PHBW blog
August 13, 2012
Are We Losing Our Humanity?: Part 1
This
is an announcement. Time is not
accidental. Dates are. It is accidental that November 5, 2012 is the
deadline for submissions to PMLA on
the general topic of tragedy. It is
accidental that on November 6, 2012 millions of American citizens will
participate in the ritual of electing a president. It is accidental that in the May 2012 issue of PMLA one finds Rob Nixon’s thoughtful
article “Neo-liberalism, Genre, and ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ “ (593-599)
and Rudolph Fisher’s missing story “The Shadow of White,” nicely authenticated
by Molly Anne Rothenberg’ s remarks on how “Dr. Fisher offers his audience a therapeutics
of the imagination”(618). It is accidental
that Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the Modern Language Association, will
moderate the forum “Are We Losing Our Humanity?” at the National Press Club on
September 7, 2012.
These
accidents are opportunities for using pre-future logics to discover and
speculate. Several billion people around the world will experience the generic
properties of tragedy in the outcomes of November 6, and they will not speak of
their experiences in privileged academic languages or publish their feelings in
peer-reviewed journals. They will curse. They will use the plain speech that
the academic folk (some anthropologists and linguists are exceptions ) dismiss . A few intelligent heretics will, like Walter
Rodney, Ella Baker, and Frantz Fanon,
listen to the anguish and use their critical gifts to write survival activities
that pertain to food, health care, and sources of energy. A smaller number of heretics will broadcast the
crucial information in Rob Nixon’s article, imitate Dr. Fisher, and expose the
obscene content of the September 7 forum.
As an agent of the MLA, Feal has chosen to make a literary and moral
sacrifice that we must respect.
For
readers who have difficulty following the rhetorical turns of pre-future
thought, I will say that the content of the September 7 forum is about who has the right to live and who should be urged to die. That is my
ultimate reduction of the sophisticated language used in the following
information about the forum that I have “borrowed” from the Internet.
September 7, 2012; 9:00 to 10:30 am
Coffee at 8:30
Coffee at 8:30
National Press Club, 529 14th Street, NW, 13th Floor
Washington, DC 20013
Washington, DC 20013
About
the event
The pressure of
explosive population growth will increasingly require us to empathize,
collaborate, and negotiate within our own small communities and as nations.
Yet, vitriolic political rhetoric, more time spent with technology and entertainment,
and evidence of religious and cultural intolerance despite a spike in diversity
within nations may all be indicative of a decrease in a globally shared sense
of humanity.
As a technological, economic, and political leader of incredible social diversity, the United States serves as a bellwether for world’s ability to “all get along.” What are the implications of diminished humanist values in an era when American business, political, scientific, and policy decisions have inevitable and repercussive global ramifications?
Discussion topics:
·
In a world of
proliferating technology, intensifying competition for resources, and rising
nation-states how will we be able to humanize the increasingly complex choices
we must make as a society?
·
How can we create a
culture of intellectual confluence that embraces both technological advance and
that which makes us human?
·
Is there room for the
humanity of all seven billion people to be recognized, or is it inevitable that
many will remain (or become) commodities?
·
As our interactions
are progressively mediated through electronics, how will we educate for
humanistic interchange?
·
How does the legal
definition of personhood blur the human status of individual people?
Can a re-infusion of
humanist values and perspectives in the way we train our scientists,
businesspeople, doctors, and engineers help them develop more efficient systems
and have greater impact, while increasing the bottom line?
The
Challenges Before us Forums
In the spirit of ASU’s
The Challenges Before Us project to tackle some of the many challenges facing
society today, the forums are designed to open a dialogue between experts,
practitioners and the community at large.
[ASU is the abbreviation for
Arizona State University]
In “Are We Losing Our Humanity?,
Part 2, I shall comment on two things.
- Why
the third topic question above has angered me greatly
- Why
the September 7 forum provides a unique opportunity to rethink what the
field and function of African American literary and cultural studies might
be
No comments:
Post a Comment