Crossing the World to Sleep with You: Chinese Crip Poetry and its Cross-Cultural Translatability is the title of this talk to be given by Hangping Xu, (East Asian Languages and Culture, UC, Santa Barbara).

Yu Xiuhua rose to her celebrity status when her poem “Crossing China to Sleep with You” went viral in 2014 on Chinese social media platforms, causing what can be called a cultural event, which director Fan Jian documents in his 2016 film Still Tomorrow. As a female poet who lives with cerebral palsy in rural China, Yu was often labeled by media representations as a “brain-paralyzed peasant poet.” Such a sensationalist labeling strategy exploits her various minority identities. Focusing on the rise of Yu as a “crip” trickster figure, the talk advances a critical account of Chinese internet poetry as transmedial performance.

Hangping Xu specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese literary, cultural, and visual studies, comparative literature, and Taiwan Studies. Situating China in the world and destabilizing the notion of “Chineseness,” his research also pays attention to the history of diaspora, dispersion, immigration, and globalization. His interdisciplinary research engages two significant turns in literary and cultural studies—namely, the affective and the ethical —by foregrounding disability as a mode of critique. It particularly examines “disability aesthetics,” that is, how the disabled body in our cultural imaginaries evokes affective responses, or what can be called “aesthetic nervousness.” It explores the ways in which disability opens up new ethical horizons because its excessively corporeal and often spectacularized embodiment conceptually and aesthetically challenges how a culture defines what it means to be human.

The East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (GSSC) welcomes Professor Xu. We invite graduate students to contact us if you are interested in participating in a grad student workshop with him on October 20th at noon. email: eap-gssc@cornell.edu for details.

Poet Dmitry Bykov was nearly killed in a poisoning, then found himself banned from teaching at Russian universities. Essayist Pwaangulongii Dauod received death threats for writing about queer culture in his native Nigeria. Cartoonist Pedro X. Molina watched as Nicaraguan state forces jailed his colleagues and occupied the offices of the newspaper where he published his work. Novelist Anouar Rahmani was threatened with imprisonment for writing about human and environmental rights in Algeria.

All four were forced to flee their homelands, and all four were able to resume their creative work in “cities of asylum” in the United States.

“DISSIDENCE: Exiled Writers on Resistance and Risk” is supported by a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. The event is also supported by CIVIC. The Migrations Initiative, part of Global Cornell, studies the movement of all living things through an interdisciplinary, multispecies lens, with a special focus on themes of racism, dispossession, and migration.

About the writers

Dmitry Bykov (Ithaca City of Asylum) is one of Russia’s best-known public intellectuals. He spent five days in a coma after falling ill during a speaking tour in 2019. An independent investigation blamed Russian security forces for poisoning him with the nerve agent Novichok. In addition to prohibiting him from teaching at the university level, the government has also barred him from appearing on state radio or TV. Bykov is currently a visiting critic at Cornell University and a fellow of the Open Society University Network.

Pwaangulongii Dauod (City of Asylum Detroit) is a novelist, essayist, and memoirist from Nigeria. His 2016 essay in Granta, “Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men,” sparked a national conversation about queer issues in Nigeria and provoked threats to his life. Woke Africa Magazine named him one of the “Best African Writers of the New Generation.” He is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at Wayne State University.

Pedro X. Molina (Ithaca City of Asylum) is a political cartoonist who fled Nicaragua during a crackdown on dissent in 2018. He was an International Writer in Residence at Ithaca College and was an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at Cornell University. Among his many honors is a 2021 Gabo Award, a 2019 Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia Journalism School, and the 2018 Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award from Cartoonists Rights Network International.

Anouar Rahmani (City of Asylum Pittsburgh) is a novelist, journalist, and human rights defender from Algeria. He has faced legal harassment for his advocacy for individual freedom, environmental rights, and the rights of minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ people. In 2021, he was shortlisted for the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards. He is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residence at Carnegie Mellon University.

Each writer will present an 8-10 minute reading followed by a moderated Q&A session.

“The Cyborgs Have Always Been Zombies: South Korean Body Politics and Lee Bul’s Body Art” a Pulse of Art History lecture

This presentation revisits the early body art of Korean artist Lee Bul before she became internationally renowned for her Cyborg series (1991-present) and dystopia-themed sculpture series (2002-present). I read Lee’s early art as not only having a formative effect on her later works, but also a response to South Korean government’s control over women’s reproductive rights: its decades-long abortion bans and family planning campaigns to curb female fertility. I argue that zombie, a figure that often indicates the status of social death in critical theories, helps locate Lee’s artistic critique against the modernizing South Korea’s developmentalist and masculine visions.

Soyi Kim is the inaugural LB Korean Studies Research Scholar for the East Asia Program, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Dr. Kim's work creatively brings together urgent questions about the ethics and politics of epidemiology and a critical humanities approach to aesthetic problems in art and digital cultures. Dr. Kim’s work, while situated in visual studies, is truly interdisciplinary, and seeks to place Korean art and visual culture in historical and cultural context. While her work is not history of medicine per se, it engages with biopolitics as Koreans encountered first Japanese, and then American imperial occupation, and a diverse series of medical and bureaucratic interventions which have directly affected the bodies and health of Koreans.

