ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Space and time have been central, organizing categories in many philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic constructions of the human. What it means to be a human subject (or conversely, a subhuman one) have classically been defined along these two axes, in terms drawn from a well-known family of spatio-temporal metaphors and motifs – at one extreme, the human as constituted by limitless horizons and latitude of movement, at another, a providential, purposeful unfolding of history. This seminar invites papers that address and interrogate the centrality of either of these two tropes in representations of the human, in various kinds of texts and media, and across different historical periods and geographical contexts. Some questions that might be posed in this connection include: the privileging of a poetics of space and time, or vice versa, in different literary-philosophical discourses; the differential spatialities and temporalities of raced and gendered subjects within the normative space and time of Western ‘man’; property as colonization of space; the impact of recent transformations in regimes of space and economies of time on contemporary configurations of the human; the body as site and moment of subjection/subversion.

Friday, March 24

Robert Lehman, Cornell University
“Creatures Utterly Unlike Ourselves: Walter Benjamin’s Temporal Personae”
Susan Engelhardt, University of Texas at Austin
“Goethe’s Italienische Reise as “Autohagiography”: Personal History as Sacred History”
Firat Karadas, Middle East Technical University
“The Spatial and Synchronic Character of Myth”
Manisha Basu, University of Pittsburgh
“A Godless Textuality: Tagore’s Notes on Secular Man”

Saturday, March 25

Katherine McKittrick, Queen’s University
“Sylvia Wynter, the Interhuman, and More Humanly Workable Geographies”
Mileta Roe, Simon’s Rock College of Bard
“Lost in Space and Time: The Nature of Isolation in Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões”
Jennifer White, Columbia University
“Timescapes of the Human: The “Nature” of Memory in Linda Hogan’s Fiction”
Dale Shin, York University
“Crossing the Boundary: The Regulation and Resistance of Space in Contemporary Narratives of Racial Crossing”