Search results for ""author lloyd pratt""

The Strangers Book explores how various nineteenth-century African American writers radically reframed the terms of humanism by redefining what it meant to be a stranger. Rejecting the idea that humans have easy access to a common reserve of experiences and emotions, they countered the notion that a person can use a supposed knowledge of human nature to claim full understanding of any other person's life. Instead they posited that being a stranger, unknown and unknowable, was an essential part of the human condition. Affirming the unknown and unknowable differences between people, as individuals and in groups, laid the groundwork for an ethical and democratic society in which all persons could find a place. If everyone is a stranger, then no individual or class can lay claim to the characteristics that define who gets to be a human in political and public arenas. Lloyd Pratt focuses on nineteenth-century African American writing and publishing venues and practices such as the Colored National Convention movement and literary societies in Nantucket and New Orleans. Examining the writing of Frederick Douglass in tandem with that of the francophone free men of color who published the first anthology of African American poetry in 1845, he contends these authors were never interested in petitioning whites for sympathy or for recognition of their humanity. Instead, they presented a moral imperative to develop practices of stranger humanism in order to forge personal and political connections based on mutually acknowledged and always evolving differences.

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September 11, the subway bombings in Europe, and Hurricane Katrina occurred in rapid succession. The outsized relationship between their historical significance and chronological span also marked these episodes as “events.” Focusing on the recent rise of “the event” as a form of experience and its simultaneous reemergence as a central term in critical theory, this special issue of differences links contemporary critical discourse on the event—Badiou, Sewell, Derrida—to long-standing conversations in philosophy, history, literary studies, media studies, and cultural theory. It also indicates how event analysis might begin to provide an analytic framework different from the conventional modes of historicism currently dominating cultural studies.One essay identifies flash points when “the event” has preoccupied Western thought from Plato to Freud. Others show how particular events—Hurricane Katrina, the Algerian War, the Haitian Revolution—betray the inadequacy of traditional nation-based frameworks for understanding the course of history. Media representations also are a central concern, as in one contributor’s analysis of how child abductions turn some (white girls’) bodies into events while other (brown girls’) bodies are denied that status. The final essay is a meditation on the end of the world that explores how the idea of the end as event transforms everyday language into cryptic signs.Contributors: Andrew Aisenberg, Wai Chee Dimock, Jonathan Elmer, Akira Lippit, Lloyd Pratt,Rebecca Wanzo, Hayden White

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