New Interpretations of Langston Hughes Using the Langston Hughes Papers
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Thursday 27 November 2014
17:00-18:30 Amphitheater “Ioannis Drakopoulos”
New Interpretations of Langston Hughes Using the Langston
Hughes Papers
Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University: Langston Hughes: A Life in Letters
Christa Fratantoro, Stockton College: Langston Hughes and Noel Sullivan: An Epistolary
Friendship
David Roessel with Edward Horan and Jade Fleming, Stockton College: “Seven People
Dancing”: An Introduction and Performance of an Unpublished Story by
Langston Hughes
This panel brings together the editors and a researcher of Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, which will appear
from Knopf in February 2015. Langston Hughes remains central to a conversation about racism in 20th century
American culture, that endemic “war with the human” that was framed into the fabric of the United States at the
time of its independence. It will also show how new archival materials from the Langston Hughes Papers can
extend and deepen our knowledge of Hughes. Arnold Rampersad will speak about how Selected Letters of
Langston Hughes will open up new approaches and areas to Hughes scholarship and that of his associates. David
Roessel and Christa Fratantoro will examine the letters between Hughes and a single correspondent, Faith Wilson,
and discuss how Hughes’s letters to an average American housewife reveal as much about his views on racism in
America as his letters to famous African American authors. Edward Horan will discuss an unpublished story of
Hughes, “Seven People Dancing,” one of only two times that Hughes uses an openly gay character in his fiction.
117:00-18:30 Amphitheater “Alkis Argyriadis”
From the De-centered Subject to the Non-human and Simulated Self in
Experimental Literary and Artistic Practice
Stamatina Dimakopoulou, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens: Singular, Close, Distant: Varieties
of Human Experience in Hannah Weiner
Spanning journals, books and visions transcribed through both verbal and visual means, Hannah Weiner’s body of work that as
Charles Bernstein has noted, includes what ‘is often denigrated as trivial, awkward, embarrassing, silly, and indeed too minutely
personal,’ compels us to revisit human experience as concurrently intractable, malleable, humane and (de)humanising. In reflexive
works where, as the artist herself put it, ‘Maybe the person I’m going to meet, IS ME,’ Weiner’s notations involve not only a
reflexive textuality but also seem to imply that the record of lived experience is both enabling and disabling. Tokens of contingency,
the experiential density and sparseness of Weiner’s texts are redemptive of singularities, that to remember Nancy, are bound by
contiguity rather than continuity. With and against the posited convergence between the self-referential, anti-aesthetic drive of
conceptual art and the anti-humanism of poststructuralism, Weiner’s artless art retrospectively seems to be also redemptive of a
humanity which, as Ron Padget put it in “Slight Foxing,” seems ‘odd to throw away,’ since ‘we’ve gone to a lot of trouble to be
humanity.’
Theodoros Chiotis, University of Oxford: Plate Tectonics: New Textualities and Emerging Subjectivities in the
Non-human Age
The spread of information technologies has brought about a significant transformation in the reception and appropriation of literary
texts. In the current publishing paradigm, the components of the term “literary production” have taken on new meaning. In texts like
Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus and Needle in the Groove, texts and linguistic idioms are being subjected to a series of manipulations
foregrounding the effect of machinic processes (text mining) on writing and reading texts. One might go so far as to suggest that
reading and writing in the age of Web 3.0 must take into account not only the intertextual relationships between different texts but
also the intermedial relations in how texts are produced and disseminated. The intertextual and intermedial relationships between
different texts and technological paradigms in the age of Web 3.0 form particular sorts of readerly and authorial subjectivities that
tend to sift through and creatively engage with the information-heavy landscape. This is evident especially in the way meaning and
sense are produced in this context where human and non-human production collide. In the encounter between human and non-
human, both parties fold into one another bringing forth new ways of experiencing and interacting with the world. I am making
particular reference to the concept of the fold, as formulated by Deleuze, because it allows us to think creatively about the
production of subjectivity, and ultimately about the possibilities for, and production of, non-human forms of subjectivity. In my
paper, I will focus on the emergence of non-human forms of subjectivity as they appear in three experimental texts: Tom Phillips’ A
Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1970), Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus (2001) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010).
Tatiani Rapatzikou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: A Book Poem without a Text and the Reading
Subject in Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s “Between Page and Screen”
Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s digital/print book-poem with the title Between Page and Screen (2012) constitutes an effective
response to the concerns expressed nowadays about the status of the print book due to the overpowering presence of digital
technologies. What makes this book-poem challenging is that its poetic text, being replaced by a series of QR codes, combines a
typographical with a digital interface that involves the reading subject into simultaneous embodied and simulated actions. As a
result, this book-poem is not merely a book poetry collection but a media construct that synthesizes a number of material and digital
elements for the creation of a much more diversified and enhanced multimodal effect. Experimenting with concrete poetry,
conceptual art, and epistolary writing, Borsuk and Bouse embark on a dialogue that treats the page (or book) and the screen (or
computer) as two conversing subjects. As for the readers, they are the ones who can activate this dialogue with the help of their
computer webcam. With reference to N. Katherine Hayles’ term of “technogenesis” attention will be paid to the multidimensional,
malleable and multimodal character of the book in addition to the alternative reading and writing strategies it can generate due to the
reader-machine interaction.
