We are still accepting abstracts for ACLA 2003; deadline extension to Oct.
15. -- Adam Miyashiro
"Biotechnology and the Post-Human: Crossing Over Corporealities"
With the proliferation of new technological practices, coupled with its
impact in biological, social and medical domains, we continually
encounter new, unstable, and liminal exchanges that interconnect fields
and understandings of technology, the machine, the subject and the body,
the organic and the inorganic. From mechanical androids to
biotechnological hybrids, contemporary literary, critical, scientific,
and popular spheres have attempted to understand post-human distinctions
as "the hierarchy of difference within which narratives of exclusion are
reiterated [and] become increasingly unstable" (Wolmark, "Staying with
the Body," _Edging into the Future_ [2002]). Our panel will focus on
these unstable narratives and modes of literary and biological
[re]productions that present the ethics and problematics behind fictions
and realities of a post-human discourse.
This panel shall consider these post-humanistic discourses within a
multidisciplinary context (texts, films, anime, biotechnologies), while
pursuing several broad questions:
1. How are discourses of post-humanity constructed (i.e., androids,
bio-mechanical hybrids, alternate/separate consciousnesses/bodies,
artificial intelligence/life, and genetic engineering/cloning), and how
do these discourses confront basic questions of the human subject, bios,
and consciousness? Do these discourses have global/universal
implications and repercussions? Is the post-human a reflection of an
ultimate, ergo definitive, marginal Other?
2. How have in vitro, in vivo, and the possibility of in silico
fertilizations [as in computer-generated genomes] confounded and
complicated notions of organic, inorganic, and technological bodies?
3. In light of cloning controversies, how have genetic manipulation
and/or eugenics been received in literary and cultural milieus?
Similarly, in which ways do these medical and scientific practices
threaten, obfuscate, or demarcate humanity?
4. In which ways have biotechnological advances, and its contingent,
globalization, reflect states of cris is and emergency (for example, the
lack of Aids treatments continue to reflect the biopower reified by
technocratic societies)?
5. In a cultural and literary scope, how has scholarship encountered
and envisioned post-humanity? From a global and international critical
purview, how have cultural discursive productions from law to popular
media been impacted by the globalization of these notions of
post-humanity?
Please send your abstracts and queries to:
Oscar Fernández, Adam Miyashiro
Dept. Of Comparative Literature
The Pennsylvania State University
311 Burrowes Bldg
University Park, PA 16802
e-mail submissions are welcomed:
aem194@psu.edu and oxf3@psu.edu
Seminar Leaders:
Adam Miyashiro, Penn State University
Oscar Fernández, Penn State University
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