ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Medievalism has for centuries been a tool for defining, but also temporalizing, essential European and by extension “human” traits, and has thereby provided a means for mapping humanity in time. Critical studies of medievalism have focused primarily upon its importance in the writing of European national identities and upon its role in placing colonized peoples “back” in human time. But medievalism was also practiced in European colonies, by the very people against whom Europe and the human were being defined. This seminar seeks to understand the uses, functions, and effects of those Other Medievalisms, specifically those developed outside the geographic and imaginary boundaries of “Europe.” What did medievalism look like from the other side of the colonizer’s “mirror”? To what effect did colonized Others use the tool of medievalism? What were their motives? What was their legitimization and rationale? Did their efforts intervene in the production of “Europe” and the “Middle Ages”? How did their actions interact with the possibility of their partaking in the civilized Human realm?

Friday, March 24

José Rabasa, University of California, Berkeley
“Decolonizing Medieval Mexico”
Haruko Momma, New York University
“Black-Haired Lancelot: Natsume Soseki’s Historical Fiction and Japan’s Colonialist Identity”
Sylvie Kande, SUNY-Old Westbury
“The caste-system as a subtext in Ahmadou Kourouma’s novels”
Nadia Altschul, The Johns Hopkins University
“Bello’s Cid: Or, Can a Latin American Found Spain’s ‘National Philology’?”

Saturday, March 25

Elizabeth Emery, Montclair State University
“Medievalism New York Style: Debates over Form and Function in the Construction of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine”
Hernán G. Taboada, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
“The ‘Three Religion Spain’ in Latin American Thought”
Jerusa Pires Ferreira, The Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo
“Medievalism Today in Brazil”
Michelle Warren, University of Miami
“Medievalism at the Musée Léon Dierx (Reunion Island, France)”