2Friday 28 November 2014
9:30-11:10 Amphitheater “Ioannis Drakopoulos”
The Ethnic Scene: Writing the Self, Writing the Border
Makrina Chrisopoulou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: A Pequot Voice Affirming Survival:
The Autobiography of William Apess
William Apess is a nineteenth century Native American author. He was a member of the Pequot tribe, a once powerful
indigenous group that was decimated by Euro-american diseases and attacks. A genocidal war conducted by the colonists
resulted in the official dissolution of the tribe in 1638: the few members that survived the slaughter were declared extinct as a
people and forced out of history. A descendant of those surviving Pequots, Apess had to struggle amidst the cruel realities of
social degradation, economic dependency, destitution, racism and dispossession. Despite the odds, he survived, converted to
Christianity and became a minister. Due to his affiliation to Christianity, he was accused of acculturation and his work
received negative criticism. Contrary to dismissive accusations, I hold that Apess did not disparage his roots. I argue that,
through the recording of his personal story, he finds the opportunity to affirm his Indian identity and promote his people’s
survival by advocating equality of the races through Christian rhetoric. My discussion of Apess’s autobiography, A Son of the
Forest (1831), will be methodologically organized by the notion of the “chronotope,” a concept applied by M. Bakhtin in
literary criticism and further expanded by B. Bergland in the study of autobiography. The term “chronotope” consists of two
greek words (“chronos” and “topos”) which respectively mean “time” and “place.” According to Bakhtin, our image of what
is human is always connected with particular positions in time and particular places and, thus, it is inevitably chronotopic.
His approach propounds the examination of the temporal and spatial axes constructed in a work as bearers of meaning.
Bergland finds his theory applicable to the study of autobiography since the chronotopic positions of the autobiographical
subject may reveal ideological stances. By examining Apess’s chronotopic positions in the text, I intend to trace his
harboring of racial causes, his proposal for his people’s survival and his affirmation of Indianness.
Sophia Emmanouilidou, Technological Institute of Education of the Ionian Islands: Memorial
Mediations of Spatial Transition and Chicano Self-Identity: The Case of Ernesto Galarza’s
Autobiography Barrio Boy (1971)
The Chicano self-identity is indissolubly related with the spatial hermeneutics of the troublesome border between Mexico
and the USA. The borderlands stand as a trope of the constant negotiation of the Mexican American identity (communal and
individual) precisely because the long history of territorial shifts, crossings and trespasses of the dividing line between the
two nations has validated the mechanics of numerous political, socio and cultural self-manifestations. Groupings of mexicano
ancestry from both sides of the border have grappled with contexts of alternating displacements and emplacements, and have
repeatedly sought the parameters and rationales in the definition of a homeland. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848
and the Mexican Revolution that started in 1910 and lasted for a decade have ignited memorial processes of a national and/or
communal selfhood and brewed the dialogic relationship between mexicano and Chicano communities which became most
salient during the 1960s upheaval of El Movimiento. The intention of this paper is to reflect on the reciprocal notions of de-
territorialisation and re-territorialization, inclusion and exclusion around a porous borderline, and to look into how the
complexities of these processes intersect with the construction of self-identity. Ernesto Galarza’s autobiography Barrio Boy
(1971) unravels the political, social, cultural and linguistic endeavors of a young Chicano who flees his homeland at the
upheaval of the Mexican Revolution. In his autobiography, Galarza oscillates between childhood memories of an abandoned
homeland south of the border and the dubious knowledge he acquires as a non-white adolescent newcomer north of the
border. The text is a memoir which extensively explores the geographics of identity in Galarza’s steady transition from a
rural space in Mexico into a bustling urban landscape in the USA. Finally, Barrio Boy is approached as the engaging
testimonio of an accomplished writer and renowned thinker in the USA who records his memories of migration not as a
stagnant emotional attachment to Mexico, but as his personal pledge to reveal and defend the Odyssey of Chicanismo across
spatial and temporal borders.
3Agnieszka Kaczmarek, University of Applied Sciences in Nysa: The Right to Live a Normal Life
Denied: the Culture of Violence along the US-Mexican Border
In the March 2009 version of the Transhumanist Declaration, attached to an article by Nick Bostrom, professor at the Oxford
University and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association now known as Humanity+, we can read in point one:
"Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of
broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to
planet Earth." While reading Ed Vulliamy's Amexica: War Along the Borderline (2010), one can see neither any heralds of
the enhancement of the human condition nor optimism for the possible future improvements. Quite the reverse, Vulliamy
describes innumerable grave situations and tragic events, which show that in northern Mexico the basic and inalienable right
to live a normal life is simply denied. The observable escalation of violence is clearly connected with cartels and cross-border
drug trafficking, however, the uncontrolled bloodshed has spread to public institutions and workplaces. Usually located in
Mexican border towns, maquiladoras, American-own factories, have shaken social relations in the traditional Mexican
family, which has contributed to the crisis of masculinity resulting in the widespread femicide. Unfortunately, crime
regularly crosses the threshold of Mexican schools, as well, and teenagers prefer the narco lifestyle to education, finding
violence particularly appealing. Intoxicated with the cult of Santa Muerte, the Holy Death, the young listen to narcocorridos,
ballads that glorify cartels and drug lords. With the focus on Vulliamy's Amexica, in my presentation I aim to present the
progressive brutalization of Mexican public life along the US border. In addition, I would like to show that the US is co-
responsible for the flourishing culture of violence there, which clearly affects not only Mexico.
Hande Gurses, Yildiz Technical University: Tracing the I: An Analysis of Contemporary Approaches
on Autobiography
Whether it is through literary, scientific or artistic devices the desire to understand the self has always remained unsatiable.
Identity in its different forms is still today a subject that contains more questions than answers. The perpetual quest for a
definition of identity reflects the uneasiness that has emerged with the eroding boundaries. In literature this tendency
becomes easily visible with the rise of the autobiogrpahical texts. But autobiography today is no longer confined to the
boundaries of its traditional definiton but rather reflects the zeitgeist in its different forms and contents. This paper aims to
explore how autobiography as a literary genre has emerged in contemporary literature and the possible ways it affects the
wider scope of the human experience. Primarily focusing on the generically ambiguous texts of Orhan Pamuk, Philip Roth
and J.M.Coetzee this paper will examine the three authors’ approaches to the narratives of the self. Without limiting itself to
the fiction/autobiography binary this study will explore the new narratives that highlight the contemporary implications of
the human identity. The narrative techniques, paratextual elements as well as the distinct diegetic levels of the selected texts
will offer an insight into the attempts to define and represent one self. Alongside thorough textual analysis the paper will also
underline the specific contexts of each author in an attempt to create a comparative outlook.
