This presentation explores how female representations encountered in Western prints, Persian painting, and South Asian sculpture were re-contextualized in Mughal environments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and re-imagined in Mughal paintings. Mughal patrons and artists negotiated elements from these bodies of visual material as they explored possibilities for fashioning Mughal models of female chastity and sensuality in service of the court. In addition to adapting various stylistic techniques and symbols, this process involved locating synergies between Islamic, Timurid/Mughal, Hindu, South Asian, Christian, and European beliefs and practices. In this way, Mughal artists and their patrons cultivated links and located points of convergence between a variety of belief systems and cultures

This talk focuses on some of the key ideas of my ethnographic monograph Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Drawing on more than 24 months of ethnographic research in the Uyghur region of Northwest China and nearby Kazakhstan between 2011 and 2020, open-source and internal police documents, and extensive interviews with current and former “terrorist-workers” before their detention in 2017, interviews with their family members since detention, and in several cases post release, it considers how Muslim farmers can be turned into unfree workers under the sign of terrorism. By placing these accounts in the context of broader economic transformations in the region and considering how the rise of the “terrorist-worker” figures in scholarship of the frontiers of global economy, the article makes a broader argument about a global turn toward techno-political systems of capital accumulation and state power. Specifically, it considers the roles that dataveillance and legal frames of exclusion play in the rise of what I name terror capitalism—an ethno-racialized system of data and labor expropriation and social control that operates under the sign of the “terrorist.” It shows how such a system can generate capital by holding targeted groups in place through biometric and social surveillance, producing forms of self-discipline and unfree labor for private manufacturers.

This discussion will be moderated by Cornell faculty Eric Tagliocozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History and Esra Akcan, Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory

While Muslim societies are very diverse, a common feature is the high status of the written word, and the centrality of libraries. During our entire period, the authority of the ulamas derived from their ability to derive the law from the foundational books. On the other hand, individuals were encouraged to read, memorize, and follow the Qur’an as well as the important commentaries and fatwas. The library culture had other roots. Wealthy bibliophiles were mostly concerned with prestige and with the esthetics of calligraphy and illumination. An administrative book culture also emerged in the thirteenth century, and flourished with the Ottoman State elite. Finally, Nelly Hanna speaks of the different perspectives of the middle-class of Cairo or Damascus, once it owned its own books. In any case, each new social-cultural dynamic reinforced the central role played by public and private libraries in Islam.

Talk by Naomi Hosoda

The Arab Gulf region, composed of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have attracted the attention of international labor migration studies, as all these countries have among the highest ratio of migrant workers to local workers in the world. Gulf labor migration policies are now characterized by exclusionary citizenship laws and the kafala (sponsorship) system, which governs migrant employment and lives. Against this backdrop, I will discuss how nationals and migrants construct new relationships in the segregated socioeconomic spaces of the region. Instead of assuming segregation is disadvantageous for migrant workers, I emphasize multiple aspects and present various voices. In this way, I try to unfold the region’s segregated socioeconomic space, as well as its new forms of networking and connectedness, in order to understand how the various peoples coexist: a situation that often entails conflict and discrepancies between expectations and reality.

Co-sponsored by the East Asia Program

The speaker has changed her title and abstract (4/21/22). Below is the new abstract for the title above:

In 1905, as the Russo-Japanese War deepened and the rise of the Meiji Empire began to take hold including Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, a thousand Koreans left their homes for Yucatán, Mexico, thereby becoming the first case of Korean migration to the Americas. Without the protection of the Korean government and lured by Mexican and Japanese contractors with the false promise of wealth and comfort, these migrants were sold into indentured servitude to work in the henequen plantations of the Yucatán. One of the most recognized writers of the Korean New Wave, Kim Young-ha recuperates this slice of history that had been silenced by all the nations involved – Korea, Japan and Mexico – in his novel Black Flower (2003). In this talk, I examine Kim’s rewriting of history that situates the 1905 Korean migration to Mexico not as a minor episode in Korean national history, but rather as a central event in the transpacific chain that links Korea and Mexico within contemporary global history. The novel’s reconfiguration of global/national history is hinged on two interlinked narrative technologies: first, Black Flower utilizes Japanese imperialism as a ready-made trope to not only construct the idea of a putative Korean nation, but also to directly connect Korean independence to the Mexican revolution; second, the novel ineluctably legitimizes the current discourse of South Korea as a multicultural trans-nation by situating the birth of the Korean modern nation in Latin America and highlighting the mobility and heterogeneity of (Korean) national borders­. I contend that the current historical moment in which South Korea is imagined as a global trans-nation and sub-empire calls for a certain recuperation of this transpacific history which places the Korean Mexican indentured worker as the modern subject of the South Korean nation.

