The French Graduate Students Association is pleased to announce the 2013 Student Symposium, exploring humanism and its critics. Drawing on the classes in which our graduate students have participated, the Symposium asks:

“Whatever happened to the human in the humanities? Humanists and humanisms from Montaigne to Négritude.”

Is there, as Edward Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism seems to suggest, a humanism that truly “admits all?”  The universalist aspiration at the heart of humanism’s Copernican revolution, to situate the human at the center of study, as the subject of inquiry, as the site of value and as the source of sovereignty, has, for decades, been under attack.  From structuralist Marxism to postcolonial critique, feminist interventions to theories of the post-human, recent critical thought has revealed the ideological and political presumptions that constitute the legacies of humanism’s complicity. But is there something worth saving?  How can humanism as critique finally “measure up to the human?” (R. Radhakrishnan). Centered around graduate student papers on a variety of themes, we hope to unearth heterogeneous and under-explored genealogies for humanism through parallel explorations of themes in the work of Michel de Montaigne and the authors of the Négritude movement.

Program:

Panel #1

Respondent: Professor Diagne

10:30am - 10:50am: Yohann Ripert – Une seconde école des Lumières.

10:50am - 11:10am: Kat Balkoski – « Nous préférons les voir lire du
Jules Verne » : Pédagogie et littérature en Afrique Occidentale
Française 1913-1947.

11:10am - 11:30am: Anaïs Maurer – The paradoxical humanism of
Negritude writing and reggae music.

11:30am - 11:50am: Anna Provitola – Ce que la femme noire apporte:
Mariama Bâ's Repositioning of the Black Woman in the Négritude
Movement.

11:50am - 12:10am: Questions

Lunch break

Panel #2

Respondent: Professor Usher

1:00pm - 1:20pm: Rose Gardner – Les Paradoxes du mensonge dans les
Essais de Montaigne, ou comment un « vice » devient vertu.

1:20pm - 1:40pm: Matthew Trumbo-Tual –Ornamental Value: Political
Economy and the “Savage” in Montaigne

1:40pm - 2:00pm: Johanna Magin – Experience versus Authority in the
Medico-philosophical Practices of Montaigne.

2:00pm - 2:20pm: Questions