The Cornell Population Center brings Luca Maria Pesando, Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Pollicy at New York University Abu Dhabi. He will give his talk, "Dynamics of School Expansion and Sociocultural Changes in inter-Casate Marriage in India."

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, (Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), who will discuss the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of the Philippines fine arts.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Known as the ‘master of Philippine sunlight,’ Fernando Amorsolo is the painter most associated with the Philippine landscape and Philippine pastoral, bringing to both a decided innocence, if not sunlit grace. More than merely formal experimentation with light, however, Amorsolo is canonical because of the distinctly national-pastoral conceptions his work elaborates. Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Fernando Zóbel de Ayala are regularly recognized as the three masters of Philippine fine arts. Their works dominate the Philippine canon and, by extension, elite notions of Philippine art. However Amorsolo’s particularizing of the (tropical) place of the Philippines separates him from his colleagues.

An anti-colonial, nationalistic celebration of precolonial, inherent “goodness”—a vision of a simple kind of goodness that I argue is explicitly tied to nature—charged Amorsolo’s works as well as his popular national reception. The American colonial period during the 1920s-30s sparked a wave of national nostalgia for the Filipino pastoral life, with Tagalog songs and Spanish poetry eulogizing the simple, happy barrio life that seemed to be increasingly receding. Amorsolo was part of this wave, which drew on the thwarted independence struggle of the Philippine Revolution, societal reaction to and cultural dislocations across the transition from Spanish to American colonialism, and ongoing political debates surrounding independence. Yet, despite round praise for his “democratic” art and celebration of the common Filipino, Amorsolo’s idea of goodness has deep connection to an underlying elitism in Philippine society and contributes to Amorsolo’s appeal among the elite class. In particular, his elitist vision of the good as grounded in nature had consequences for human relationships with the natural environment, while also being itself a result of existing class relationships with nature. This talk seeks to analyze the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of Amorsolo’s landscape and genre painting.

About the Speaker

Originally from the Philippines, Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is an Associate at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She was also formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University. Her broad research interests center on global intellectual history and Southeast Asian environmental and social history. Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, published by Columbia University Press in June 2020, charts the emplotment of ‘place’ in the proto-national thought and revolutionary organising of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers. Her current research analyzes the co-constitution of class and relationships with the natural environment over the 19th to the 20th centuries in the Philippines. Her research has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Philippine Studies, among other publications.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Viola Lasmana, (ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow / South and Southeast Asian American Studies Postdoctoral Associate, Department of American Studies, Rutgers University-New Brunswick), who will discuss Southeast Asian feminist practices and pedagogies.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

This talk explores the possibilities of Southeast Asian feminist practices and pedagogies through a discussion of transnational Indonesian and Vietnamese experimental documentaries, Children of Srikandi (Children of Srikandi Collective, 2012) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989). Exploding the documentary form and subverting representation, these works activate a poetics of collaboration and generate what Lasmana calls a shadow imagination, enabling new ways of articulating marginalized women's lives beyond the specter of the nation.

About the Speaker

Viola Lasmana is an Emerging Voices Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and a South and Southeast Asian American Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where she is also affiliated with Global Asias and Asian Languages and Cultures. She received her PhD in English from the University of Southern California with a certificate in Digital Media and Culture from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and has taught at Columbia University, USC, and Occidental College. Her work has appeared in Film Quarterly, make/shift: feminisms in motion, The Cine-Files, Visual Anthropology, Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, and more. She is currently completing a book, Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives, on the reconstitution of Indonesia’s decimated cultural archive.