CFP - Dialogues on Animality

“Dialogues on Animality” Call for Papers

A Graduate Student Symposium, October 2-3, 2009

Organized by Ruth Erickson and Nathaniel Prottas; Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania

http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/dialoguesonanimality/

Despite Darwin’s claim that the human is an animal, humanity is often described in contradistinction to animality. Various binaries have defined the relationship between humans and animals, with the human capacity for consciousness, culture, rationality, and language understood as fundamental and determining differences. Today, rather than being fixed, the terms “animal” and “human” are increasingly understood as in flux, bound together theoretically, historically, and socially to enact a complex reciprocity that both defines and challenges the traditional categories of disciplines. If at the heart of the humanities is the question “what does it mean to be human?” this symposium seeks to explore the role of animals in the history and formation of this question from different disciplinary viewpoints.

One of the most interesting aspects of this dialogue is our understanding of the animal as a category of the “other,” a central concept of modern inquiry, especially as it focuses attention on identity issues, including gender, race, and queerness. This conference attempts to insert the “animal” into these discussions and to investigate the overlapping and contradictory categories that have come to define the animal/human relationship. These include questions of how we can understand the animal in relation to wildness/domestication, cultivation/ wilderness, language, consciousness, and instinct.

Approaches to the animal often vary widely between the sciences and humanities; this topic, therefore, provides a unique space in which to bring together diverse disciplines and methodologies. We invite papers from all disciplines; possible topics include: What roles have animals played historically in the formation of the sciences, arts, psychology, and other fields? What historical moments or movements have proved critical in altering the relations between humans and animals? What myths and associations have been attached to animals in particular cultures? What role does the question of language and consciousness play in ethical debates?   How do different theoretical and narratological models of the animal shape our applied and real world encounters with live and dead animals? If animals are connected to the realm of nature rather than culture or artifice, to what end have people used animals or depictions of animals, and are those uses currently in transition as the relationship between the animal and the human changes?

This symposium will include an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion and a keynote lecture by Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Professor Lippit is the author of two books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000). Lippit’s work on animals reaches across the disciplines of contemporary theory to recast the human/animal relation, offering a new understanding of the animal as spectral and increasingly vanishing.

Submission Deadline: March 1, 2009

Email 500-words abstract and CV/bio to dialoguesonanimality@gmail.com.

This symposium is generously supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s History of Art Department, Cinema Studies, SASgov, English Department, and the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society (CIAS).