ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This panel explores the sites of extreme encounters and/or encounters at the extremes by investigating how humanness and otherness are interrogated, integrated, construed and perceived at the margins and frontiers of material and imagined spaces. At these extremes the seemingly stable category of human comes under fierce pressure to either survive or re-define itself and this enables us to consider: Where are the borders of the human? How and why define this border? How is location or space used to define “the human and its others”? How is human conceived and perceived through or beyond its bodily limits? Why and by whom? How is human constructed and construed within extreme environments? How can experiences at those edges or margins allow us to re-define our notions of human and other? How do the edge-zones of space or experience enable or generate our definitions of human and other?

Saturday, March 25

Róisín O’Gorman, University of Minnesota
“Motioning bodies, Moving Space and the Interrogation of Perception”
David Parisi, New York University
“Fingerbombing or ‘Touching is good’: The cultural construction of technologized touch”
Louise H. Davis, Michigan State University
“‘It’s All Around You’: Subversive Cyborgs and Space in Ridley Scott’s Alien and Bjork’s “All Is Full Of Love””
Carla Cappetti, The City College of New York-CUNY
“The Hunting Camp and the Slave Plantation: William Faulkner’s “The Bear””