Digitalization in Africa: Pace, Challenges, Possibilities and Accomplishments

Hybrid link

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) impact has increased dramatically since the second half of the 20th century with accelerated pace since the beginning of the 21st century. The functioning of many social institutions and sectors such as education, the economy, health care, political process and various other areas were impacted by the increasing use of the technology with the expectation of efficacy. However, when the authorities of World Health Organization (WHO) declared on March 11, 2020, COVID-19 a pandemic, there was no common anticipation of the duration of the pandemic, its effects on of the functioning of all the sectors of society and the extraordinary acceleration of the digitalization albeit in a damage control and survival mode. One of the most striking upsurges of technology was in the education sector as school children and older learners were confined to their homes because of school closures due to lockdowns and curfews. Hence education had to be taught utilizing digital technologies. Efforts toward digitalization were already underway even before COVID-19, like the notable innovations of a cashless economy with the digitization of a well-known money transfer application known as M-Pesa, prevalent in East Africa and other similar smart phone transfer systems were being utilized throughout the entire African continent. In this advanced COVID-19 era, it has become now evident that careful and deliberate adoption of digitization is no longer a distant future: It is now. Throughout the semester, scholars from multiple disciplines will share their respective insights on the state and prognosis of the future in the digitalization era, in relation to: dimensions of the education systems, political processes, functioning of the domestic and global economy and specific business activities, healthcare provision and management, and forth.

As the war in Ukraine rages on, how is the ground shifting across Eurasia and beyond? Leading journalists and scholars covering Russia, Europe, China and the global political landscape will discuss how international relations, security, trade and economics are shifting in ways not seen since World War II.

This Arts Unplugged event will feature:

Ann Simmons, the Wall Street Journal's Moscow Bureau Chief

Mark Landler, the New York Times' London Bureau Chief

Peter Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies

Jessica Chen Weiss, associate professor of government in the College of Arts & Sciences

Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, will moderate the discussion.

Talk by Denise N. Green

In 2015 I began teaching a class at Cornell about fiber, textile, and apparel production in India, which included a winter break field trip to manufacturing facilities. Inspired by the students' transformative learning experience and the connections we created, I wanted to expand the course to include Sri Lanka. Apparel is the country's leading export, making garment manufacturing one of Sri Lanka's largest industries. I began preliminary research in January-February 2022 by visiting factories, innovation centers, educational institutions, students, faculty, garment workers, industry leaders, and domestic designers. While the COVID-19 pandemic eroded revenues and significantly reduced production capabilities, apparel manufacturing was poised for a powerful comeback in 2022 when export revenues increased by 23% in January and projections anticipated 3-4% annual growth. As Sri Lanka's economic and political crisis worsened in spring 2022 and inflation in buying markets continued, manufacturers braced for a significant reduction in orders. Organizations like the Ethical Trading Initiative, Clean Clothes Campaign, American Apparel and Footwear Association, Workers United, among others, have called upon the fashion industry to support Sri Lanka with continued orders, timely payments, and price negotiations that account for rising costs of energy, raw materials, and labor. How did Sri Lanka become an exemplar of sustainable, ethical, and innovative production? The industry grew and expanded globally in the mid-late 20th century with the World Trade Organization's Multifibre Arrangement (MFA, 1974-1994) and Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC, 1995-2004), but pivoted after elimination of the quota system by creating the Joint Apparel Association Forum (JAAF) in 2002 and their subsequent “Garments Without Guilt” campaign in 2006. With nearly 90% of manufacturers participating, the industry conveyed collective commitment to sustainable and ethical production. Using examples from my recent fieldwork trip, I will consider how these commitments articulate with the aspirations, challenges, possibilities, and realities facing Sri Lanka's garment workers and apparel manufacturers today.

Denise Nicole Green is an associate professor of fashion design and management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell where she also directs the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection. She holds a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology, a Master's of Science in textiles, and a Bachelor's degree in apparel design, which has enabled interdisciplinary inquiry into the study of fashion as both an industry and an expressive medium through which individual and collective identities are produced and represented. She co-authored the book Fashion and Cultural Studies (2022) with Dr. Susan Kaiser and has written numerous journal articles and book chapters in addition to her curatorial work, design scholarship, and documentary filmmaking.

Join the Johnson Museum of Art and Precious Okoyomon—Nigerian American poet, sculptor, and avant-garde chef—for a participatory talk exploring themes of migration, dispossession, and redress. Okoyomon’s large-scale, immersive artworks are especially concerned with the entangled fate of humans, plants, and animal species as they move from place to place across the planet. Approaching artmaking like a poet, Okoyomon mines the metaphorical associations of all manner of found objects and raw materials—from kudzu vine to lambswool—to elicit new reflections upon our complex, interconnected histories.

Okoyomon was born in England in 1993, raised in Nigeria and the United States, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This visiting artist talk is the second in an ongoing series with the campus-wide Migrations Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell, with support from the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.

Masks are suggested at the Museum and social distancing will be encouraged in the Museum's wing lecture room.