In the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon points to the limits of the European humanist subject (“Man”) and the ways in which its definition has involved violent actions and exclusions. He calls for a non-Eurocentric project to invent a “new man” that requires an expansion and reconsideration of humanity. This task of imagining and bringing into being a new human seems to involve a delicate double bind: humanity must be claimed in the name of those excluded from its purview; the claim to be human, however, may unwittingly reinforce the transparency and self-evidence of the very category that needs to be interrogated, thus further marginalizing alternative versions of humanity. This tension between claiming the human and critiquing it prompts a number of questions that we are interested in examining in this seminar. How does one extend the boundaries of the human? What examples can we find of new genres and practices of humanity? What are the necessary errors involved in formulating a more synthetic and comprehensive notion of the human? In what contexts does humanity have to be validated and produced? Is the human an enabling category or a constraining one? In the struggle for social justice, are there alternatives to the human?

These questions have motivated the work of scholars in various fields. Postcolonial critics, for instance, have challenged the abstract figure of the human that masks the dominance of the white Western subject. Feminist theorists have analyzed how the human is implicitly coded as male. Scholars interested in human rights have highlighted the ways in which one needs to become human in order to qualify for rights. Posthumanists have decentered the human by redefining it in relation to technology, animal life, and the environment. African-American critics have argued for race and the experience of racialized bodies as a constitutive element in any reconsideration and reinvention of the human. Native Americanists have explored how indigenous people revise the terms of recognition. Beyond specifically academic debates, these questions also inform some of the most urgent social issues of today such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the status of refugees/migrants.

We invite submissions that engage with the possibilities, limits, and transformations of the human. We welcome papers from a range of perspectives and hope to build a conversation that will benefit from the unexpected insights of comparative and collaborative endeavor. Abstracts can be submitted via the ACLA website at the following address:

http://www.acla.org/claiming-human-critiquing-human