Is the Einaudi Center's International Relations minor for you? Here's a chance to find out. Graduates go on to successful careers in fields like international law, economics, agriculture, trade, finance, journalism, education, and government service.

Contact: irm@einaudi.cornell.edu; https://einaudi.cornell.edu/academics/international-relations-minor

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only.

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months. Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/fulbright-us-student-program

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports college graduates conducting research or teaching in any field in more than 150 countries. Applications are due in the fall; students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year.

United States citizens in any field of study are eligible.

Contact: fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu, https://einaudi.cornell.edu/fulbright-us-student-program

**Due to unforeseen circumstances, Arnika Fuhrmann will no longer be presenting. The speaker and title of this Gatty Lecture have changed.**

Magnus Fiskesjö's research concerns ethnic relations and political anthropology in China and Southeast Asia. His research and teaching interests include historical and political anthropology; civilizations and barbarians; sovereignty, citizenship, and state formations; autonomy and dependence; ethnopolitics, ethnicity, and ethnonymy in interethnic relations; cultural heritage and archaeology; museums and modernity; and East and Southeast Asia (including China and Burma).

This Gatty lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Please register here if you wish to attend via Zoom: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJctd-uqqDsuHNKMibs8l_WoFPStOI…

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

In accordance with university event guidance, all campus visitors who are 12 years old or older must also present a photo ID, as well as proof of vaccination for COVID-19 or results of a recent negative COVID-19 test. If you are not currently participating in the Cornell campus vaccination/testing program, please bring proof of vaccination or the results of a recent negative test.

More information on acceptable documentation is available here: https://covid.cornell.edu/visitors/

Please join us for a talk by Alexander Soucy (St. Mary's University).

In 2006, a monk and member of the Order of Interbeing wrote an open letter to the disciples of Thích Nhất Hạnh, in which he described his (and hence their) Zen lineage. One of the claims the letter made was that Thích Nhất Hạnh "received the lamp-transmission in Từ Hiếu root temple" ten days before he left for the US in 1966. This portrayal of Thích Nhất Hạnh as Zen master has been uncritically assumed and repeated in the media as well as in the scholarship of Buddhism in the West, mostly by uncritically affixing to him the title of "Zen Master." As Nguyen and Barber noted, however, this assertion of him being part of a Zen lineage is not based in the forms of Buddhist practice and temple organization that actually exist in Vietnam. This presentation will discuss the seeming incongruence between the claims by Thích Nhất Hạnh and his followers and the Buddhist practices and institutions in Vietnam. The purpose is not to disprove their claims, but contextualize the globally important figure of Thích Nhất Hạnh within the developments of Buddhism in Vietnam and with the globalization of Buddhism.

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The talk is open to all interested; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu

This talk focuses on some of the key ideas of my ethnographic monograph Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Drawing on more than 24 months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region of Northwest China and nearby Kazakhstan between 2011 and 2020, open-source and internal police documents, and extensive interviews with current and former “terrorist-workers” before their detention in 2017, interviews with their family members since detention, and in several cases post release, it considers how Muslim farmers can be turned into unfree workers under the sign of terrorism. By placing these accounts in the context of broader economic transformations in the region and considering how the rise of the “terrorist-worker” figures in scholarship of the frontiers of global economy, the article makes a broader argument about a global turn toward techno-political systems of capital accumulation and state power. Specifically, it considers the roles that dataveillance and legal frames of exclusion play in the rise of what I name terror capitalism—an ethno-racialized system of data and labor expropriation and social control that operates under the sign of the “terrorist.” It shows how such a system can generate capital by holding targeted groups in place through biometric and social surveillance, producing forms of self-discipline and unfree labor for private manufacturers.

This discussion will be moderated by Cornell faculty Eric Tagliocozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History and Esra Akcan, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory

Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program

The speaker has changed her title and abstract (4/21/22). Below is the new abstract for the title above:

In 1905, as the Russo-Japanese War deepened and the rise of the Meiji Empire began to take hold including Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, a thousand Koreans left their homes for Yucatán, Mexico, thereby becoming the first case of Korean migration to the Americas. Without the protection of the Korean government and lured by Mexican and Japanese contractors with the false promise of wealth and comfort, these migrants were sold into indentured servitude to work in the henequen plantations of the Yucatán. One of the most recognized writers of the Korean New Wave, Kim Young-ha recuperates this slice of history that had been silenced by all the nations involved – Korea, Japan and Mexico – in his novel Black Flower (2003). In this talk, I examine Kim’s rewriting of history that situates the 1905 Korean migration to Mexico not as a minor episode in Korean national history, but rather as a central event in the transpacific chain that links Korea and Mexico within contemporary global history. The novel’s reconfiguration of global/national history is hinged on two interlinked narrative technologies: first, Black Flower utilizes Japanese imperialism as a ready-made trope to not only construct the idea of a putative Korean nation, but also to directly connect Korean independence to the Mexican revolution; second, the novel ineluctably legitimizes the current discourse of South Korea as a multicultural trans-nation by situating the birth of the Korean modern nation in Latin America and highlighting the mobility and heterogeneity of (Korean) national borders­. I contend that the current historical moment in which South Korea is imagined as a global trans-nation and sub-empire calls for a certain recuperation of this transpacific history which places the Korean Mexican indentured worker as the modern subject of the South Korean nation.

This talk by Mey-Yen Moriuchi (LaSalle University) explores the history of Chinese migration to Cuba, which began with the coolie trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1847 and 1874, approximately 150,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba under termed contracts to fulfill a labor shortage on the sugarcane plantations. They suffered harsh conditions and were treated severely.

Chinese coolies were generally viewed as dutiful and submissive, and their voices have largely been confined to the margins of literature and history. However, the 19th-century testimonies and illustrations of Chinese coolies denounce the savagery and cruelty of the Spanish overseers, while simultaneously revealing that the coolies were not passive victims. The coolies demonstrated agency, courage, and resistance in the act of migrating, in their words, and rebellions.

Coolie labor played a major role in reshaping Cuba’s sugar economy and its existing systems of production. In addition, the amplified presence of the Chinese in Cuba challenged existing paradigms of race and nation. Cuban society was no longer black and white. The growing Chinese population forced a reconsideration of this traditional binary vision of society and, in the formation of a new Chinese-Cuban identity, complicated notions of what constituted cubanidad.

This event is co-sponsored by the Einaudi Center's East Asia Program.