Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Van Nguyen Marshall, (Associate Professor of History, Trent University), who will discuss the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State.

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

About the Talk

In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests, and carry out their activities.

About the Speaker

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University with particular research interests in Modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008) and the recently published Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).

Stories of Queer Feminist Alliances in the Peacebuilding Movement

Lesbian feminist organizing has played a significant role in women’s peacebuilding work, including anti-war and abolitionist organizing. Yet women’s lesbian and queer identities as a part of their organizing are continually marginalized in the histories of the women’s peacebuilding movement and feminist strategies for resisting patriarchal violence. What can explain the silence about these lesbian and queer lives, especially as told about the American and UK women’s peacebuilding movements?

Jamie Hagen, Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast, will discuss how this silencing perpetuates heteronormative practices in gender, peace, and security work. Her research surfaces stories of queer women in organizing for peace, both past and present. Part of this work is also articulating the complex ways people align themselves with LGBTQ identities and how this has shifted historically when working in international security spaces such as the United Nations.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jamie J. Hagen is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast, where she is the founding co-director of the Centre for Gender in Politics. Her work sits at the intersection of gender, security studies, and queer theory. Jamie brings a feminist, anti-racist approach to her work, bridging gaps between academic, policy, and activist spaces. She is the lead researcher on a British Academy Innovation Fellowship (2022-2023) focusing on improving engagement with lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women in Women, Peace, and Security Programming. She is co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Queer Conflict Research: New Approaches to the Study of Political Violence (BUP).

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Timothy Cheek, History, University of British Columbia kicks off this semester's CCCI lecture series with the theme of "China, the Central State and All Under Heaven."

How is China governed? It is a question on our minds today as the rule of Xi Jinping in China challenges American hopes and stokes our fears. Is it Communist? Capitalist? Confucian? Making sense of Chinese statecraft, or of how any state is governed, requires not only political analysis but also some sense of the context, inherited problems, sense of self, that is, of its history.

This is a fundamental historiographical challenge: how and in what ways can knowledge of past practice inform our understanding of later or current practice? How can specific knowledge of history inform, deepen, challenge, and open up new questions about what we think we know of our present rather than simply reinforcing our current assumptions and prejudices?

This lecture explores that challenge to the practice of history through the example of one sort of governance—state-sponsored, village-based local public education in civic virtues. This state attempt to create ideal subjects began with the Confucians of the early 11th century, continued in rural education programs in Republican China in the 1930s, re-emerged in Communist ideological remolding campaigns under Mao, and appeared once again in political study sessions in Xi Jinping’s China today.

China: The Central State and All Under Heaven is the theme of this semester's CCCI lecture series directed by Professor Yue (Mara) Du, History, Cornell. At the core of the “China Dream” and China’s rise in power on the global stage is the Chinese Communist Party’s proclaimed role in the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”—a restoration of China’s historical glory and its rightful place as a “Central State” of “All under Heaven.” To achieve this goal, China’s current leader Xi Jinping requires the party “not to forget the original intention,” which could be interpreted as either a return to Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, to Mao’s integration of “Marx” and Legalism of China's first imperial dynasty, to Republican ethnonationalism, or to state Confucianism combined with territorial expansion in imperial China. As China’s past looms large in its present, understanding the historical relationship between the "Central State" and "All under Heaven" is critical for our analysis of China’s economy, society, politics, and international engagement at the present and in the future.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series is co-sponsored by The Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

This talk, based on the 2022 book with the same title, explores how diverse phenomena, such as populism, anti-black racism, and islamophobia in various countries share the same core: nativism. It Includes an in-depth, original analysis of political developments in three countries: the US, France, and the Netherlands, some of the most liberal countries in the world, and shows why liberalism is not a safeguard against the rise of nativism. The talk offers a distinct approach from alternate explanations of the rise of far-right nativist discourses.

Speaker
Jan Willem Duyvendak is the Director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW) and Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His main fields of research currently are belonging, urban sociology, 'feeling at home' and nativism.

Whose Tianxia? Imagining the Great Qing in Post-Imperial China

Fei-Hsien Wang, History, Indiana University Bloomington

Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) lecture series

How should the geographical and ethnic boundary of “China” be defined after the fall of the Qing Empire? Did China become just a nation among nations, or should it retain the vision of being the overseer of “all under Heaven”? How should the modern (Han) Chinese states and society come to terms with the Manchu imperial glory? Wang explores cases ranging from the popular history in the early Republic period, martial art novels and cinema from the Cold War Hong Kong, and twenty-first-century internet novels and TV drama, to demonstrate how (Han) Chinese authors, audiences, and the state confront, negotiate, and reconcile with the tension between their uncomfortable longing for greatness, the modern Han-centered Chinese nationalism, and the imperial legacy of a Manchu/non-Han “prosperous age.”

China: The Central State and All Under Heaven is the theme of this semester's CCCI lecture series directed by Professor Yue (Mara) Du, History, Cornell. At the core of the “China Dream” and China’s rise in power on the global stage is the Chinese Communist Party’s proclaimed role in the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”—a restoration of China’s historical glory and its rightful place as a “Central State” of “All under Heaven.” To achieve this goal, China’s current leader Xi Jinping requires the party “not to forget the original intention,” which could be interpreted as either a return to Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, to Mao’s integration of “Marx” and Legalism of China's first imperial dynasty, to Republican ethnonationalism, or to state Confucianism combined with territorial expansion in imperial China. As China’s past looms large in its present, understanding the historical relationship between the "Central State" and "All under Heaven" is critical for our analysis of China’s economy, society, politics, and international engagement at the present and in the future.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series is co-sponsored by The Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

Our semester's first Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium text-reading will be led by Megan Bryson, Department of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee.

The Dali kingdom (937–1253), centered in what is now southwest China’s Yunnan province, left behind several ritual texts that have not been found elsewhere. This short section on “Inviting the White Vajra Being” thus resonated far beyond the spatial and temporal confines of the Dali kingdom.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文). 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.