Talk by Du Fei (History, Cornell University)

How would India’s connected histories look like if viewed from a gendered perspective? This presentation examines Muslim women’s participation in the local and transregional economic exchanges of the Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds that converged in India from the height of Mughal rule in the seventeenth century to the consolidation of the British colonial state in the nineteenth century. Based on a wide array of archives in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, English, and Dutch, this presentation will show that Muslim women from merchant and landholding families played constitutive roles in sustaining an economy of mobility and a culture of circulation often seen as dominated by men. Muslim women’s negotiation with male kins, jurists, judges, and officials in seemingly mundane areas of Islamic law, especially inheritance and agency, thus defies any easy conceptions of the idea of patriarchy in Islam. Situated at the intersection of history, gender and sexuality studies, and Islamic studies, this project challenges existing gender-blind narratives of how trade and travel contributed to the making of global Islam in and beyond South Asia.

Du Fei is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University—his research centers on gender in South Asia’s global connections across the colonial divide. More broadly, his research interests include post-classical Islamic law, the history of capitalism, transnational feminism, digitization, and community archives. For 2023-25, Fei is a Junior Fellow in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School. His published and forthcoming works can be found in Modern Asian Studies and Past & Present.

Talk by Ashawari Chaudhuri (Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University)

The introduction of genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton in India in 2002 invoked fierce debates and discussions about the future of agriculture in the country. Towards the beginning of its cultivation, some farmers received higher yields. However, over the years, concerns over the cost of cultivating GM cotton, pests developing resistance to the technology, environmental impacts, and corporate control over agriculture have taken center stage in discussions around agricultural biotechnology. Although most of these discussions have been centered on GM seeds, the seed itself remains unexplored. Based on ethnographic and archival research among communities on opposite ends of the agrarian political economy, like farmers and breeders/biotechnologists, I explore the meaning of Bt cotton for these communities. In opening the GM seed through practice, time emerges as a powerful yet understudied phenomenon. Different registers of time, like breeding time, generational time, seasonal time, and market time, are braided in ways that determine the meaning of the seed for these communities. I use braided time to critique GM seed as a commodity. I also suggest that recognizing the significance of time further enables responsibility towards human and agrarian lives and non-human ecological formations.

Ashawari Chaudhuri is an anthropologist of the environment, science, and medicine. Chaudhuri’s current book manuscript is a historically grounded ethnography of agricultural biotechnology in India. Along with asking what a good seed is for farmers and biotechnologists, Chaudhuri traces how knowledge about objects like genetically modified seeds is formed at intersections of practice, people, and time. Chaudhuri’s next project is an inquiry into the long relation between environmental heat and the body in South Asia. Chaudhuri finds historically emerging meanings of words and concepts powerful. Her teaching is often grounded in questions of ethics and creative negotiations with power around practices, technologies, and ideas that acquire palimpsests of meanings over time and across places. Chaudhuri has lived in India, Singapore, and the U.S. and knows Bengali, Hindi, and English. She has also been learning Mughal Persian for the past few years. Chaudhuri’s research and teaching are infused with my senses of self, belonging, and identity. When Chaudhuri is not teaching or researching, she is interested in healing plants, stars, and cultural interpretations of dreams.

Speaker: Thunghong Lin, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. Introduced by Eli Friedman (ILR).

In an era where democratic nations globally face the risk of regression, the question arises: How can a small democratic country survive the political and economic pressures imposed by authoritarian great powers? The concept of "democratic resilience" has recently emerged in political science circles. Lin's new book, "Stormy Seas: Taiwan's Democracy under the Shadow of China in the 21st Century," uses Taiwan as a case study to analyze China's authoritarian influence. This influence is sometimes referred to as "Sharp power," an international relations strategy that impacts Taiwan's election outcomes. In this lecture, Lin explores China's strategies of authoritarian expansion toward Taiwan, including United Front tactics, economic interests, propaganda, and the influence of military intimidation. These strategies interact with three major political cleavages in Taiwan: ethnic and national identity, economic disparities, and generational differences. The dynamics of Taiwan's elections are shaped by the interplay between these strategies and political cleavages.

