Remembering Edward Said

Announcing an ACLA webinar event organized in collaboration with The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. 2023 marks twenty years since the death of Edward Said, a figure who has been essential to the North American history of comparative literature whether understood through its philological bias, or its forms of postcolonial critique and expansion. The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University and the American Comparative Literature Association plan to come together to mark Said's influence on the humanities generally, and comparative literature in particular, through a webinar event centered on Said's late work, Freud and the Non-European. At the last annual meeting of ACLA, the vice-presidential seminar, organized by Ranjana Khanna, was planned around the question, "Why Psychoanalysis?" Specifically, we addressed the various forms of thinking across involved both in psychoanalysis and in comparative literature including understanding difference, metaphor, analogy, dyad, sinthome, migration, translation, theoria, as well as the failure, inadequacies, and limit points of comparison. As the current Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and President of the ACLA, Khanna has invited the participants in that seminar to discuss Said's text, which speaks significantly to our fields and to our moment. Please join us for the webinar on January 16, 2024, 2:00pm - 3:30pm EST. Participants include Ranjana Khanna (Duke University), Lee Edelman (Tufts University), Maria Fernanda Negrete (University of Buffalo), Azeen Khan (Dartmouth), Ankhi Mukherjee (Oxford), Cate Reilly (Duke University), and Dina Al-Kassim (U of British Columbia.) Register at https://duke.is/p/n7y5