Associate Professor Aliyah Khan from the University of Michigan will give a talk titled "Diasporic Devotions: The Indo-Caribbean Islamic Qasida and Gendered Performance" on Thursday, March 21.

The Indo-Caribbean Islamic qasida is a diasporic devotional song that propagates Indian subcontinental Islamic ritual practices and preserves the use of Urdu in the post-indentureship Caribbean through performances of religious authenticity. But it is simultaneously creolized in transliteration and translation, in part through Muslim women’s participation in public worship. This talk explores the gendered and racialized performances, songbook and vinyl record dissemination, and transliterated creolization of Urdu qasida poetic, devotional praise songs brought to Trinidad and Guyana by Indian Muslim indentured laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this lecture, Khan focuses on the evolution of women’s public devotional and competitive performances of qasidas in the Indo-Caribbean Muslim context of sectarian Sunni and Ahmadi differences, local engagement with global revivalist principles of bid’a (innovation), and the controversial emergence of women’s performance categories in new qasida competitions supported by nation-states and commercial interests. Indo-Caribbean women’s qasida performances, Khan argues, lie at the intersection of Indo-Caribbean postcolonial political identity—which is historically and continually defined by Indian women’s culturally “proper” dress, sexuality, and public behavior in visible opposition to Afro-Caribbean women—and worldwide Muslim debates and tensions over global and local iterations of Islam.

Dr. Aliyah Khan is an associate professor in the University of Michigan (U-M) Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of English Language and Literature. She is also the Director of the U-M Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC). Dr. Khan specializes in postcolonial Caribbean literature and the contemporary literature of the Muslim and Islamic worlds, with a particular focus on the intersections of race, gender, and Islam in the hemispheric Americas, including in immigrant communities in North America. She has also presented and taught widely in the field of Muslim representation in comics and graphic novel. She is on the editorial board of Bloombsbury Critical Guides in Comics Studies.

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press and University of the West Indies Press 2020), Dr. Khan’s first book, is the first academic monograph on the literature, history, and music of Caribbean Islam, focusing on Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, and on enslaved Muslim West Africans, indentured Indian colonial sugar plantation laborers, and their Muslim Caribbean descendants. Far from Mecca garnered honorable mention in the 2020-2021 Modern Language Association Prize for a first book. Dr. Khan is currently conducting research for a literary and musical book project on Caribbean hurricanes and climate change, including religious responses, reparations debates, and other community-oriented environmental mitigation strategies.

This lecture is part of the 'Religions on the Move' lecture series sponsored by the Religious Studies Program which is supported by a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. Additional support from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, Society for the Humanities, Comparative Muslim Societies Program, and South Asia Program.

The Einaudi Center’s Foreign Language Introduction Program (FLIP) is heading into local communities to teach children about world cultures and languages. FLIP aims to connect our diverse Cornell community to K-12 students at local schools, libraries and community centers in Upstate New York. Cornell volunteer teachers will have the opportunity to share short introductory lessons on the foreign languages and cultures they are passionate about. Volunteer teachers should have at least an intermediate knowledge of their chosen language.

Register to attend either the Feb. 1 orientation in person or the Feb. 5 orientation over Zoom.

The Institute for African Development (IAD) offers 6-8 week summer internships that let you undertake challenging practical fieldwork in Ghana, Zambia, or Liberia. If you're a sophomore or junior, join this info session to find out how you can apply. Applications for Global Internships are due February 1.

Register for the information session.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

The LACS Graduate Student Summer Research Grants provide funding for in-country research costs for graduate pre-dissertation work in Latin America or the Caribbean. (The grant does not cover international airfare; students should also apply for an Einaudi Center Travel Grant for airfare.) LACS will offer up to three research grants to qualified graduate students who need to conduct field research over the summer of 2024. The grant may cover up to $1,500.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact lacs@cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Sarah Wolff is Professor in International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Prior to that, she held a Professor position in European Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London where she also directed the Centre for European Research (2017-2023) and was awarded a NEXTEUK Jean Monnet Chair of Excellence (2020-2023) on the future of EU-UK relations. She was the Director of the QMUL MA in International Relations in Paris (2021-2023). Her research concentrates on EU and UK migration and asylum policies, EU-Middle East and North Africa, EU and British foreign policies, as well as EU’s policies on gender and religion abroad. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Mediterranean Politics. Her award-winning book Michigan University Press on ‘Secular Power Europe and Islam: Identity and foreign policy’(best book award 2023 European Union Studies Association) was conducted thanks to a Fulbright-Schuman and a Leverhulme research grants. She is Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and on the steering committee of two major professional associations in European studies UACES and of ECPR SGEU.

About the Speaker

Sarah Wolff is Professor in International Studies and Global Politics at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Migrations initiative, part of Global Cornell and cosponsored by the Institute for European Studies.

Register at eCornell here.

This webinar features a discussion of author Saket Soni’s The Great Escape, which tells the astonishing true story of a group of immigrants trapped in the largest human trafficking scheme in modern American history. Weaving a deeply personal journey with a riveting tale of modern-day forced labor, The Great Escape — named a 2023 best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, and Amazon — takes us into the hidden lives of the foreign workers that America relies on to rebuild after climate disasters.

Join us for a dialogue with Saket Soni, a labor organizer and human rights strategist working at the intersection of racial justice, migrant rights, and climate change, and New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman. Cornell Law School professor Stephen Yale-Loehr moderates the discussion, in which our panel will put this tale of human slavery into the larger context of our broken immigration system.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A gripping tale of forced labor and liberation that NPR called “a true story that reads like a novel”What it takes for immigrant workers to make the promise of democracy realThe origin of the immigrant workforce rebuilding after climate disastersHow this story fits into larger immigration controversiesSPEAKERS

Saket Soni
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, Resilience Force

Sarah Stillman
STAFF WRITER, The New Yorker

Stephen W. Yale-Loehr
PROFESSOR, Cornell Law School

This webinar is cosponsored by the Migrations Initiative and Cornell Law School.

Speaker: Edith Aldridge, Linguistics, Academia Sinica

Taiwan is the homeland of the Austronesian language family, speakers of Proto-Austronesian having migrated there from southeastern China roughly 6,000 years ago before proceeding to populate the Philippines, Indonesia/Malaysia, Madagascar, and the Pacific islands. As many as twenty distinct languages were spoken in Taiwan at the beginning of foreign contact in the 17th century. Now a third of these are extinct, and the rest are endangered. The first of these to decline were languages spoken in lowland areas in contact first with the small Dutch presence in southern Taiwan in the mid-17th century and subsequently with waves of Chinese migration in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intensive contact with highland Austronesians began with Japanese colonization during the first half the 20th century and continued under the Nationalist government from 1945 until the lifting of martial law in 1987. In 2001, the government inaugurated a revitalization program with the hope of invigorating the by then already endangered Austronesian languages, for example by introducing ethnic language education into local school curriculums. This presentation sketches the history of foreign contact, government language policies (particularly in the 20th century), revitalization efforts, and some outcomes of these policies and programs.

Introduced by John Whitman, Linguistics, Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Linguistics Department.

Su-yeon Seo, (Cornell grad student, Asian Studies) will lead final Classical Chinese text-reading for this semester titled Naming and Knowledge in the East Asian Sea.

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.