49:30-11:10 Amphitheater “Alkis Argyriadis”
Human Fictions
James P. Savchuk, Pierpont Community & Technical College, Fairmont: It Came from Within the Same:
Atomic TV in the Glow of Posthuman Fallout
Heeding N. Katherine Hayles’ call to offer “histories that show the erasures that went into creating the condition of virtuality”
(20), and abiding, too, by Neil Badmington’s mandate “to listen out for the deconstruction of the binary opposition between the
human and the inhuman that is forever happening within humanism itself” (16), this effort at cultural criticism suggests that the
conditions for, and the responses to, American TV’s cultural arrival—from prewar articles promising that “a man’s sense of
physical limitations will be swept away” (Sarnoff 43), through wartime ads guaranteeing that soon “YOU’LL BE AN
ARMCHAIR COLUMBUS” (DuMont 1944) at “THE BIGGEST WINDOW IN THE WORLD” (DuMont 1944), to the
uncanny telegraphing of a TV presence from the B-movie contagion irradiating the 1950s’ “‘fright’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’”
(Freud 11) over the atomic bomb—signal an irruption at the assumed divide between what counts as human and what
inhuman. Although Badmington helpfully suggests in his consideration of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
“that there is something further at stake” than understanding the film “as a product of its particular historical moment” (17), I
propose that something is further at stake in the particular historical moment than either he or other 1950s B-movie critics have
so far addressed, something, too, that parallels nicely the 1945-1960 timespan Hayles identifies as cybernetic tradition’s first
wave of development. In Leo Bogart’s The Age of Television, we learn that by 1956 73% of American homes had one
television, and 97% “were within reception range of a TV station” (10, 12). Noting as well that many American holdouts
“expressed a fear that the [TV] set would ‘take over’ in their lives” (viii) we can detect, I think, the irruptive force of an
apparatus that “Hatches Electrons that bring Television to Life” (International Nickel 1945). As a result, much more is at stake
than Badmington’s hasty dismissal of The Thing from Another World (1951) admits, especially in the light of Dr. Carrington’s
eerie seedpod gloss: “Yes. The neat and unconfused reproductive technique of vegetation. No pain or pleasure as we know it.
No emotions. No heart. Our superior. Our superior in every way.”
Giannis Stamatellos, American College of Greece (Deree): Virtus Homines Digitalis: A Virtue Ethics
Approach to Digital Citizenship and the Question of Information Privacy
The emergence of computer networking and advanced digital communication technologies has led to a philosophical
reconsideration of our ethical, social and political values. In normative theories of cyber ethics, duty-based Kantian or
consequence-based utilitarian approaches have frequently prevailed at the expense of a virtue ethics approach. In this paper it
is suggested that a reconsideration of a virtue ethics approach to the new realities of digital citizenship should be promoted,
especially in relation to the civic and political engagement of network citizenship. Virtue ethics promotes network citizens’
awareness of the need for responsible use of digital technologies as well as of the importance of active political participation in
their digital communities and online Internet democracies, especially in their deliberative form. A self-directed and character-
based virtue ethics approach to digital citizenship improves self-awareness and contributes in the conscious understanding of
the ethical and social issues deriving from the extensive use of digital technologies. Particularly, the widespread use of
personal data in digital networks poses a serious threat to the right of privacy not only at the level of data integrity and security
but also at the level of user’s identity and freedom. A virtue ethics approach to the problem of information privacy emphasizes
the need for informational self-determination in the control of personal data and the claim of individuals and groups to
determine for themselves when, how, and what kind of information about themselves is shared with others.
5Mariusz Marszalski, University of Wrocław: Explorations of Post-humanity in Dan Simmons’s
Speculative Fiction, The Hyperion Cantos
For centuries in the Western world, ontologically the concept of the human being has been a well-established given involving a
dichotomous division into the human body and the soul (a Christian idea based on Platonic dualism) and later into the material
body and the immaterial mind (as exemplified by Descartes). The more recent reductionist scientific investigations have done
away with all the non-material emotive and intellectual aspects of man, treating them as results of the physio-chemical
activities which take place in the living tissues, and thereby made the body as we know it the only indispensable constituent of
humanity. Thus, a continuous existence in the same body from natural birth till death that terminates the earthly life has been
taken for granted as a central paradigm of the human condition. The existing epistemological and moral considerations are
founded on this seemingly solid ontological assumption. However, we are getting increasingly conscious of the disturbing truth
that our man-made reality is changing, that we humans effect the changes and that we are also affected by them. Once subject
only to natural mutations, now we begin to get anxious about the possibilities of artificial, scientifically produced ones of
unpredicted nature. Cloning humans seems to be only a matter of time. Technological enhancements of the human body,
cyborgization developed for medical but also military purposes, are becoming a reality we have to face. What humanity is
heading for is a new era of posthumanism, including transhumanism, with its so far undefined philosophical consequences.
The objective of the proposed paper is a discussion of a simulation of humanity in a faraway future featuring large in Dan
Simmons’ speculative fiction The Hyperion Cantos. What Simmons offers his readers is a complex metaphysical,
epistemological and ethical reconsideration of humanity that has become a multi-faceted entity of conflicting ontologies and
uncertain identities.
