Speaker: Chang Xu, Assistant Professor, Department of Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University
Description: Against the backdrop of the 1785 Qing–Russian trade embargo, reports of rhubarb smuggling in southern Xinjiang in 1788 prompted the Qianlong Emperor to impose a swift, empire-wide ban on rhubarb exports. Regarded by the Qing as an essential good in high demand in Russia, rhubarb became a tool of diplomatic leverage, with control over its circulation used to press Russia into meeting Qing’s demands. Yet as a vital medicinal substance, the complete ban soon clashed with local welfare needs, forcing the court to navigate between diplomatic goals and people’s livelihood. This text-reading focuses on edicts and memorials documenting Qianlong’s changing assessments of rhubarb’s medical necessity in Taiwan, Ryukyu, Manchuria, and Xinjiang, tracing how the state’s view of rhubarb evolved in step with shifting imperial priorities. We will also examine how the Qing wove diverse borderland realities into a coherent foreign policy, while applying regionally differentiated regulations to manage rhubarb circulation.

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium
The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.
o At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

The tender longing for the stars, an impulse familiar to many, has unfolded alongside another trajectory in modernity: from Captain Cook’s pursuit of Venus to NASA’s Space-Age invocation of Christopher Columbus, tracing a historical course intertwined with imperial expansion. The cultural imagination of space exploration, arguably most concentrated in the genre of science fiction (sf), is also haunted by what Gerry Canavan calls a “bad [colonial] conscience.” While scholars such as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., John Rieder, and Jessica Langer have examined the colonial and postcolonial operations within the genre, others, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Grace Dillon, Lou Cornum, and Taryne Jade Taylor, have turned to minoritarian SF traditions—Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and Latinx futurism—that foreground speculative geographies illuminating decolonial concepts of temporality and subjectivity.

Engaging with this constellation of scholarship on colonial speculation and alternative futuring in the Anglophone sphere, this presentation turns to early revolutionary Cuba, whose anti-colonial, socialist, and Cold War conditions offer a unique historical, linguistic, and cultural vantage point for speculative imagination. Specifically, I focus on Ángel Arango’s 1964 short story “El cosmonauta” (“The Cosmonaut”)—an early exemplar of Cuban science fiction—and ask: How does Arango’s playful engagement with Indigenous narratives, Caribbean postcolonial writing, and European colonial travelogues reconfigure the genre’s inherited traditions? In what ways does it invite us to rethink our relation to history and the human subject? In other words, what alternative visions might it bring to complicate prevalent capitalist techno-utopian discourses of space exploration?

Lu Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Studies. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Hispanophone Caribbean and Mexican literature, visual culture, and intellectual traditions. She is currently developing a project on alternative perspectives of space exploration in Latin American speculative imagination, from the 1950s to the present. This project emphasizes non-Western ideas of temporality, technology, ecology, and the human, while also highlighting how space ambitions create complex dynamics among postcolonial modernity, decolonization, and racialization.

This talk examines how to ensure Indigenous Peoples are meaningfully involved in jurisdictional REDD+ initiatives, with their rights safeguarded and their perspectives actively shaping decisions. It highlights practical approaches for designing benefit-sharing systems, implementing safeguards, and establishing governance models that reflect both climate goals and Indigenous priorities. Drawing on lessons from diverse regions, it showcases successful collaborations among governments, Indigenous organizations, and civil society that have advanced equitable, transparent, and high-integrity climate finance. Attendees will gain concrete strategies and real-world examples to strengthen Indigenous participation in REDD+, fostering trust, resilience, and lasting outcomes for both climate and biodiversity.

Edgar Godoy is a senior environmental strategist and trained biologist with over 15 years of experience in sustainable forest governance, climate change mitigation, and jurisdictional REDD+ implementation. He holds a degree in biology and has built his career through leadership roles in international NGOs, government collaborations, and multilateral platforms. He is a former Director for Rainforest Alliance Latin America and has provided technical support to Mexico’s National Protected Areas Commission (CONANP).
Edgar specializes in forging lasting partnerships with subnational governments, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities to design and scale high-integrity forest carbon finance solutions. With deep expertise in policy frameworks, safeguards, and benefit-sharing mechanisms, he ensures technical assistance aligns with country priorities while fostering inclusive climate action.
His leadership has been pivotal in advancing carbon market readiness, facilitating ERPA negotiations, and engaging diverse stakeholders across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. By connecting policy, science, and local priorities, Edgar brings strategic insight and diplomatic skill to the fight against deforestation, helping shape equitable, lasting climate solutions.

Talk by David Engerman (History, Yale University)

Apostles of Development offers a history of international development through the lives and work of six South Asian economists who all studied together in Cambridge in the 1950s. They were an illiustrious group, with long careers and many succeses: winning a Nobel Prize (Amartya Sen), spending a decade as Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh), inventing the Human Development Index (Mahbub ul Haq), becoming a leading economist of international trade (Jagdish Bhagwati), agitating for independent Bangladesh (Rehman Sobhan), and helping create the modern Sri Lankan economy (Lal Jayawardena).

David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs, teaches international history at Yale University. Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. In 2016, he served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of four books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018), and most recently Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India, Oxford, 2025); he is also the editor or coeditor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World.

