East Asia Program
“Anti-Blackness” in Chinese Racial-Nationalism
Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology
Kun Huang, a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and officer in our EAP Graduate Student Steering committee, writes about "Anti-Blackness" in China, in the journal, "Praxis". Her article, "Anti-Blackness" in Chinese racial-nationalism" states: In recent years, each time a mixed-race Chinese-African person went viral on social media, a nationalist uproar erupted online. A mixed-race Chinese-African child and intermarriage between Chinese and Africans have come to symbolize anxieties over “Chineseness.” This article explores how Chinese racial-nationalism, ideologies of sex and gender, and the biopolitics of disease prevention combine to form the affective and discursive justifications for contemporary Chinese anti-Black racism.
Notes on English edition: This essay was originally published in Chinese on the “Trading Thoughts” column of thepaper.cn (澎湃思想市场) on June 20, 2020.
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East Asia Program statement of solidarity with BLM
Throughout modern history, the emergence of movements making powerful demands for justice have opened up the possibility for profound social transformations. The East Asia Program recognizes such a moment in the sweeping protests that have arisen over the murders by police of unarmed Black persons. Together with people across the globe who are demonstrating the justice and necessity of this movement, we wish to express our affirmation of, and support for, Black Lives Matter and its allies in their quest for redress for injuries perpetuated by systemic racism.
For too long, we have failed to acknowledge both the blatant, and also subtle, violences that have been the legacies of American slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and exclusionary practices and illegal internments of Asian migrants and their descendants. We have also disavowed the intersection, modeling, and impact of these racist policies in other societies across the globe. Complicity with this disavowal at every level of our institutions, including those of higher education, belie the principles of democracy to which we believe scholars and people across the globe aspire. Indeed, as people everywhere reflect on the origins of modern national cultures, we believe we as scholars must undertake far-reaching examination of how our very critical concepts , not only of “race,” but of “racism” itself, may yet perpetuate systemic racism and the violences that accompany it, including in the knowledge practices called area studies. We therefore urge Cornell University, in the coming year, to encourage and promote extensive reflection on these matters, as well as intersecting oppressions (e.g. gender, sexuality, and class), and how they may be addressed in our teaching and research, in hiring and promotion, and in transforming the cultural and social life of the university as a whole.
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Program
Some Of China's Freed Labor Activists Start New Lives, But State Pressure Lurks
"Especially given that [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping has reasserted the role of Marxism in education and official ideology, the state wants to keep a very tight grip on defining the terms of the debate," said Eli Friedman, an expert on labor in China at Cornell University.
Friedman explains the activists' union work highlighted deficiencies where the Chinese Communist Party has not upheld its own socialist commitments: "Students trying to organize with workers, while aggressively framing the struggle in Marxist political terms, poses a real threat to ideological monopoly," he says.
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Ivanna Sang Een Yi
Assistant Professor, Asian Studies
Ivanna Sang Een Yi is a scholar of Korean literature, culture, and performance. Her research focuses on the performative dimensions of living oral traditions as they interact with written literature and the environment from the late Chosŏn period to the present. Her current book project, Continuing Orality and the Environment in Korean Literature, examines the flourishing of Korean oral traditions such as p’ansori (epic dramatic storytelling) and sijo (lyric poetry) through transformative encounters with writing, the environment, and recording technology.
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Pandemic: What International Studies Tells Us
June 25, 2020
12:00 pm
Students: Join Einaudi Center regional experts for this #SummerPassport webinar--for all undergraduate and graduate students interested in global thinking and action.
The outbreak of a novel coronavirus may be the most significant world event of our century. It's a pandemic--a Greek word that means "all people." Around the world, all of us are experiencing this shared breakdown of public health, economics, and international cooperation.
Experts representing Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America will discuss the big questions facing our major world regions during this global crisis. What are reforms, new ways of thinking, and new challenges that will emerge out of the pandemic?
Moderator:
Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies
Panelists:
Esra Akcan, 2019-2020 Frieda Miller Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; Associate Professor, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory, Department of Architecture, Cornell University; Member, Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities.