Eleni Filippachi, Independent Scholar: Fellows in Mortality? Imagination, Empathy and Alien Forms
of Life
This essay argues for the driving force of imagination and empathy in establishing morally meaningful relationships with alien
forms of life: beings that are alien enough to often test the limits of our conceptual and linguistic comprehension, yet not too
alien to become ethically irrelevant to us. Both non-human animals and post (trans) humans fit this description. My work
draws primarily on a recent philosophical debate sparked by Coetzee’s novel The Lives of Animals. The debate questions the
limits of philosophical debates on animal ethics -what is revealed and what is left out of sight when the rich texture of human-
animal relations is torn to threads of syllogisms about rights and duties, interests and consequences; when the complex, often
contradictory social and cultural practices of human-animal fellowship are overlooked in favor of an exchange of arguments
premised solely on biological cross-species similarity or analogy; when philosophical thinking is in danger of deflecting its
puzzlement over such ethical inconsistencies or contradictions into skepticism (or dogmatism); and when animal (as much as
human) vulnerability is so treated by philosophical analysis as if its breath-taking effect on human imagination and emotion
need not be acknowledged and reckoned with; indeed as if that were the domain of literature, out of which philosophy ought to
remain forever banished. On one side of the House stand philosophers of utilitarian or deontological points of view, notable
proponents of animal interests or animal rights, whose contribution in establishing the contemporary discussion of animal
ethics and making philosophical analysis relevant to law and public policy has been immense. Squeezing them together on one
podium may seem crude or unfair, just as crude and unfair would be a wholesale critique of the way they have addressed and
reshaped a whole tradition of philosophical discussion on how to extend our ethical concepts of right, interest, and duty, to
include non-human animals. Not so, though, when the retort comes from such careful and sophisticated reader as Cora
Diamond, whose side-ways tactics point to fissures and significant complexities that remain unacknowledged by the
argumentative strategies of deontologists, or utilitarians. Diamond -and philosophers like Stephen Mulhall and Sandra Laugier
drawing on her work- emphasize the importance of moral attention and moral imagination in the face of human and animal
vulnerability as ways of acknowledging the resistance of reality to moral propositional thinking. Literary writing, Diamond
suggests, is one place where such attention and imagination are strongly exercised. My essay focuses in particular on the issue
of empathetic imagination. Is it possible to imagine ourselves into a fellowship with non-human animals? How can we spell
out this kind of imaginative connection? The discussion begins with a critical exposition of Nagel’s seminal position on the
limited imaginability of alien forms of life in “What is it like to be a bat?” As a reply to Nagel I offer a reading of a novella by
Rainer Maria Rilke that suggests an alternative understanding of empathetic imagination (inspired by the work of Diamond,
Stanley Cavell, and to some extent by feminist care ethics) as embodied apprehension of our shared vulnerability across alien
forms of life. In order to extend the discussion from animals to trans-humans, I move from literature to cinema and conclude
with some remarks on Spike Jonze’s recent film Her.
613:00-14:40 Amphitheater “Ioannis Drakopoulos”
Human Ruins, Posthuman Turns
Nathan Snaza, University of Richmond: Departments of Language
Taking “crisis” of the “humanities” and the crisis shaking the “human” that goes by the name of “posthumanism” as
co-symptomatic, my paper speculatively imagines what a non-humanist “language department” might look like. By
situating the traditional, humanist language department (partitioned by national language or regional clusters) in
relation to both a two millennia career of breaking language into separate things for the purposes of study (beginning
with the ancient Greek division of grammar, rhetoric, and poetics) and a modern politics of global imperial
conquest, I argue that the humanities, as we know them today, should be abandoned. My reasons, however, are
entirely different from those offered by neoliberal administrators who believe the humanities are either irrelevant or
an economic drain on STEM knowledge production. Polemically, I argue that traditional language departments
are—despite whatever radical political commitments of their members—colonialist and speciesist institutions.
Anchoring my concerns in relation to postcolonial, new materialist, biopolitical, and posthumanist thought, I argue
that decoupling language from “the human” (as narrowly defined in Western post-Enlightenment thought) offers the
occasion for imagining a language department that would seek to re-imagine language in its entirety (that is, as
something shared among humans, animals, and objects) as the political to which we are exposed. This will require a
radical shift away from current norms of disciplining and departmentalizing language and politics, but it also offers
a new way of articulating the absolute importance of studying language as a primary task of the university.
Julietta Singh, University of Richmond: Posthumanitarian Fictions
This paper analyzes what I call “post-humanitarian fictions,” a body of postcolonial literary texts that link the force
of colonization to contemporary practices of humanitarian aid. Set within crisis zones, these narratives—exemplified
by Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People, J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, and Mahasweta Devi’s short
story “Shishu”— challenge the widely held notion of the human as a “universal” category by revealing its historical
and ideological contingencies. The humanitarians in these texts serve populations that have been dehumanized by
ecological disasters, toxic spills, and war, but in so doing their actions reveal that dehumanization is a structural
problem that implicates workers themselves. Post-humanitarian fictions represent the complex entanglement of
politics and ethics through inter-national and intra-national forms of humanitarian aid, and they offer an urgently
needed perspective on the neocolonialism of humanitarianism as it is currently enacted and enforced. Despite the
fact that humanitarian characters often profoundly desire to act in ethical ways, these fictions relay the
infrastructural and ideological foundations of humanitarianism that impede its fruition. They query how those with
privilege and good intention unintentionally prohibit the radical mobilization required to redress damages in the
short term and to create equity in the long term. The humanitarian is finally revealed to be an ideological
imaginary—a way of relating to the neocolonial enterprise of globalization through humanitarian fetishism, a
process that fundamentally negates oneʼs own complicity. Read collectively, these fictions enable us not only to see
the interrelations among structural, material, and ideological forms of oppression, but also to begin to envision
alternate forms of alliance that exceed those that currently define global relations.
