A community book read with Sumit Mandal, author of Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World and winner of the 2020 Benda Prize. This read is organized by the consortium for Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies (GETSEA).

Sumit Mandal is a historian at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He is currently doing research on Muslim shrines as inscriptions in the landscape of transregional histories of the Malay world. He is working towards a book from this research that is tentatively titled “Saints of the Southern Indian Ocean: Sacred Geographies, Popular Faith Practices, and the Politics of Islam from Jakarta to Cape Town.”

As the AAS Southeast Asia Council (SEAC) describes it: Sumit Mandal’s Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World (2018) is a powerful and important work of history, the result of prodigious archival research. Beyond its importance in challenging conventional understandings of the category ‘Arab’ in the Malay world, it suggests new ways of thinking about the project of colonial racial categorization more broadly. Mandal importantly argues that most scholarship assumes that racial categorizations deployed in postcolonial nations stemmed from colonial practices aimed at dividing populations in order to rule them. He upends this argument by breaking down what the category, Arab, meant in historical contexts prior to, during, and after Dutch colonial rule. In particular, Mandal’s argument that colonial racial categories are not ‘totalizing’ but are subject to reinterpretation and subversion, encourages the reader to think hard about the historical processes through which such racial categories come to exist, and shift over time. Working from Malay, Dutch, French, and English language sources, this is a book whose importance will center the field of Southeast Asian studies in broader conversations about creole histories and racializing area studies.

Register here:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_40g5rX84SNK4QwQSch1jbg

The Translator Interpreter Program (TIP) is facilitating an online discussion, “A Critical Exploration of Language Access and Equity with Fatema Sumar and Angelika Kraemer,” featuring Fatema Sumar ‘01, the founder of TIP and President Biden-appointed Vice President of the Department of Compact Operations at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Angelika Kraemer, the faculty advisor of TIP and Director of the Language Resource Center at Cornell. The Translator Interpreter Program is a student-run program of the Cornell University Public Service Center, providing free translation and interpretation services in a wide range of languages for the community agencies in emergency and non-emergency situations.

Our changing climate poses great challenges for humanity around the world: extreme weather events, sea level rise, flooding, drought, wildfires and more. How are countries in areas most affected by climate change responding to these and other challenges? In honor of Earth Day 2021, this special edition of Verdant Views will feature current Fellows in Cornell’s Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program, sharing stories of the challenges and choices they face in their home countries, and actions being taken in response to this global crisis. Presented in partnership with the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program and the CALS Department of Global Development.

Participating Humphrey Fellows:

Husnain Afzal, Executive Engineer (Civil) at Pakistan Water & Power Development Authority (WAPDA)

Saukira Banda, Former Communication and Knowledge Management Officer for 'Pilot Program for Climate Resilience Project' in Environmental Affairs Department, Ministry of Forestry and Natural Resources, Malawi

Natalya Minchenko, Sustainable Development Goals advisor, UNDP/UNICEF/UNFPA project on 2030 Agenda, Minsk, Belarus

Alma Perez, Agricultural Production Manager, La Paz Department, Project ACS USAID at FINTRAC, Honduras

This live webinar is free but pre-registration is required. Please register through the "Register" button on this page, or the following link: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qPWPrfsYRHuT34O4o5rCDw

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. The webinar will be recorded and available for viewing online after the live broadcast. Participants in the live presentation will have the opportunity to pose questions.

Verdant Views is a monthly webinar series hosted by Kevin Moss of Cornell Botanic Gardens. Each episode focuses on a different topic related to plants, gardens, conservation, sustainability, and the vital connections between plants and peoples around the world.

Earth Day is an international event held annually on April 22 to raise awareness and demonstrate support for environmental protection, with a major focus on climate action. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network).

This conversation with Maryam Wasif Khan is part of ICM's Spring 2021 New Books Series. Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.

Darren Byler, University of Washington, discusses the working paper "Digital Enclosure and Unfreedom in Northwest China."

The author will join for a conversation about their work. No formal presentation will be given; please read in advance. A link to the reading will be sent with the registration confirmation.

Part of the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) seminar series.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies (STS).

About the author

Darren Byler is a postdoctoral researcher in the ChinaMade project at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington in 2018. His research focuses on Uyghur dispossession, infrastructural power and "terror capitalism" in the city of Ürümchi, the capital of Chinese Central Asia (Xinjiang). He has published research articles in the Asia-Pacific Journal, Contemporary Islam, Central Asian Survey, the Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art and contributed essays to volumes on ethnography of Islam in China, transnational Chinese cinema and travel and representation. He has provided expert testimony on Uyghur human rights issues before the Canadian House of Commons and writes a regular column on these issues for SupChina. In addition, he has published Uyghur-English literary translations (with Mutellip Enwer) in Guernica and Paper Republic. He also writes and curates the digital humanities art and politics repository The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which is hosted at livingotherwise.com.

About the working paper

The author explains: "In my work I use the conceptual framing of a digital enclosure to consider the way Uyghur and Kazakh societies in Northwest China have been enveloped by a surveillance system over the past decade. I show how novel enclosures are produced and, in turn, construct new frontiers in capital accumulation and state power. The Turkic Muslim digital enclosure system gives technology companies and state authorities abilities to watch and control the movements and behavior of Muslims in increasingly intimate ways, turning them into an unfree proletariat--a docile yet productive permanent underclass."

Artwork by the artist Badiucao. Used with permission.

Journalist and translator Alice Driver is joining the Latin American Studies Program seminar series to share her work on migration, human rights, and gender equality.

Alice Driver is a writer and investigative journalist who covers immigration and labor rights. She is based in Mexico City, and she is the author of More or Less Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2015). Her journalism has been published by National Geographic, Time, CNN, and Oxford American. She has recently collaborated on migration projects with Chinese neorealist painter Liu Xiaodong, National Geographic photographer John Stanmeyer, and Noble laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Tawakkol Karman, and Rigoberta Menchú.

Currently based in Mexico City, Driver is the author of More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico (University of Arizona 2015). She received a 2017 Images and Voices of Hope Restorative Narrative Fellowship and 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellowship and also participated in the Women's Media Center Progressive Women’s Voices 2017 media and leadership training program.

Driver has received first aid training for combat and wilderness wounds through Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC) and from the DART Center and Columbia Journalism School course on Reporting Safely in Crisis Zones. She is currently partnering with Longreads Originals to produce a series of articles on migration in Central America. Buzzfeed recently included her work in "8 Visual Stories That Will Challenge Your View of the World."

This Latin American Studies Program (LASP) event is co-sponsored by the Migrations initiative.

Learn about studying Burmese at Cornell, with an opportunity to ask the instructor and current students questions!

This event is a part of Southeast Asia Language Month! To participate and compete for a $100 Amazon gift card and other prizes, follow the steps below. This competition is only for current Cornell students.
1. Download the GooseChase App
2. Enter code 3KX9D9
(or search for "Southeast Asia Language Month")
3. Complete missions and attend events to earn points

Issues in African Development Seminar Series examines critical concerns in contemporary Africa using a different theme each semester. The seminars provide a forum for participants to explore alternative perspectives and exchange ideas. They are also a focal activity for students and faculty interested in African development. In addition, prepares students for higher level courses on African economic, social and political development. The presentations are designed for students who are interested in development, Africa’s place in global studies, want to know about the peoples, cultures and societies that call Africa home, and explore development theories and alternate viewpoints on development.