ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This panel investigates the crucial role played by faith in the articulation of identity, not only in religious terms but also in geographical and ethnic terms. From the early modern period the incorporation of faith in discourses of imperialism caused religion and race to function as vectors of alterity in dramatically new forms. Already in this period it is possible to observe the ways in which alterity came to be predicated on the basis of a biological or racial nature rather than that of a spiritual orientation, while faith – by definition Christian faith – came to be the exclusive property of the Western subject. This panel examines the ways in which religious, geographic and ethnic categories of alterity and identity have been deployed and reclaimed in imperial and postcolonial contexts. Panelists draw from a variety of disciplinary methodologies, including anthropology, history and comparative literature. Case studies encompass the role of supernaturalism and formation of identity in nineteenth-century America, South Asia and the Middle East and contemporary Britain, Iran, and South Asia.

Friday, March 24

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto
“Categorizing Alterity: Race and Religion in the Pre-modern Discourse of Empire”
Paulo Lemos Horta, Simon Fraser University
“A Jinni answers the Angel of Revelation: Supernatural Alterity in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction”
John Su, Marquette University
“Specters of Englishness: Heritage and Multiculturalism in Contemporary British Fiction”
Kay Yandell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“The Ethics and Politics of National Narratives in the Literature of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism”

Saturday, March 25

Matthew A. Cook, Columbia University
“Hindu” Merchant Identity and the British Colonization of Sindh”
Paul Sedra, Dalhousie University
“Negotiating a Modern Coptic Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Egypt”
Chelva Kanaganayakam, University of Toronto
“Subversion and the Supernatural in Sri Lankan Literature”
Shahla Talebi, Columbia University
“The Many Faces of Self-Sacrifice: The Ethics and Politics of Religious and Secular Martyrdom in post-Revolutionary Iran”