7Georgia Axiotou, Koç University: The Human Other En Route: Michael Kʼs Nomadism as a
Site of Contestation and Political Possibility
How can one resist the generalised state of exception and emerge as a figure of life? What are the possibilities of
resistance during times of emergency when subjects have been stripped of the rights that mark a political life, and
how is resistance further complicated once enacted and articulated by the site of the “human other”, who due to
his/her social, racial and physical inferiority suffers different forms of violence? These are some of the questions
that J.M Coetzee’s novel Life and Times of Michael K (1983) engages with while it delves into the relation
between expropriation and exceptionalism, precarity and biopolitical control as it is lived and experienced by those
whose “proper place in nonbeing” (Judith Butler). Set in an unspecified future at the times of a dehumanising
civil-war, the narrative details the life of Michael K, a disfigured, impoverished, dispossessed, coloured man, as he
tries to evade the injurious logic of a generalised state of exception ravages South Africa. Michael K’s evasions,
enacted in his agonizing attempts to cross the country while avoiding internment and remaining outside the camps,
obtain a political import in that they adumbrate a space that eludes the social and political death of the state of
exception. Following Judith Butler’s suggestion that the human emerges when one “refuses to stay in his/her
proper place”, I will construe Michael Kʼs nomadism as a tactic, to evoke De Certeau’s formulation, that via the
double gesture of mobility and disobedience assists him in the asymmetric encounter with the thanatopolitics of
the state of exception. Acknowledging that Michael Kʼs nomadism does not dismantle the structures of power
and oppression, I will maintain that it is geared in creating cracks within the state of exception, and safeguarding
life as it emerges, and it is encountered, en route.
Mina Karavanta, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens: Towards an
‘Autopoetics’ of the Common
Much to the chagrin of a number theorists who have proclaimed the end of postcolonial studies or the death of the
postcolonial, the current economic and political crisis that spreads in the West and the rise of the multitudes of
immigrants and refugees across the world suggest the development of neocolonial practices that threaten to reduce
large numbers of human beings, who are economically and politically expropriated, to a state of constant precarity.
The question of the human is asked again as the specters of nationalism and neo-racism (Étienne Balibar) haunt
Europe and other places in the world, especially in view of the growing new communities and collectivities of
subaltern populations of immigrants and refugees, and the reigniting of ethnic conflicts and wars. The growing
presence of the multitudes of the poor and the subalterns and their collectivities, despite their economic precarity
and their political delimitation by the exceptionalist politics of nations and transnational unions like the EU, calls
for a remaining and reconfiguration of community no longer determined by the “imagined community” (Benedict
Anderson) of the nation. By drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s work that calls for another “autopoetics” of the human
and Michelle Cliff’s Into the Interior as an example of a postcolonial imagining of community that affiliates the
prenational with the transnational, I will pursue the following questions, which I find pertinent to the political
work of postcolonial studies in the present: Can there be an “autopoetics” (Sylvia Wynter) of the human in
intrahuman planetary terms that opens to rather than forecloses the presence and coming constituencies and their
communities whose humanity is rendered precarious by the fiction of the self? What kind of turn has the
postcolonial novel taken in the 21st century with more and more recent novels counterwriting the lived
communities of the past not included in the dominant imaginary of the nation?
813:00-14:40 Amphitheater “Alkis Argyriadis”
Human Polemics
Jonathan Gross, DePaul University: “The Art of Political Protest: Student Participation in Politics
at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, or Fiscal Austerity and Humanist Education
This essay examines the Greek austerity crisis from the standpoint of World War II. “The Germans have taken from the
Greeks even their shoelaces, “Mussolini complained to Ciano, “and now they pretend to place the blame for the economic
situation on our shoulders.” The occupation of Athens during World War II presents an interesting model for the conditions
that led to the fiscal crisis in 2008. This essay explores poster art at Aristotle University, University of Thessaloniki to
argue that a new generation has successfully avoided the polarities that governed the austerity crisis in 1941. By accepting
salary cuts of up to 40%, the faculty at Aristotle University have provided a model for their own students in finding a way
out of fiscal difficulties that does not lead to warfare. As a Byron scholar, I examine Byron’s own approach to financing
the Greek revolution and argue for the “value-added” benefits of a humanist education in treating events that seem to be
purely economic. Drawing on Mark Mazower’s Inside Hitler’s Greece and Roderick Beaton’s Byron’s War, I discuss
Athens and Thessaloniki as a literary, economic and political landscape, shaped by humanists as much as by economic
forces. I do so, in part, by examining the graffiti in the city of Thessaloniki and political posters pasted by Aristotle
University students in the Spring of 2014, shortly before elections placed three members of the Golden Dawn in parliament.
Maria Pyrgerou, Independent Scholar: Neo-liberal Politics—Precarious Lives: Corporatism
against Humanity
In my presentation I propose to read Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine (2007) in the light of Judith Butler’s theory
of precarity, as this is expressed in Precarious Life (2004). In particular, I am going to demonstrate the way/s in which the
implementation and practice of neo-liberal policies wage a war on human rights, human achievements and institutions
creating precarious subjectivities who, divested of their basic humanness, are manipulated towards an economic, social and
ontological extinction in favor of the establishment of private corporations which will substitute and run the state in all its
forms. Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of “unfettered capitalism,” introduced the economic doctrine whereby the state,
any state, should relinquish all interference in the affairs of the market, encourage free entrepreneurship and diminish
public welfare costs which would, in turn, lead to unhindered and unrestricted privatization. This free economic association
and exchange would presumably lead to individual and collective prosperity expanding the well-known principle of
“laisser-faire” in order to diminish the interference of the state in private businesses and promote aggressive
individualism— an ideological stance deeply ingrained within the Anglo-Saxon frame of mind. In the countries in which
this economic model was put to practice, however, Greece being one of them lately, Friedman’s model led to the transfer of
public wealth to private hands, exploding, unmanageable, public debt and an ever-widening gap between those who
accumulated and controlled public wealth and the huddled masses of the “newly-poor” who suffered the consequences of
Friedman’s dehumanizing policies under “corporatism”—rather than, plain capitalism—a term which serves to designate
the newly emerging economic ideology of private institutions controlling –and distributing—public and private wealth. My
reading of Klein’s book on the risks involved in such an economic practice, the effects of which are most acutely
experienced by Greek society at this very moment, is complemented by Butler’s insights on the concept of precarity. I
intend, therefore, to argue that neo-liberal policies and corporatism pose a tangible threat on the human because they
undermine its existence depriving it of its basic human rights and prerogatives. Such a precarious condition, I contend, de-
humanizes the individual and gradually, but, most definitely, leads to its extinction—its economic, social and individual
annihilation.
