A LACS 60th Anniversary Special Seminar

In this event, historians Tessa Murphy (Syracuse) and Heather Roller (Golgate) will join LACS director Ernesto Bassi in a conversation about Murphy’s and Roller’s recently published, award-winning books The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (2021) and Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (2021).

Murphy and Roller will uncover the multiple ways indigenous people in the Lesser Antilles and Brazil encountered Europeans, expanding the universe of interactions beyond futile efforts of resisting European encroachment. Their books show how indigenous people in the eastern Caribbean and the Brazilian interior prevented Europeans from establishing sovereignty in what the Kalinagos, the Mura, and other indigenous groups considered their territories. Successfully deploying technology and diplomacy, strategically engaging in trade and warfare, and even developing alliances with other newcomers, were all part of the toolkit indigenous groups used to maintain their treasured autonomy.

The Creole Archipelago won the 2022 James A. Rawley Prize, granted by the American Historical Association, to recognize outstanding historical writing that explores aspects of integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century, as well as the 2022 FEEGI book prize, granted by the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, for its groundbreaking examination of “islands beyond empires” and of local/creole and indigenous instrumentality in forging a Creole Archipelago.

Contact Strategies won the 2022 Friedrich Katz Prize, granted by the American Historical Association, to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America, including the Caribbean, as well as the 2022 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize for the Best Book in Social Sciences, granted by the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).

Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). An Associate Professor of History at Syracuse University. Her research and teaching interests lie in the history of the colonial Americas, broadly defined to include the Caribbean, Central, and South America, and what are now Canada and the United States.

Heather Roller, Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). A Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Colgate University, where she teaches courses on global environmental history, Brazil and Amazonia, and the histories of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. In addition to Contact Strategies, she is the author of Amazonian Routes: Indigenous Mobility and Colonial Communities in Northern Brazil.

Strategic empathy is one of many capabilities the US Army War College seeks to enhance in its students, who are rising senior leaders in their respective armed forces and agencies. Government actors become more effective when they apply strategic empathy and thereby more fully understand the nuanced perspectives of their allies, partners, competitors, and adversaries.

Colonel Dena Goble will share her insights regarding the importance of strategic empathy as a US Army Reserve military police and civil affairs officer recently responsible for leading 800 soldiers during US resettlement operations for Afghan refugees. Brigadier General Bhat from the Indian Army will give the audience an opportunity to improve their own strategic empathy for India as he candidly explains the historical challenges, current dilemmas, and emerging opportunities for India as it navigates the great power competition between the United States and China.

Panelists

Brigadier General Atul Bhat is a senior officer in the Indian Army with 30 years of service. His various assignments, including command of an infantry company during counterinsurgency operations in Kashmir, command of an armored regiment and an armored brigade, and as deputy commander of an armored brigade at extreme high altitude in the Himalayas.

Colonel Dena Goble has over 35 years of Army Reserve service with expertise in military policing, detainee operations in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, and civil affairs operations enhancing the integration of women into the Jordanian military, supporting intergovernmental coordination for the Syrian refugee crisis, and resettling Afghan evacuees in the United States.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Nationalism Unsettled presents a critical exploration of national imaginaries that disturb, defy or deviate from mainstream nation-state narratives, demanding renewed consideration of the nature of nationalism. In tackling this subject, we bring to the table speakers with cross-disciplinary expertise, spanning history, sociology, geography and the arts, and consider case studies spanning the Caribbean of the late 18th century, China under Mao, and contemporary Venezuela and Russia. At a time when nationalism globally is being re-energized through shifting and newly affecting forms, we invite you to join us in taking a deep dive into this vital subject, harnessing the power of a comparative perspective.

Discussant: Begüm Adalet, Department of Government

Format: 10 minute talk by each panelist on their individual research topic, followed by a 20 minute talk by the discussant, and up to 60 minutes for responses to the discussant and Q&A.

Presentations:

Ernesto Bassi, Department of History: Economic proto-nationalism or creole patriotism? Eighteenth-century visions of prosperity and the broken promises of empire

Mara Yue Du, Department of History: What Was Loving China: Revolutionizing Patriotism under Mao

Irina R. Troconis, Department of Romance Studies: Nation, Unsettled: Translucency, Memory, and Materiality in the Venezuelan Diaspora

Leila Wilmers, Department of Sociology: The myth of national resilience and non-statist imaginaries of the Russian nation

Register for viewing on Zoom.

This event is hosted by the Institute for European Studies as part of the Einaudi Center's democratic threats and resilience research priority. It is co-sponsored by Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the East Asia Program.

Migration has defined human activity for millennia, illustrated by the fact that it constitutes the basis of many foundational texts: the Sanskrit Ramayana, the Old Testament, Homer’s Odyssey, the Aeniad, Icelandic sagas. In Poetics of Relation (1990), Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant distinguishes between "root identity," and "relation identity." While root identity is founded on plantedness in the past, claims to legitimacy, and entitlement to the possession of land, relation identity places emphasis on contact and circulation between cultures: "network of relation." In her presentation, Finburgh Delijani will demonstrate the centrality to contemporary theatre of the theme of migration. Exiles, immigrants, and refugees featuring across the plays examined by Finburgh Delijani show how belonging, legitimacy, and identity are uprooted via the often violent severance of migration. Concurrently, they illustrate how the trauma that characters suffer – which cannot be underestimated – is counterbalanced by the relational, transnational, cosmopolitan citizens they are able to become. With particular emphasis on women characters, Finburgh Delijani demonstrates how Glissant's notion of relation enables an appreciation of how theatre is promoting an understanding of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century worlds of mass migration, as post-national, transnational and fluid.

Hosted by the Einaudi Center as part of its inequalities, identities, and justice and migrations global research priorities, this event is co-sponsored by Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge.

Speaker

Clare Finburgh Delijani (Goldsmiths, University of London) is the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2023-26) and Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has edited many books and articles on theatre from the UK, France, and the French-speaking world. She is currently writing Spectres of Empire: Performing Coloniality in France (contracted with Liverpool University Press) on theatre that addresses France's colonial past, and postcolonial present.Moderator

Eleanor Paynter (Einaudi Center)Respondents

Sabine Haenni (Performing & Media Arts, A&S)Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature, A&S)Imane Terhmina (Romance Studies, A&S)

Hosted by GETSEA

A community book read with Teren Sevea, author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya and winner of the 2022 Benda Prize.

Open to current graduate students at GETSEA institutions (which includes Cornell), click here to register.

Sevea’s book Miracles and Material Life is a remarkable scholarly achievement that breathes new life into the intractable themes of cultural hybridity and religious syncretism in Southeast Asian studies. This extraordinary book combines ethnography, oral histories, archival research, pilgrimage, and translations to depict the cosmopolitan imaginations of pawangs and bomohs in colonial Malaya—the miracle workers who operated simultaneously as powerful, resourceful, and problematic actors in the development of colonial capitalism. Miracles and Material Life is a highly original approach to the study of vernacular Islam and colonial statecraft and their zones of overlap and interaction. Its turn to colonial historiography revivifies colonial texts by analyzing the contradictory scenes and terms of their production, acknowledging the multilayered collaborations between scribes, pawangs, courts, and fastidious colonial officers. Tracing the vital economic role of pawangs in colonial Malaya, Sevea shows how indigenous knowledge and spiritual prowess were foundational to the colonial state project of territorial expansion, resource extraction, and cultural control.