Co-sponsored by: History of Art Department

With its striking stonework, dramatically sited buildings, and impressive terraces cascading down steep mountainsides, Inca architecture has fascinated visitors to the Andes for centuries. Yet, this lithic architecture was only one part of the complex built environment of the Inca. In this talk, Nair explores how issues of permanence and ephemerality were crucial to Inca building practices and reveal the critical role gender played in creating and giving meaning to place.

Stella Nair’s scholarship focuses on the built environment of indigenous communities in the Americas. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, Nair has conducted fieldwork in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, with ongoing projects in the South Central Andes. Nair’s book, At Home with the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero (University of Texas Press, 2015), examines the sophisticated ways in which the Inca manipulated space and architecture to impose their authority. She has also published (with Jean-Pierre Protzen), The Stones of Tiahuanaco: A Study of Architecture and Construction (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2013), which explores one of the world’s most artful and sophisticated carving traditions.

Nair has received numerous research grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Association, the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art), Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the John Carter Brown Library. More recently, Nair was awarded a Rome Prize by the American Academy of Rome and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Currently, Nair directs the Andean Laboratory and the Architecture laboratory at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Talk by Dr. Lalitha Gopalan

Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India provides a sustained engagement with contemporary Indian feature films from outside the mainstream, including Aaranaya Kaandam, I.D., Kaul, Chauthi Koot, Cosmic Sex, and Gaali Beeja, to undercut the dominance of Bollywood-focused film studies. Gopalan assembles films from Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Trivandrum, in addition to independent productions in Bombay cinema, as a way of privileging understudied works that deserve critical attention. The book uses close readings of films and a deep investigation of film style to draw attention to the advent of digital technologies while remaining fully cognizant of ‘the digital’ as a cryptic formulation for considering the sea change in the global circulation of film and finance. This dual focus on both the techno-material conditions of Indian cinema and the film narrative offers a fulsome picture of changing narratives and shifting genres and styles. The book presentation will include a sequence of clips from a few select films considered in the book.

Lalitha Gopalan is an associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, Contemporary World Cinemas, Indian Cinemas, Genre Films, and Experimental Film and Video. Essays and books written by her include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; Orient Blackswan 2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), and Bombay (London: BFI Modern Classics, 2005); and the edited volume The Cinema of India (London: Wallflower Press, 2010). Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices across different locations globally. She has published essays in journals including Screen, Journal of Moving Image, Film Quarterly, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, and many landmark anthologies. She has been a recipient of several grants including a Senior Fellowship from the Polish Institute of Advanced Study in Warsaw (PIAST); Provost’s Author’s Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin; Tagore Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India; Senior Long-Term Fellowship, American Institute of Indian Studies; and Fulbright Hays-Nehru Fellowship. Long interested in curatorial practices her recent co-curated projects with Anuj Vaidya include Cruel Cinema: New Directions in Tamil Cinema (2011-12) and Other Species, Other Times: New Video Art from India’ (2015-16). Lalitha Gopalan currently serves on the editorial board of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. She has served on several film festival juries and is currently on the advisory board of the 3rd Film Festival, San Francisco.

Ming-sho Ho (Sociology, National Taiwan University)

Taiwan's vibrant democracy nowadays defied the geopolitical challenges imposed by a century of Japanese colonialism, cold-war anti-communist dictatorship, and China's irredentism. This lecture will analyze the island nation's pursuit of autonomy and democracy, with special attention to the role of student mobilization. "Student" was a category created in the colonial modernization, as the Japanese modernized the educational structure and expanded the youthful population receptive to political radicalism. After the flourishing of anti-colonial struggles in the 1920s, the postwar Chinese Nationalist regime encountered student mobilization in the 1947 February 28 Incident and the subsequent clandestine insurgency. The early-1970s witnessed the rise of the nationalistic Diaoyutai movement and its spillover to prodemocracy and social service streams. The lifting of martial law in 1987 gave a mighty impetus to the student movement, culminating in the 1990 Wild Lily Movement. After a long hibernation, the student movement made a comeback in the 2008 Wild Strawberry Movement and the 2014 Sunflower Movement, with the protest target shifting to China. His lecture will review the century-long student movement history and examine its changing ideologies, strategies, and impacts.