9John Nelson, United States Military Academy, West Point: ‘Grim-visag'd war hath smoothed his
wrinkled front’: the Rhetoric of War and the Erasure of the Human
This paper will analyze the way in which warfare dehumanizes us through language, particularly the war refugee. From the
euphemisms used to describe an affected civilian population (“collateral damage,” “displaced personnel,” “non-combatant”), to
military uniformity (the rank structure, the “chain of command,” the rigidity and dressage of military life (à la Foucault), and
homogeneity of dress), to the deliberate erasure of an enemy force’s individuality (through totalized and racialized Othering),
warfare has always been partly fueled by the deliberate erasure of the human visage and thus the concomitant suffering.
Through an entrenched rhetoric of war, governments, militaries, and the media—to name just a few actors—have constructed
an economy of representation that obfuscates war’s profound human cost. This linguistic camouflage is true even more so
during contemporary conflicts since the dehumanizing language must mask the individualized subjects captured by image,
film, YouTube clip, or Instagram posting. A tension thus emerges between the desire to humanize the subject through
individualization and the deeply-entrenched tradition of homogenization through war’s language. As I examine this entrenched
economy of representation, I will look at a number of historical and literary examples to illustrate my points about the use of
language during contemporary armed conflict. As James Dawes notes in The Language of War, “During war the effect of
violence upon language is amplified and clarified: language is censored, encrypted, and euphemized.” I will briefly introduce
some literary examples of how language works in this manner from Homer’s The Iliad and Shakespeare’s Henry V and then
quickly shift to contemporary representation both in popular film and in mainstream media reporting. My exploration will
focus on a few films from the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most likely Siddiq Barmak’s film Osama (2003,
Afghanistan), Bhaman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (2004, Iraq), Sam Mendes’s Jarhead (2005, U.S.), and Sebastian Junger and
Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo (2010, U.S.). I will show how these films—two narrative, one biopic, and one documentary—
echo the rhetorical strategies used in contemporary media accounts of current conflicts, thereby perpetuating the
dehumanization process. In doing so, I hope to expose the ongoing tension between the desire for individuality and the
rhetorical erasure of the human, particularly in the case of war refugees and displaced people. If technological support is
available, I will accompany my paper with images from the media and the films to enhance the presentation.
Mukhles Murad, Salahaddin University, Erbil: “The Responsibility to Protect: Call for Peace or
Humanitarian War to Save Civilians?
The Report of the Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty could not have been produced in an intellectual vacuum.
There is an enormous literature on the subject, in many languages and going back many years, which the Commission had a
responsibility to take into account – and every reason to want to.
Humanitarian war is an oxymoron which may yet become a reality. The recent practice of state, and of the United Nations, has
involved major uses of armed force in the name of humanitarianism: especially in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Somalia and in former
Yugoslavia. These humanitarian activities in situations of conflict raise many awkward questions. Two are considered here:
1. Is humanitarian involvement in conflicts- in the form of the provision of food, shelter, and protection, under international
auspices- a step on a ladder which can or should lead to much more direct military involvement, even to participation in
hostilities?
2. Can we conclude from recent and contemporary practice that a new consensus is emerging on humanitarian intervention, that is,
military intervention in a state, without the approval of its authorities, and with the purpose of preventing widespread suffering or
death among the inhabitants?
Moving beyond debates about legality and legitimacy, this work is a systematic attempt to apply measures of success to
humanitarian interventions. The difficulties of this analysis are fully acknowledged—and fully engaged.
Both these questions fall partly within the field of the legitimacy, or otherwise, of the resort to force in particular circumstances-
the jus ad bellum. These particular questions are, to some extant at least, separate from the laws of war- or jus in bellow-but the
membrane between these field is less permeable in fact than in legal theory. These two questions also take us beyond law, and into
the fields of historical interpretation and prudential judgement.
They involve ancient problems which have been debated since time immemorial. With respect to both questions; international
thought and practice seem to be changing.
1016:00-17:40 Amphitheater “Ioannis Drakopoulos”
From the Hybrid and Cyborg Body to the Post-Human through
Performance Art
Mariza Tzouni, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Sculpting the Body: Re-defining the Body
through its Relation to Beauty and Pain in Marina Abramović’s, and Orlan’s Performance Art
The twenty-first century foregrounded in novel ways crises of identity, causing us to reconsider the individual’s position
within contemporary society. Traditional ideals of beauty were deconstructed and then dramatically reconstructed. Painful
procedures, such as cosmetic surgery, the intense use of cosmetics, the consumption of dietary products, body piercing and
scarification, became integral to the said process of reconstruction. The beauty ideals of the new era demanded rapid and
radical, aesthetic and functional changes of the corporeal morphology. Female performance art assumed a critical stance
toward the emerging beauty ideals, caustically commenting on the fact that the quest for beauty is a painful, never-ending
procedure that can never lead individuals to attain the chimera of the ideal. Even though many individuals, and,
particularly, female individuals live under the belief that they can measure up to the iconic beauty of so-called flawless
women, female performers realized the illusory nature of this belief and subsequently employed, or rather manipulated
painful, and often extreme, beauty practices as well as fashion techniques in order to lead women to a similar realization.