View the art, media, and writing of Cornell students and staff who share the ways that migration shapes their lives in this Mann Library exhibit. The exhibit will feature winning submissions from the Migrations Program's creative writing and art competition and an interactive digital space where you can share your own migration story.

At the exhibit's launch, guest speaker Cathy Linh Che will read poetry and join us for a Q&A session.

About the Speaker

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books), and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Host and Sponsors

The Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, is hosting this event.

The IAD Colloquia are monthly events that aim to strengthen relationships as well as to increase awareness, interest, and dialogue about African scholarship and issues across campus and beyond. The monthly panel discussions include Cornell faculty and invited specialists.

Register

The IAD Colloquia are monthly events that aim to strengthen relationships as well as to increase awareness, interest, and dialogue about African scholarship and issues across campus and beyond. The monthly panel discussions include Cornell faculty and invited specialists.

Register

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Analyn Salvador-Amores from the University of the Philippines Baguio.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract

Tattoos, or batok was once a place-based practice accorded to the members of Kalinga, an ethnolinguistic group in northern Luzon, Philippines. Batok served as badges of honor for the men who successfully participated in tribal warfare in the past; and as a form of aesthetics for the women, both of whom reflects the relevant social position they occupy in the community: religious, political association, and economic status. During the American colonial period at the turn of the century, the traditional tattoos were abhorred due to its association to “savages and criminality” and waned in the next century.

Today, there is a strong wave of revival of traditional tattoos in the contemporary period. Foremost inspired by Apo Whang-ud, a 90-year old elderly woman and a tattoo practitioner from a remote village in Buscalan, Tinglayan in Kalinga. It has generated a growing interest on Kalinga tattoos from the local and international market. The wave of revival of traditional tattoos among the younger Kalinga has been accompanied by a steady influx of urban and diasporic Filipinos of non-Kalinga origin visiting Buscalan to get tattooed. It is here that the most dynamic process of the transformation of tattooing can be observed. In what seems to be an ongoing revival or reinvention of traditional tattoos in the contemporary times, the tattoos now are also commodified due to the advent of tourism.

The popularity of Kalinga tattoos has opened new arenas for both traditional and contemporary forms of expression dissociated from the symbolic meanings – tattoos as graphic designs devoid of ritual acts. Due to the influx of tourists to the village of Buscalan since 2014, which burgeoned in 2015 and continues to grow even until now. Initially, Whang-ud started with an apprentice of her niece Grace Palikas; today there are two hundred fourteen (214) other young female and male tattoo artists in the village who tattoo tourists from their homes, and have travelled to the cities to tattoo outside of the village.

With the vibrant economy bolstered through the quest for authentic tattoos by Apo Whang-ud, a significant new phenomenon developed, of local people patronizing the younger tattoo artists in the village and getting inked by the same tattoos that they abhorred forty years ago. The pain, perforation of the skin, and permanence (embodied) that one experiences to construct individual and social identities through appropriation of the batok resulted in the re-contextualization of the tattoos in the present.

About the Speaker

Analyn Salvador-Amores is Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Museo Kordilyera at the University of the Philippines Baguio. Her research interests include anthropology of the body, non-Western aesthetics, material culture, endangered cultures, ethnographic museums, Indigenous peoples and colonial photography in the Philippine Cordillera. She studied for her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. In addition to her award-winning book, Tapping Ink, Tattooing Identities: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Kalinga Society (University of the Philippines Press, 2013), she is the author of many scholarly articles published in various books and journals.

As a public service professor, she continues to engage Indigenous communities in her work, and promoting Indigenous knowledge in different platforms. She actively carries out anthropological fieldwork among the Indigenous communities in Northern Luzon, and have published extensively on this subject. Recently, she is involved in the research on Northern Luzon Philippine collections in the archives and museums in the US and Europe, reconnecting historical documents, archival photographs and material culture to communities of origin in Northern Luzon, through digital repatriation and rematriation. The culmination of this collaborative work with German museums is the book, Hunting for Artifacts: 19th Century German Travelers in the Luzon Cordillera (2025) published by the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines Baguio.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Maria Hwang, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies from McGill University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Jangai Jap, Assistant Professor from the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia.
This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract

Since independence, most of the ethnic minority groups in Myanmar—though not all—have rebelled against the central government, making it home to the most simultaneous and longest ongoing armed conflict in the world. In this talk, I track the origins of armed ethnic organizations in Myanmar and argue that political exclusion—a primary grievance widely thought to motivate ethnic rebellion—played a rather minimal role in the onset of ethnic rebellions. Instead, what distinguishes ethnic groups in rebellion from other ethnic minority groups is the claim of having an ethnic “homeland” within Myanmar. Individuals from such ethnic groups form nascent armed groups, which are then fostered and supported by more established ethnic armed organizations. I illustrate this dynamic through the role of the Karen National Union and the Kachin Independence Organization in the proliferation of robust ethnic armed organizations in Myanmar.

About the Speaker

Jangai Jap is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs. She researches ethnic politics, nationalism, minority-state relations, and Burma/Myanmar politics. Her ongoing work examines interethnic relations, bureaucratic experiences, and ethnic rebellion. Previously, she was an Early Career Provost Fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University and a B.A. in Judaic Studies and Political Science from Yale University.