ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said defines humanism as “the practice of participatory citizenship” whose “purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny” and thus disclose its “human misreading and misinterpretations of a collective past and present” (22). In a postcolonial and global era that bears witness to a rapid mobility of peoples, it is imperative to rethink humanism no longer as a practice that defines the human to exclude other humans but as the practice that opens to a wide gamut of political and aesthetic forms of representation of the “global hybrid” that emerges in the public realm of the global sphere. As different cultural, linguistic, social and political realities are leaking into each other and the rapid flows of capital and labor force are producing new social, economic and political conditions of co-existence, the reinvention of the public sphere and the active participation in what Etienne Balibar calls the constitution of “a citizenship-in-the-making” are more than necessary. Our seminar thus focuses on humanism as a “democratic practice” and an intellectual praxis in the context of the newly constituting and constituted postcolonial and global conditions and addresses the need to rethink the field of comparative literature as a form of humanistic practice that can contribute to the envisioning of a global community open to hybrid forms of existence and representation.

Friday, March 24

David M. Buyze, Iowa State University
“Just Tolerating the Other?”
Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, Penn State University, Altoona College
“Hybrid Time: Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series”
Asimina Karavanta, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens
“Humanism and the Quest of Community”

Saturday, March 25

Donald Pease, Dartmouth College
“Humanism and the Global Hybrid”
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University
“Efforts of Conscience: Cosmopolitanism in Said and Derrida”
Robert P. Marzec, SUNY at Fredonia
“Edward Said: Enclosures, Citizenship, and the Lost Ontology of Inhabitation”
Aristides Baltas, National Technical University of Athens
“Performing Criticism: Forms, Strategies, Effects”

Sunday, March 26

William V. Spanos, SUNY at Binghamton
“Edward Said’s Humanism: Disciplinary or Collaborative?”
R. Radhakrisnan, University of California Irvine
“So, What is the Verdict on Humanism?”
Tabea A. Linhard, Washington University in Saint Louis
“Narratives of Shipwreck and Displacement: Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture”
Nina Morgan, Kennesaw State University
“The Aporia of Hybrid Humanism”