Performers such as Marina Abramović, and Orlan use their bodies as primary material in their performance art, “sculpting”
them and submitting them to painful cosmetic procedures. By incorporating cosmetic practices and fashion techniques into
their body performance art these female performers not only violate their bodies, but also explore the reasons why a body
transgresses the boundaries of human moving towards the post-human as well as for the methods with which the human
body can be used as malleable building material for the construction of multiple hybrid human, or even, post-human
identities.
Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Fashion
Polymerizations: Bodies Clad in Techno-fabrics
Fashion art is exactly what it appears to be: art through fashion. Its aim is not only to present wearable outfits or set
seasonal trends, but also to cultivate aesthetic sensibility and raise intriguing questions, not unlike other art forms (painting,
music or literature). In the hands of certain designers, garments become tools to serve political purposes and the runaway
transforms into an exhibitory room that will host politically engaged fashion art “installations.” One such designer is Iris
Van Herpen, who has managed to redefine traditional views on fashion aesthetics and politics. Her collaborations range
from filmmakers to architects to musicians to performers to visual artists. Van Herpen has succeeded in introducing 3D
printing in her couture thus providing new meaning to futuristic fashion conceptualization. Musician/performer Lady Gaga,
who has successfully collaborated with Van Herpen, is another artist that utilized fashion to build her public persona and
make political statements. Her chameleonic sense of style develops parallel to fashion and is augmented by technology and
art. The reason why Van Herpen and Gaga stand out is that their creations, besides being capable to stand alone as
artworks, are ultimately inseparable from the human body, rendering it polymorphous. With the aid of technology, the
individual is transformed into a stylized hybrid, a techno-fashion-compound, without however losing altogether its
corporeal physicality. My paper will examine Van Herpen’s and Gaga’s fashion projects for the light they shed onto the
future of the human body; a body dressed in techno-fabrics, a body aesthetically revamped, physically reshaped,
hybridized, and ultimately reintroduced as post-human.
11Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Humans
Remembered/Cyborgs Performed: Subject(ions), Abject(ions), Object(ions) in Cyborgean
Theatrical Experiment
Cyborg theatrical practices, emergent amidst unprecedented challenges to the concept of human(ity), exhibit a specific
form of engagement with new technologies in both content and form, and bespeak the urgent need for rethinking and
reconfiguring previous assumptions of—among other things—the human body, performance, text, and feminism.
Indeed, throughout the past thirty years theatrical sites have been registering an intense interaction between new
technologies and performance practices, a sensuous contact between the virtual and physical, as well as bold corporeal
transformations. Revealingly, the work of a number of woman practitioners of cyborg theatre—performers such as
Cathy Weis, Shirotama Hitsujiya, Elizabeth LeCompte and Katie Mitchell—reflects more than bold experimentation
with technology in the constitution of the theatrical event; rather, it reflects (on) the integration between performers
and technologies onstage as well as (on) possible modes of addressing and accounting for this integration. The said
performance artists take a (technologically and otherwise) hybridized “subject” as a given and terminus a quo; then
go on to problematize extant constructions of bodies as subject, abject, and/or object; and, ultimately, reclaim these
bodies as cyborg-subjects. The cyborg subjectivities articulated in their multimedia performances correspond to
dispersed and fragmented, yet coherent and accountable embodied bodies/entities. Despite the profound modifications
of the corporeal and the openness to non-human elements that their theatrical/metaphoric cyborg transformations
involve, humans and their bodies are not forgotten. Instead of affirming post-humanism in the utopic sense of “cyborg
dream,” within which ideas that our humanness has disappeared prevail and the experience of embodied identities is
disengaged from gender, race, and other problematic constructions, the artists present post-humanism as a lived, albeit
technologically multi-mediated, reality, inextricably bound up with political and moral standpoints relating to power
hierarchies and as critical space that necessitates radical reassessments of the crucial role of humans within a world in
crisis.
Dimitra Gkotosopoulou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Hi-Teching Body and Mind in
Multi-Media Theatre: Perceptions of Human Life and Communication in a Technological Reality
The human body and mind have been transformed according to the flow of the current highly advanced, technological
society. Multi-media theatre, as part of this transformation, addresses various issues on how technology has changed
contemporary communication and living patterns. In this paper, the focus is on how these issues can be perceived
through specific multimedia productions, Slight Return (1994) and Firefall (2009) by John Jesurun, and Aladeen
(2003) and Super Vision (2005) by the Builders’ Association. These productions use representations of a human body
and mind highly permeated by technology. Their purpose is to bring to the foreground the point of view that notions
deriving from the discourse of post-humanism may be interpreted in ways that could lead to the neglect not only of the
human body per se, but of the human element whatsoever. As it seems, a perception of life without physical
boundaries is highly valued by numerous individuals. However, there are not only positive aspects in a life without
limits, without physical, mental, and perceptional boundaries. The notion of boundlessness moves beyond them to
other aspects as well; aspects that disrupt the image of technological advancement as inherently positive. Criticism
towards an unquestioned devotion to the boundlessness offered by technology relates specifically to the fact that
humans themselves are physically restricted and live in a world of limitations. This paper attempts to designate issues
of a fragmented human identity, which occurs when balance between the human and the technological element is lost,
in an era when technology has become an integral part of our lives and an extension of our minds and bodies.