Lin is a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, and the former director of the Center for Contemporary China at Tsinghua University (Taiwan). His research interests include social stratification, political sociology, and sociology of disasters. He received the Golden Tripod Award (National Book Award in Taiwan 2012), the Wu Ta-You Memorial Award (National Young Scholar Award in Taiwan 2015), and the Fulbright Scholarship for 2023-24. He is the Stanford-Taiwan Social Science fellow for 2023-24.

Talk by Tariq Thachil (Political Science, University of Pennsylvania)

Urban citizens in low-income democracies rarely hold elected officials accountable for toxic air. To understand why, we fielded a large citizen survey in Delhi, India, a highly polluted megacity where voters rarely prioritize air pollution at the polls. We find no evidence of conventional explanations for accountability failures: residents are aware of pollution’s adverse impacts, do not privilege development over curbing emissions, and are not fractured along class or ethnic lines on this issue. Instead, we find partisanship and sensitivity to the potential private costs of mitigation policies reduce accountability pressures. On the other hand, a simple randomized intervention (sharing indoor air quality information) that personalizes the costs of air pollution increases its electoral salience. We reveal key opportunities and constraints for mobilizing public opinion to reduce air pollution in developing democracies.

Tariq Thachil is Professor of Political Science, Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI), and Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent book (coauthored with Adam Auerbach), Migrants and Machine Politics, focuses on the political lives of poor migrants in Indian cities. His first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters examines how elite parties can use social services to win mass support, through a study of Hindu nationalism in India. He received his PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2009.

Talk by Kavita Panjabi (Former Professor of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata)

Turtuk is now an Indian village on the India-Pakistan border in the Karakoram mountains, in the contested zone of Baltistan. People in Turtuk who went to sleep in their homes in Pakistan on the 13th of December 1971, woke up on the 14th morning to find themselves in India. Unlike the people of the neighbouring village of Chalungka, who had fled en-masse further into Pakistan when the Indian army had arrived there a few days ago, the people of Turtuk had decided to stay with India. The Balti people of Turtuk, and its neighbouring villages Thang, Pachathang, and Tyakshi, were not compelled into any forced removal; they were subject to “in-situ displacements” (Feldman) in the conflict between Pakistan and India - staying within their homes, they had been displaced from one nation to another. Transitional spaces such as these that form the borderlands between nation-states are spaces of liminality, and the conditions inducing liminality in this region were severe. For the people of these villages, space had shrunk, and time stood still. Once situated at the crossroads of international trade and ideas on the silk route, they had become effectively sealed off from the rest of the world when the borders came up in 1948. Captive in the borderlands of Pakistan till 1971 and then in India, Turtuk finally opened to the rest of this country in 2010. For more than 60 years, the people here had found themselves in a literal “time capsule”, practically isolated within the borderlands of Pakistan and India. In this talk, Panjabi maps, through oral narratives of the Balti people of Turtuk, and the prism of their liminality, the cartographies of affective life pulsating beneath the officialese of borders. She tries to understand how the long duree of their liminality inflected their efforts both to preserve Balti culture across the borders of two nation-states and to safeguard their historical memory of an Asian internationalism. Thus, Panjabi hopes also to retrieve some of the strands of the politically shrouded webs of significance that once characterized the connectivities between Asian cultures.

Kavita Panjabi (Comparative Literature PhD '92) is a former Professor of Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, where she taught for 33 years. Over three decades of activism in the Southasian women’s movement, a passion for oral history, and a lively interest in cross-border people’s perspectives inform her book Unclaimed Harvest: An Oral History of the Tebhaga Women’s Movement and her Pakistan diary, Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition. She has also edited anthologies on Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia, and on Feminist Culture and politics, as well as two volumes on borders with Debra Castillo namely, Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas, and Centering Borders in Latin American and South Asian Contexts: Aesthetics and Politics of Cultural Production.

Y.S. Lee, author of Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia (Anthem Press, 2023) and Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell Law School speaks about his book which examines the causes of long-standing and complex tensions in the region and explores possible solutions to build lasting peace there. Introduced by Yun-chien Chang, Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law.

