You're invited to the 2020 Cornell-China Online Forum this Thursday and Friday evening (December 10-11, 2020 starting at 7:30 pm EST both nights).

Through hosting this annual event, the Cornell China Center hopes to promote in-depth communication and collaboration between Cornell University and leading international scholars and leading Chinese scholars, entrepreneurs, and innovators. This year's exchange will focus on the future of Sino-US education, exploration and reflection during the pandemic, alumni career development, future-oriented design education, and more. The Forum hopes to provide constructive perspectives for the thinking and practice of the development of areas of society, and also to launch a series of new regular events including a deans' dialogue. The E Fund Foundation provided valuable support to this event. Below is the forum information and registration (free). Hope you can join us!

"When They Come For Your Identity: The Ongoing Destruction of Living and Historical Heritage in the Uyghur Region, China"

Since 2017, a cultural genocide is unfolding in Western China. This illustrated lecture reveals the staggering scope: The living, historical, and archaeological heritage of the Uyghurs, the Kazakhs and other indigenous peoples is being systematically demolished. Pilgrimage sites and houses of worship are razed, historical cemeteries obliterated (one dating to 960AD), indigenous architecture destroyed -- even home interior decoration is forcibly torn down. Native cultural and religious practices are forbidden; hundreds of native artists, poets, musicians, and academics have been disappeared into concentration camps, alongside hundreds of thousands of other innocent people. This presentation focuses on the material destruction, and places it in the context of the unfolding genocide.

I also discuss how the campaign relates to the legal constraints of the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention (from which cultural genocide was dropped, due to objections from the former colonial powers), and to China's current commitments to cultural heritage protection as a human right, as defined in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2018 -- the closest we have to a legal writ against cultural genocide. I also look briefly at how the new Chinese state program of accelerated, forced cultural assimilation is being expanded to Tibetans and other non-Chinese peoples ruled by China.

About the speaker:

Magnus Fiskesjö is an associate professor of anthropology and core faculty member of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology & Material Studies (CIAMS). Professor Fiskesjö's research concerns ethnic relations and political anthropology in China and Southeast Asia. He is affiliated with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies as a steering committee and/or core faculty member of the Judith Reppy Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, the East Asia Program and the Southeast Asia Program.

A Webinar Sponsored by The Levinson China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program

Virtual event. Seven students in the Korean Language Program will compete in a Korean singing contest for prizes! The audience will vote. Pre-recorded performances by Cornell's dance groups, LOKO and E.Motion will be played as well. Open to the public.

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.