1216:00-17:40 Amphitheater “Alkis Argyriadis”
Re-Thinking the Human through Experimental Print Narratives
Lizzy Pournara, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Redefining Humanities through a Redefinition
of Reading Habits
My paper will discuss the attempt of a contemporary American poet, Susan Howe, to raise awareness as regards the cultivation of
critical thinking by a diversification of the human subject’s reading habits. Through a selection of Howe’s poems from her poetry
collection That This (2010), I argue that her poetic writing demonstrates an alternative approach to reading and adoption of
reading modes, which alert the subject to the multiple levels of language. In addition, my paper focuses on the ways in which
Howe’s poetic practice pushes the borders of typical reading customs, diversifies different ways of reading that combine a variety
of skills. Howe invites her readers to appreciate close reading, as well as the elemental process of literature, in an effort to
underline the combination of traditional literary analysis with digital reading. Finally, my paper examines the course of action that
Howe’s reading subject embarks on; it moves beyond binaries by combining a range of skills, and aims at paving a different path
towards literary analysis.
Vassilis Delioglanis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Literary (Re)Configurations of Human and
Textual Bodies
The present paper examines the ways in which Steve Tomasula’s novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2002), challenges and
revolutionizes not only the concepts of the novel, narrativity and textuality, but also the concept of the “human,” which is
approached from both a biological and a technological viewpoint. On the one hand, the novel can be seen as the product of
convergence of a variety of media and genres. In fact, it functions as a remediation of electronic textuality, playing with innovative
typography and graphic design as well as combining text, color, verbal sound, and several other media. On the other hand, the
notion of the “human” can be regarded as the byproduct of the convergence of different techno-scientific and sociocultural
practices and epistemological assumptions. This being so, the author envisions a post-literate and a post-human future, which can
be examined in parallel, as technology alters both the textual body (the novel itself) and the human body. Finally, the author's
creative and artistic experiments with typograph and the actual form of the novel reflect the ways in which the human body as a
physical entity is challenged in postmodern culture through its transformation due to the application of the practices of
technoscience.
Thomas Mantzaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Marking the Visual: Human Traces in the
Print Book
The dominance of computer technology has, arguably, rendered the human a marginal agent in the conceptualization and
production of media such as literature and photography. However, an array of contemporary authors and publishers has assigned a
central position to non-mechanical elements in their literary and artistic works. In this paper, the 2013 novel S. by J. J. Abrams and
Doug Dorst will constitute the case study in my exploration of the argument that the foregrounding of human traces on the print
book constitutes an indication of active human agency. What marks the distinctiveness of S. is its interrogation of the traditional
roles of the author and the reader, as well as a focus on the materiality of the print book as a product of human interaction. In this
direction, I will suggest that an emergent body of twenty-first-century literary texts not only defies the popular narrative of the
death of the human in the face of media technology but, more importantly, suggests that, however filtered, processed or mediated,
the human will always constitute the lens of any verbal or pictorial narrative.
1317:45-19:25 Amphitheater “Ioannis Drakopoulos”
Performing the Human
Katerina Liontou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: Never Let Me Go: Βiological Hybridity
and the Reconfiguration of the Cartesian Liberal Subject
In 1970, in his landmark work The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Michel Foucault concludes
with an aphoristic statement concerning humans and their future: “[m]an is an invention or recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end” (387). Provocative as it might appear at first sight, the aforementioned declaration has been since then the
inexhaustible source of debates and re-negotiations on what has been the most celebrated and cherished invention of
modernity and of the Enlightenment: the humanist liberal subject, also known as the Cartesian subject. Forged under the
influence of a plethora of ideological currents (empiricism, rationalism, moral philosophy etc), liberal humanism prescribes
the individual as essentially free, the owner of himself/herself, endowed with an innate capacity for reason, free-will and
self-determination, constructing thus the individual as an essential, almost metaphysical abstraction. The emphasis,
evidently, is placed on cognition. In this paper I intend to explore the ways in which the advent of the posthuman era, and
particularly the concept of cloning as it is literarily dramatised in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, brings in
the foreground crucial questions concerning the idea of anthropos as it has been solidified during the early modernity. The
existence of the clones, who are presented as anthropomorphic machines, oscillating in the precarious fissures between
archetypical Western dualities, human/non-human or infra-human, conscience/body, organic/mechanic, challenges
established ideas of essentialised subjectivity and promotes the reconfiguration of the notion of the Cartesian subject as an
ontological fallacy, revealing its discursive limitations. Furthermore, I intend to examine the clones as hybrids, who
problematize rigorous notions of humanness and challenge politics of exclusion that rely on essentialised concepts of the
human identity.
Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, University of Bucharest: Posthuman Agency: The Rebellious
Clone in Cloud Atlas
Positioned, since Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1991), on the boundary between science fiction and social reality,
the posthuman has always challenged binaries and rigid categories of thinking. For Rosi Braidotti, a true “breakdown of
categories of individuation (gender and sexuality; ethnicity and race)” has to go as far as “the breakdown of species
distinction” (2006: 97). For Mads Rosendhal Thomsen, the new human (the term he prefers to address “changes in human
mindset and culture” rather than “a break with the human species at a genetic level”) goes beyond temporally located
biotechnological achievements and “has a long history of fascinating humanity” (2013: 2). The posthuman condition is
thus, most importantly, related to better and more advanced forms of being human, which can be traced back in literature
long before the concept appeared. In all these cases, however, important questions emerge as to the ways in which the
(post)human subject acts upon the world that surrounds us.
This paper will examine some of the current repositionings of the questions of agency, equality and the right to self-
determination in a posthuman light. I will use as a case study for this inquiry the film Cloud Atlas (2012), based on David
Mitchell’s 2004 novel and directed by Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski. In this film, an instance of posthuman
rebellion, placed in the context of radical reconsiderations of the spiritual, becomes a lens through which historical
assumptions about gender, race and ethnic equality are seriously revised. I will aim to show that, through the connections
between characters and events in the seven storylines that make up the plot, the emerging of posthuman agency in Cloud
Atlas traces back a whole historical process of an egalitarian consciousness-raising which aims at a revision of fundamental
ethical concerns for the third millennium.
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