Co-Sponsor: Cornell University Public Health Program

This presentation draws from a chapter in Alex Nading's book in progress, Non-Traditional Causes: Kidney Disease, Climate Change, and Life Support in Nicaragua’s Sugar Plantation Zone. In it, he follows the treatment trajectories of former sugarcane plantation workers in Nicaragua who have been consigned to hemodialysis due to a novel condition called Chronic Kidney Disease of Non-Traditional Causes (CKDnt). In order to access dialysis treatment, these patients rely on the material and financial support of their former employers at the plantation company--a company whose labor and environmental policies they blame for the onset of CKDnt. The talk describes how, joined together in a loose activist alliance, patients and their families confront the ambivalence of end-of-life care. While many ethnographic studies have noted that dialysis can sever patients from the lives they had known prior to treatment, in the case Professor Nading describes, the treatment operates in a way that pulls patients more deeply into the social and economic fabric of the plantation.

Alex Nading is a medical and environmental anthropologist. His research, mostly focused on Nicaragua, has examined transnational campaigns against dengue fever, bacterial disease, and chronic kidney disease, as well as grassroots movements to address these issues. In all his work, he uses ethnographic methods to bring the theoretical concerns of medical anthropology together with those of critical environmental studies and science and technology studies. His teaching includes courses on the anthropology of global health, anthropological methods, and international development. He is also the editor of the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly and is currently working on a book entitled Non-Traditional Causes: Kidney Disease, Climate Change, and Life Support in Nicaragua’s Sugar Plantation Zone from which his talk will be derived.

Keyword: Public Health

Talk by Michele Friedner (Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago)

The Indian state relates to the category of disability through the distribution of aids and appliances such as hearing aids, canes, and wheelchairs that are ‘make in India,’ as examples. In 2014, the state modernized its distribution program and started providing cochlear implants to children living below the poverty line. While aspirations exist to create and manufacture an indigenous Indian cochlear implant, currently the state purchases implants from four multinational corporations. This cochlear implant program reveals new directions for the state in regards to engaging with disability and introduces novel assemblages of welfare, medicine, rehabilitation, and multinational capital. In these assemblages, new relationships form between the state, multinational corporations, and families with deaf children. These relationships stretch beyond the one-time disability camp or the one-off surgery and have resulted in opportunities for government administrators, surgeons, and rehabilitation professionals to reinvent themselves in relation to the seemingly miraculous power of cochlear implants while also producing complex dependencies for families with deaf children.

Michele Friedner is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. A medical anthropologist, she conducts research on deafness and disability in India and is the author of Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (Rutgers, 2015) and the forthcoming book Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India (2022, University of Minnesota Press).

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Science and Technology Studies

Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) will be available at this event.

This talk by Mey-Yen Moriuchi (LaSalle University) explores the history of Chinese migration to Cuba, which began with the coolie trade in the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1847 and 1874, approximately 150,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba under termed contracts to fulfill a labor shortage on the sugarcane plantations. They suffered harsh conditions and were treated severely.

Chinese coolies were generally viewed as dutiful and submissive, and their voices have largely been confined to the margins of literature and history. However, the 19th-century testimonies and illustrations of Chinese coolies denounce the savagery and cruelty of the Spanish overseers, while simultaneously revealing that the coolies were not passive victims. The coolies demonstrated agency, courage, and resistance in the act of migrating, in their words, and rebellions.

Coolie labor played a major role in reshaping Cuba’s sugar economy and its existing systems of production. In addition, the amplified presence of the Chinese in Cuba challenged existing paradigms of race and nation. Cuban society was no longer black and white. The growing Chinese population forced a reconsideration of this traditional binary vision of society and, in the formation of a new Chinese-Cuban identity, complicated notions of what constituted cubanidad.

This event is co-sponsored by the Einaudi Center's East Asia Program.

Talk by Ravinder Kaur (South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen)

In this talk, I unpack the affective-material entanglements of the moment of “opening up” of the Indian economy. The great transformation of the nation-form into commodity-form – Brand India – entailed more than structural adjustments and free-trade formula prescribed by the global financial institutions. It took shape upon the tantalizing promise of the great spectacle of capitalist growth stories unfolding across the old third-world. Drawing upon my recent work Brand New Nation, I trace the affective and bureaucratic designs of the dreamworlds of New India, the hopes and anxieties, contradictions and speculations, and the production of an authentic Hindu civilizational identity in the circuits of twenty-first-century global economy.

Ravinder Kaur is a historian of contemporary India. She is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies and the Director of the Centre of Global South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her core research focuses on the processes of capitalist transformations in twenty-first-century India. This is the subject of her most recent book Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India (Stanford University Press, 2020). This work was selected as the “Financial Times Best Book of the Year” in 2020 and longlisted for the “Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize” in 2021. She is also the author of Since 1947: Partition Narratives among the Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2007; 2nd edition, 2018).

Co-sponsored by the History Department