RSVP is required as space is limited. Please note, lunch is available to the first 15 who RSVP.

Uris Hall 204.

Includes a light lunch.

This event is co-sponsored by the Reppy Insitute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

More about the book: Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia examines the causes of these complex tensions in Northeast Asia and their underlying political, historic, military, and economic developments. It further discusses their political-economic implications for the world and explores possible solutions to build lasting peace in the region. This book offers a unique approach to these important issues by examining the perspectives of each constituent country in Northeast Asia: China, South and North Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, and their respective roles in the region. Major global powers, such as the United States and Russia, have also closely engaged in the political and economic affairs of the region through a network of alliances, diplomacy, trade, and investment. The book discusses the influence of these external powers, their political and economic objectives in the region, their strategies, and the dynamics that their engagement has brought to the region. Both South Korea and North Korea have sought reunification of the Korean peninsula, which will have a substantial impact on the region. The book examines its justification, feasibility and effects for the region. The book also discusses the role of Mongolia in the context of the power dynamics in Northeast Asia. A relatively small country, in terms of its population, Mongolia has rarely been examined in this context; Sustainable Peace in Northeast Asia makes a fresh assessment on its potential role.

Animating Forces by Andrew Schonebaum.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文). We are pleased to welcome Andrew Schonebaum, East Asian Studies, Maryland University to lead this month's text-reading.

Liaozhai zhiyi, like other anomalous account collections, is a curious text.  It not only records curiosities of the natural world – enormous bugs, tiny animals, and suchlike, it is curious about particular topics, investigating (in brief, but repeatedly), things that seem inexplicable – that dragons could die, or that foxes could evade the punishment of thunder. Liaozhai examines the stuff of life - the animating force, souls, human forms, and zombies (jiangshi 僵屍 /  殭屍). It asks, what is the difference between a body that is alive and one that is dead?  What transformation takes place in the moment of death?  Life itself – what animates a body is the ultimate object of inquiry into the unseen, and one that still fascinates.  We are of course, always gathering first-hand information about our bodies, and yet, as a natural object what makes it go, is elusive. We will read “Woman from Changzhi” 長治女子 about a Daoist who steals the life anima of a woman to bring alive a wooden doll. We will also consider other records that detail the legal and moral menace of "plucking life" (caisheng 採生).  

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 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.

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.

No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) is excited to welcome Meg Rithmire, Business Administration, Harvard Business School to speak on, "The Dangerous Politics of State-Business Relations in Contemporary China."

Why have relations between the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese private-sector business elites gone from “co-optation” and “cronyism” to crackdowns and emigration? Drawing on her book (Precarious Ties, Oxford University Press 2023) and related work on the turn to security in China’s political economy, Meg Rithmire traces the current crackdown to the long presence of distrust between political and business elites in China and the CCP’s partial liberalization of the financial sector over the last 20 years.

Introduced by EAP director, Jeremy Wallace (Government).

CCCI brings together scholars, researchers, and students with sustained research interests in contemporary China. In response to widely expressed needs related to contemporary China across campus, CCCI invites leaders in the field to give talks on an array of interdisciplinary issues about the current Chinese economy, politics, and society.

Talk by Nausheen Husain (Magazine, News and Digital Journalism, Syracuse University), and Mohammad Ebad Athar (History at Syracuse University)

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the FBI investigated a 23-year-old Pakistani man, Mohammad Salman Hamdani, who was declared missing at the site of the attack. As part of their investigation, FBI and CIA officials visited Hamdani’s home in Queens where they questioned his parents about his whereabouts and his background. The New York Daily News said his disappearance “quickly took on sinister implications.” Hamdani was a police cadet in training and was working as a research technician at Rockefeller University. On September 11, Hamdani was headed to work when the attacks happened and, having prior experience as an EMT, went to offer assistance. At the conclusion of the law enforcement investigation, Hamdani was found to be innocent, given full police honors at his funeral, and was declared a hero by then-mayor Mike Bloomberg. The Patriot Act passed on October 26, 2001, states that Hamdani “acted heroically.” The New York Times called him “an all-American Jedi.” In analyzing the news coverage of Hamdani, we argue that Hamdani’s case is representative of the impact the news media can have in the normalization of South Asian and Muslim-identifying people being a securitized population throughout the ongoing War on Terror, as well as the perpetuation of the ‘good Muslim, bad Muslim’ trope in media and pop culture. Connecting to our larger work supported by the Lender Center for Social Justice at Syracuse University, we connect Hamdani’s story to coverage of cases of entrapment of Muslim men by the FBI in sting operations, using data-driven news audits as our methodology.

