ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Colonial discourses of travel and the distinction between the Human and its Others have fed off one another. Mobility as a quality of the Human and fixedness as an attribute of the Other remained central to the perpetuation of this binary and its geopolitical execution in the form of the spatial disempowerment of the Other. The flow of migration from the “South” is causing a redistribution of space and redrawing the former geographies of otherness and humanness. Lavie’s “the savage is no longer out there but has entered the home here and fissured it” echoes Ha’s “everywhere we [non-westerners] go we become someone’s private zoo” and Lazreg’s “theater of the indigenous.” These scholars emphasize the contemporary residues of the distinction between the Human and its Others. This panel will investigate the persistence and (re)deployment of this distinction in current narratives, discourses and theories of movement and intrusion into foreign spaces.

• Are Otherness and Humanness still coterminous with space and geography?
• How do migrant narratives strategically and subversively (re)deploy this distinction?
• Are there residues of this distinction in postmodern and postcolonial discourses of movement by Deleuze and Guattari, Clifford, Kaplan?
• How do humanitarianism and the distinction between the Human and its Other feed off one another? I.e., in which ways are current travels to ‘rescue’ Afghan women and other incursion into foreign territories to protect human rights (ex. the debate over “genital mutilation”) epistemologically filiated to this distinction?
• When do human rights become a humanizing mission?

Friday, March 24

Tamara Emerson, Wayne State University
“Medicine as Global and Protestant Policy: Interconnections of Nineteenth-Century Professionalization of Medicine with U.S. Encounters with China”
Vanessa Chu, Concordia University
“Interpellation and the Subject Black Patient in the Era of Racialized Drugs”
Kristi Giselsson, University of Southern Queensland
“Is Respect for Difference Possible Without Humanism?”
Ayo Abietou Coly, Dartmouth College
“Human Rights or Humanizing Rights: Female Circumcision as a political and ideological site”

Saturday, March 25

Maria-Theresia Holub, State University of New York at Binghamton
“Moving With, Not In-Between: Towards an Alternative Globalization”
Mootacem Mhiri, Vassar College
“Scheherazade Goes West and Fatima Dreams of Trespass: (Re)Constructing the Subject and the Other in Mernissi’s Memoirs”
Minu Tharoor, New York University
“Journey to Calcutta: Migration and the Female Subject/Subject Female in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Chinta’”
Pei-Ju Wu, University of South Carolina
“Positioning Nation and Identity: Salman Rushdie’s The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place”