ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will explore the complexity and difficulty inherent in efforts to represent humanity during moments of social terror. Of particular interest will be essays that analyze how the politics of panic and terror associated with war, authoritarianism, fascism, empire, and globalization require the construction of an inhuman other. To what extent do torture, genocide, and other forms of military violence depend on an impoverished notion of humanity? How do these forms of violent othering relate to social practices of racial profiling, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, criminalizing of communities, classism, xenophobia and other ideological structures dependent on divisive notions of social identity? And what role has cultural production played in challenging these notions? How have cultural products attempted to mediate the trauma of terror, record alternative versions of official history, and suggest alternative, egalitarian worldviews? What role does culture play in the struggle for Human Rights? And how can the scholarly methods of Comparative Cultural Studies enable interdisciplinary investigations into the relationship between politics, aesthetics, psychology, and historical crisis? This seminar will take a global view of the ways that these issues have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century and will especially welcome studies that are cross-cultural or transhistorical.

Friday, March 24

Marlo David-Azikwe, University of Florida
“Big Girls and Little Women: The Social Terror of Race and Reproduction”
Chung Man Ko, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
“Spaces of Nostalgia and Subversion: Memories of Political Oppression as Homeland in Beidao’s Exile Poetry”
Najat Rahman, University of Montreal
“The Status of the Human in Visions of Impending Terror”
Sophia McClennen, Penn State, University Park
“The Humanities and Human Rights Culture: The Comparatist Imperative”

Saturday, March 25

Elaine Martin, University of Alabama
“The Global Phenomenon of ‘Humanizing’ Terrorism: Literary/Cinematic Iconoclastic Practice”
Natasha Tinsley, University of Minnesota
“What is a Uma? Complicating Human and Gendered Identities in Paramaribo, Suriname”
Shawn Conner, Indiana University
“Beauty in the Eyes of the Beheld: The Humanizing Pageantry of Latin American Women’s Prisons”
Henry Morello, Pennsylvania State University
“The Aesthetics of Bearing Witness”