ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar allows for papers ranging from first contacts in the New World and elsewhere to representations in fiction and non fiction of people as being human or non-human. For instance, papers about topics like Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery through Las Casas’s defence of Natives (their genocide) to colonial and postcolonial novels, and fiction about the holocaust and the Gulag would come under this rubric as long as they addressed the issue of what is said to be human and what is not.

This seminar is sponsored by The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

Friday, March 24

Jonathan Hart, University of Alberta
“The Human and Not Human in the Early Colonization of the Americas”
Fred Waage, East Tennessee State University
“The Non-Human in New World Encounter Narratives of the English Renaissance”
Eugene Eoyang, Indiana University
“The Arrogance of the Species: Humanity, Humanitas, and the Chinese Notion of ?”
Nicole L. Sparling, Pennsylvania State University
“Deauthorizing Anthropologies: Authenticating Landscapes”

Saturday, March 25

Megan Bradley, University of Rhode Island
“Animal Imagery and Dehumanization in Morrison’s Beloved”
Irene Sywenky, University of Alberta
“Animal-Human Dichotomy and the Negotiation of Cultural Space in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi”
T. Ravindranathan, University of Pennsylvania
“The Cow and the Hippopotamus: Exoticism and Post-Exoticism of the Animal”