An online panel discussion considering relations between modern mapping, as a configuration of spatial difference, and modern figurations of race and ethnicity in Japanese Studies.

Hosted by Brett de Bary, Professor Emerita, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature

Participants:

Discussant – John Namjum Kim, Associate Professor, German/Japanese/Comparative Literature, UC RiversideDiscussant – Parisa Vaziri, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Studies, CornellAndrew Harding, Ph.D. candidate in the field of Asian Literature, Religion & Culture,
“Make Zainichi Korean Again: The Allure of the Sovereign Figure in Post-Colonial Japan and Korea”Andrea Mendoza, Assistant Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, UC San Diego,
“Toward a Critical Phenomenology of the Transpacific”Dexter Thomas, culture correspondent for Vice News,
“Black Liberation in Japanese Manga: Another Look at Golgo 13”Paul McQuade, Ph.D. candidate in the field of Asian Literature, Religion & Culture,
“Translating Race: Mapping Language and Ethnicity”This panel discussion will consider relations between modern mapping, as a configuration of spatial difference, and modern figurations of race and ethnicity in Japanese Studies, as well as the spatially bounded “Japan” taken to be its object. How do we understand how figures of race and ethnicity, as fundamentally aesthetic constructions without much reference to socio-demographic existences, nevertheless can mobilize such powerful political effects? How is our ability to critically read these figures shaped by geopolitical mappings institutionalized in postwar Area Studies? How do we historicize the multiple distinctions between “interiority” and “exteriority” these mappings enable? Panelists will propose and discuss possible approaches to these questions.

Protests against racism and police violence crescendoed in the United States and around the world in 2020. In the United States and internationally, how can we balance social justice, accountability, and personal freedom with demands for order and security?

This Lund Critical Debate brings together the United Nations’ police commissioner and a noted expert on political conflict resolution to discuss strategies—both inside and outside the policing framework—for public safety and law enforcement. The conversation will address current questions around security and policing, including political violence, racial injustice and Black Lives Matter, and global responses to unlawful use of force.

The panel welcomes questions in advance and during the event. Registration is required.

Panelists
Luís Carrilho, United Nations Police Adviser. He has served since November 2017 as police commissioner and director of the UN’s Police Division. He previously served as the police commissioner in multidimensional United Nations peacekeeping operations in Timor Leste, Haiti, and the Central African Republic.

Christian Davenport, Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan. His research focuses on racism, social movements, and political conflict, including human rights violations, genocide, torture, political surveillance, and civil war. His most recent book is The Peace Continuum: What It Is and How To Study It (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Moderator
Sabrina Karim, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies; Hardis Family Assistant Professor for Teaching Excellence, Department of Government, A&S. Her research focuses on conflict and peace processes, international involvement in post-conflict security, and state building in the aftermath of civil war.

About the Debate
This year’s Lund Critical Debate is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center. Established in 2008, the Einaudi Center's Lund Critical Debate Series is made possible by the generosity of Judith Lund Biggs ’57.

Celebrate International Education Week #IEW2020 with Global Cornell!

Join DJ Daniel Bass of WRFI's Monsoon Radio for world music of 2020—from coronavirus and mass incarceration, to migration, love, dancing, and beyond. Jonathan Miller of Homelands Productions cohosts.

For semi-finals: It's a semi-study break. See you there.

Registration is required.

Daniel Bass (South Asia Program) has been a radio DJ for nearly 30 years. As an undergraduate at Carleton College, he was music director of KRLX, the student-run radio station, and hosted a weekly show. In graduate school at the University of Michigan, he cohosted a weekly show of South Asian music on WCBN, the college/community radio station in Ann Arbor. In 2013, he started Monsoon Radio on WPKN in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He brought the show to Ithaca's WRFI in 2017. Monsoon Radio features music of South Asia, its influences and diasporas, branching out to music of the Indian Ocean and the Muslim world and fusions from all over the globe. Until the pandemic forced the show into hiatus, Monsoon Radio aired every other Tuesday night on WRFI, 88.1 FM, and wrfi.org.

Jonathan Miller's work as a journalist, writer, and editor has taken him to more than 20 countries in Asia, the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. His radio and television reports have been broadcast on NPR, Marketplace, BBC, PBS NewsHour, and other outlets. As executive director of the journalism collective Homelands Productions, he has designed and produced multi-platform projects on cultural change, globalization and work, and the future of food. He serves as board chair of Ithaca City of Asylum. From 2016 to 2018 he was associate director of communication at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Register here: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hjkj48IdQ7yEVetaG1QFlA

Please join us for a virtual talk by Jonathan C. Gold, Associate Professor of Religion at Princeton University.

Buddhist thought provides a meta-identity theory. Doctrines such as dependent origination, emptiness, and karma can be used to theorize the ethics of adopting and ascribing socio-cultural identities. Professor Gold will argue in defense of a cultural reading of the doctrine of karma, and a karmic reading of culture. The cumulative, recursive, identity-forming nature of karmic causality under this view helps us discern otherwise occluded ethical implications of our actions. While we ordinarily think of ourselves as individual “agents,” a karmic perspective helps to enliven the idea of an “agent” as someone who “acts on behalf of” someone or something. It shows how, in all of our thoughts and actions, we are working on behalf of cultural forces that we often fail to see or understand. This provides a moral motivation for critical historical/cultural studies, which entails the exploration of the total assemblage of our karmic affordances and potentials, our “storehouse” (ālaya) of identities.

This event is funded by the GPSA and generously co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, the South Asia Program and the Southeast Asia Program. All are welcome to attend, and a Zoom link will be available upon registering through CampusGroups.

Please contact Bruno at bms297@cornell.edu for any special arrangements you may require in order to attend this event.

Please join us for a virtual talk by Jane Marie Law, Associate Professor of Asian Studies here at Cornell University.

Professor Law's research explores the interface between living communities and religious ideologies and praxis, with fieldwork as a core methodology. Her early work focused on the ritual uses of human effigies in Japan, and explored how puppetry represents a kind of ritual logic. From this work, she became interested in issues of cultural memory and memorialization of atrocity. Recently, she has turned her attention to how religious communities participate in debates and actions concerning ecological healing or degradation, and movements toward or away from sustainable living. Her current writing explores the activities of marginal intentional religious communities presenting models of transition to ecologically sustainable living. The questions she is exploring are wide reaching, allowing a variety of cases and questions to be explored in her work: What ecological knowledge is the particular community protecting and developing? What religious ideas, ideologies and epistemologies are being employed to explain the reasons for the protection and development? Do these communities use this ecological knowledge and lens as an outreach to their broader lay religious contexts? Do these communities employ any languages of morality or ethics to enhance their conservation and protection? How do they translate what they are doing to a wider audience outside their religious communities? In the end, do these intentional communities have answers to questions of survival (food security, models of communal living, habitat conservation and resource management) that have not been adequately explored? In her research, she is committed to developing methodologies that enable scholars and communities to work together to find answers to shared questions.

This event is funded by the GPSA and generously co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, the South Asia Program and the Southeast Asia Program. All are welcome to attend; please register through CampusGroups to receive the Zoom link.