∙ Mohammad Ebad Athar is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Syracuse University and is a graduate fellow at the Lender Center for Social Justice working on the impact of media coverage of Muslims during the War on Terror. His dissertation research examines the securitization of South Asian identity in the United States and the Persian Gulf during the ongoing Global War on Terror.

∙ Nausheen Husain is a journalist, assistant professor of journalism at Syracuse University, and current faculty fellow at the Lender Center for Social Justice. Her research focuses on the news coverage of the War on Terror defendants and infrastructures after 9/11.

Talk by Tawab Danish (Cornell Law School)

The Hazara and Shia populations, comprising approximately 10-15% of Afghanistan's demographic, have historically endured systemic violence, discrimination, and exclusion due to their distinct physical features and religious beliefs. With the reestablishment of Taliban rule, these issues have intensified. There has been an escalation of targeted attacks on Shia’s mosques, educational institutions, and areas predominantly inhabited by Hazaras and Shias. Concurrently, the Taliban have repealed the Shia Personal Status Law, removed Shia jurists from their posts, and excluded Shias and Hazaras from all decision-making positions within their governing structures. The prohibition of Jafari Jurisprudence in education and the Taliban's declaration of the Hanafi school as the sole religious authority in Afghanistan further illustrate a deliberate, systematic discrimination against these communities. These actions are in direct opposition to the foundational principles of human rights and the core values of Islam, which include justice and equality. The strategic and progressive nature of these policies reveals a concerted effort to marginalize Hazara and Shia communities systematically, undermining their potential for integration within the nation's political, administrative, and judicial frameworks. Such sustained exclusionary strategies portend the emergence of intensified ethno-religious conflicts and the potential descent of Afghanistan into a state of anarchy characterized by the absence of a coherent and inclusive legal system.

Tawab Danish is a remarkable individual with roots in the scenic Bagram District of Parwan, Afghanistan, where he was born in the warm month of August 1985. Tawab's academic journey is quite the inspiration—he embarked on his higher education at Albironi University in Kapisa, obtaining his law degree with flying colors in 2007. With a thirst for knowledge, he then ventured to Pune University in vibrant Maharashtra, India, where he expanded his horizons with a master's in public administration and political science between 2009 and 2011. His passion for law and public service didn't stop there; he further honed his expertise with an LLM from the prestigious University of Washington School of Law in 2018-19. Tawab's dedication and hard work paid off handsomely when he was chosen for the esteemed role of assistant professor at Parwan University's Faculty of Law and Political Science in 2013. He didn't just teach; he led with distinction as vice-dean and then dean of the law faculty up until 2019. His specialties? None other than the pillars of justice—Constitutional Law, Public International Law, and Human Rights Law. 2019 marked a significant milestone for Tawab as he received the honor of being appointed by the President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan as a Senior Advisor to the Speaker of the House of Representatives for International Affairs—a testament to his profound expertise and integrity. But Tawab's contributions extend beyond the halls of government; he's a trailblazer in education too! In 2014, he founded Bagram Bastan Private High School, lighting the path to learning for over a thousand eager Afghan boys and girls. Following the dramatic changes in Afghanistan, Tawab and his beloved family—his wife and three wonderful children—relocated to the United States. Here, he continues to share his wealth of knowledge as a Visiting Scholar at the distinguished Cornell School of Law, now in his second year. His journey reflects a relentless commitment to education, law, and the rights of people everywhere.