Faculty host: Eli Friedman (Sociology, Department of Comparative International Labor Relations, Cornell)
Co-sponsored by The Levinson China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) of the East Asia Program welcomes Simona Segre-Reinach (Fashion Studies, University of Bologna, Italy) as part of our semester-long theme of Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China with faculty host, Peidong Sun (History, Cornell)

Some of the questions that guest speakers will investigate include: How do we define politics from the dimension of fashion? What was a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance? And how do we define and interpret the human condition in China under Mao's rule (1949-1976)? What was human resilience in the face of absolute power?

Simona Segre-Reinach's talk is titled, "Sino-Italian Encounters in Global Fashion: 20 Years of Sino-Italian Collaborations."

The talk focuses on the evolution of fashion relations between Italy and China in a unique period - from the late nineties of the 20th century to the second decade of the 21st century – which signals a change in the concept and the practices of Italian fashion on the one hand and the emerging of Chinese fashion withing a global setting on the other.

The CCCI lecture series aims to expose the broad campus community to issues and scholarship of contemporary China.

We thank our co-sponsors:

Asian American Pacific Studies Program | Asian Studies | College of Human Ecology | Cornell Society for the Humanities | Feminist, Gender & Sexuality StudiesDepartment of History | Department of International & Comparative Labor Relations | Department of History | The Levinson China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) of the East Asia Program welcomes Deborah Davis (Sociology, Yale University)
as part of our semester-long theme of Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China with faculty host, Peidong Sun (History, Cornell)

Some of the questions that guest speakers will investigate include: How do we define politics from the dimension of fashion? What was a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance? And how do we define and interpret the human condition in China under Mao's rule (1949-1976)? What was human resilience in the face of absolute power?

Deborah Davis's talk is titled, "Sexual Revolutions and the Future of the Institution of Marriage."

Drawing on census data, documentaries, life histories, and a decade of fieldwork, the lecture considers the future of marriage and sexual intimacy in contemporary China where the one-child policy, massive migration out of villages, and multiplying connections to global youth cultures have transformed the legal, demographic, and cultural supports for marriage.

The CCCI lecture series aims to expose the broad campus community to issues and scholarship of contemporary China.

We thank our co-sponsors:

Asian American Pacific Studies Program | Asian Studies | College of Human Ecology | Cornell Society for the Humanities | Feminist, Gender & Sexuality StudiesDepartment of History | Department of International & Comparative Labor Relations | Department of History | The Levinson China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) of the East Asia Program welcomes Antonia Finnane (History, University of Melbourne) as part of our semester-long theme of Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China with faculty host, Peidong Sun (History, Cornell)

Some of the questions that guest speakers will investigate include: How do we define politics from the dimension of fashion? What was a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance? And how do we define and interpret the human condition in China under Mao's rule (1949-1976)? What was human resilience in the face of absolute power?

Antonia Finnane's talk is titled, "Patterns for the People in Communist China."

When the People’s Republic of China was founded, new clothing protocols for state employees resulted in a general change in everyday dress. This was consistent with historical precedent: when the dynasty changed, the clothing was altered. But who made the new clothes and how were they made? Clothing in this period is often discussed in terms such as variety, agency, and consumption, contradicting assumptions of general conformity under communism; yet if we look at how clothes were made, we can see how conformity was instilled.

The CCCI lecture series aims to expose the broad campus community to issues and scholarship of contemporary China.

We thank our co-sponsors:

Asian American Studies Program | Asian Studies | College of Human Ecology | Cornell Society for the Humanities | Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies | Department of International & Comparative Labor Relations | Department of History | The Levinson China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program