Marcelo Borges, Professor of History; Boyd Lee Spahr Chair in the History of the Americas at Dickinson College, and Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes.
Expedit Ologou, Founder, Civic Academy for Africa’s Future, and Director of Politics and Governance Programs at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Benin.
Jenny Goldstein, Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University, an Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future Faculty Fellow, and a core faculty member of Cornell's Southeast Asian Studies Program at Cornell University.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Nantes.
Register now!
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
East Asia Program
Southeast Asia Program
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Institute for African Development
Institute for European Studies
South Asia Program
Faculty Conversation: Research in the Time of Coronavirus
June 4, 2020
12:00 pm
Across the world, our lives have been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. All fields of study are impacted, as our medical, agricultural, economic, political, and cultural systems are challenged. The crisis reinforces the need to think differently and boldly about the world today and the world ahead.
The Einaudi Center invites all Cornell faculty to come together for a conversation about ways forward. Join us to share reflections and identify pathways for collaborative projects and new research agendas.
REGISTER NOW
Each participant will be asked to share brief reflections on three interrelated questions:
1. How has the coronavirus affected your field and/or your research?
2. What are the most urgent questions that you see arising out of this moment?
3. What are the next-generation questions you imagine or the rethinking you see potentially occurring in the next phase, as we move beyond the pandemic?
Particularly when we cannot travel to planned conferences, seminars, research sites, our intellectual community can sustain us and catalyze new individual and collaborative projects with international partners virtually.
We encourage all participants to think about what parts of these questions they would like to take forward and what infrastructure or collaborators would be useful to put together a team with synergistic capacities. Contributions may be worked up into a series of short essays for the Einaudi website, a collective review for publication, and/or grant applications and seed projects.
Moderator: Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies
Please send any questions or suggestions in advance of the conversation to rbeattyriedl@cornell.edu.
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Program
Einaudi Center for International Studies
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies
East Asia Program
Southeast Asia Program
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Institute for African Development
Institute for European Studies
South Asia Program
Negotiating Socialism in Rural China: Mao, Peasanta, and Local Cadres in Shanxi, 1949 - 1953
This is the first monograph in English on how China's agricultural collectivization began. In 1953, the Chinese Communist Party launched a system of agricultural collectivization to lean the countryside toward socialism. It led to the Utopian Commune Movement in 1958 and was followed by the worst famine in human history.
Book
25.00
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Program
Type
- Book
- Cornell East Asia Series
Publication Details
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Number: 179
ISBN: 9781939161598
Barbed Wire and Rice: Poems and Songs from Japanese Prisoner-of-War Camps
From the Foreword by David McCann: "Bishop McKendree's gathering of songs and poems from the Japanese prisoner of war camps of World War II is a remarkable outcome to a brutal experience....The materials were elusive in their circulation among the prisoners, dangerous to those who composed or performed them, and certainly would have been fatal to McKendree, had he been caught with them....
Book
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Program
Type
- Book
- Cornell East Asia Series
Publication Details
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Number: 183
ISBN: 978-1-939161-63-3
Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment, and Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden
Good Dogs explores the intersection of didacticism, Chinese vernacular scholarship, social criticism, and commercial storytelling in late Tokugawa Japan through an examination of a masterpiece of 19th century popular fiction: the novel Nansō Satomi hakkenden (The Lives of the Eight Dogs of the Satomi of Southern Kazusa; for short, Hakkenden), serialized from 1814 to 1842 by Kyokutei Bakin (1767-1848).
Book
65.00
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Program
Type
- Book
- Cornell East Asia Series
Publication Details
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Number: 186
ISBN: 978-1-939161-66-6
Gendered Landscapes: Short Fiction by Modern and Contemporary Korean Women Novelists
Gendered Landscapes presents nine short stories and novellas by representative modern Korean women writers dating from the 1930s to the end of the 1990s. Signature pieces selected from the acclaimed novelists’ repertoire, these narratives address issues related to Korean women as gendered beings in a Confucian-governed patriarchal society.
Book
65.00
Additional Information
Program
Type
- Book
- Cornell East Asia Series
Publication Details
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Number: 187
ISBN: 9781939161673