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.

The Migrations Forum is an interdisciplinary works-in-progress series for Cornell migrations scholars, bringing together graduate students and faculty across disciplines to share ongoing research.

In this session, Rachel Beatty Riedl, Director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, and professor in the Department of Government, will present.

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Feature documentary follows Multi Grammy Award winners Arturo O’Farrill and Kabir Sehgal, as they prepare to record a live album at the U.S.-Mexico border wall. The project is inspired by the annual Fandango Fronterizo Festival, which unites people on both sides of the Tijuana-San Diego border. This festival features son jarocho, a 300-year-old folk music tradition. Before recording, festival organizer, Jorge Francisco Castillo, takes O’Farrill and Sehgal on a tour of Veracruz, Mexico, where this musical mixture of indigenous, Spanish, and African traditions originated. As they travel, they meet legendary son jarocho musicians such as Patricio Hidalgo, Fernando Guadarrama, Ramón Gutiérrez, Wendy Cao Romero, Tacho Utrera, Andrés Vega, Martha Vega, Yaratczé Hidalgo Sandoval — and recruit many of these artists for the upcoming festival. Their travels cumulate with the annual celebration, promoting peace and celebrating unity. From executive producers, Quincy Jones, Andrew Young, Carlos Santana, the film introduces the beautiful music of the region through intimate interviews and captivating concert footage. Directed by Varda Bar-Kar.

Website for film, with images: http://fandangowall.com/film/

Co-Sponsored by: Latin American Studies Program, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell Cinema, and the Migrations Initiative

In this presentation, Harris Khalique will trace the evolution of resistance poetry in Urdu from the times of Jaffer Zatalli to the present day. He will also look at the wider multilingual literary landscape of Pakistan and the role played by poetry to challenge oppression in the country's political history. He will explore the troubled relationship between art and power and how poets have challenged authority over centuries, giving a voice to the voiceless, the marginalized, and the invisible. He will also speak about his own understanding and personal journey as a contemporary poet within the rich tradition of verse in South Asia.

Harris Khalique is a leading Pakistani poet and author in Urdu and English with nine collections of verse, two books of non-fiction and several hundred articles and columns on international development, human rights, history, culture and literature behind him. He is a recipient of the Presidential Pride of Performance Award and UBL Literary Excellence Award in Pakistan and a University of Iowa Honorary Fellow in Writing. His work has been translated into several languages and anthologized internationally.

with a panel discussion featuring filmmaker Varda Bar-Kar and others on Tuesday, April 27 at 1pm

Ithaca Premiere>2020 > USA > Directed by Varda Bar-Kar
An exuberant documentary that follows masterful son jarocho (a 300-year-old folk music rooted in the land that combines African, Indigenous and Spanish traditions) musicians from Veracruz, Mexico to the US-Mexico border where they join renowned New York Maestro Arturo O'Farrill and his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra for a transformational music & dance festival, Fandango Fronterizo, taking place on both sides of the border. The event resulted in an album, a book and this documentary, directed by Cornell alumna Varda Bar-Kar '82. Subtitled. Cosponsored by the Latin American Studies Program. More at fandangowall.com/
1 hr 32 min

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first play date.
Reservations can be made here:
https://cinema.cornell.edu/virtual-cinema-order-form

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Professor Vázquez Enríquez writes at the intersection of the environmental humanities and the fields of border and migration studies. Her first book project theorizes the concept of border biomes to think about the mutual entanglement between human and nonhuman entities in relation to border settings and migration flows in the Americas. In her work, she examines questions of ecopolitics in transnational settings, the relationships between migrants and border communities with border ecologies, and queries regarding the different forms of environmental racism faced by immigrants.

Emily Celeste Vazquez Enriquez holds a licenciatura in Hispanic literature from the Autonomous University of Chihuahua, Mexico, an M.A. in Spanish with specialization in Latin American literature from the University of Texas at El Paso, and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University. Focused on the fields of border and migration studies, in her research she analyzes the social and discursive intersections between speculation and environment. Particularly, she is interested in studying speculative border fiction depicting the built and natural environments of the Guatemala-Mexico and Mexico-U.S. borderlands.

Co-Sponsored by: Latin American Studies Program, Latina/o Studies Program, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell Cinema, and the Migrations Initiative

Film Overview:

Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. The meditative pace patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds."The film is in Arabic, Norwegian, and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 64 min.

Streaming details and more information

Panelists:

Rachel Bezner Kerr, Professor of Global Development, Cornell University. She does transdisciplinary research on social, health, environmental and political dimensions of agriculture in Africa. Major themes include agroecology, climate change adaptation, gender and social inequity, food and nutrition security. She has published over 60 scientific articles, in journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment. She is a Coordinating Lead Author for the ‘food chapter’ for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change upcoming report on climate change impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation. She also co-authored a report on agroecology for the United Nations Committee for World Food Security.

Johanna Sellman, Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from UT Austin and at OSU she researches and teaches in the fields of modern Arabic literature, migration, translation, and Arab diasporic theatre. Her current book project Speculative Belongings: 21st Century Arabic Literature of Migration in Europe analyzesthe transformations of Arabic migration literature in an era of mobility, displacement, and globalization.

The moderators of the event are:

Amr Leheta, PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University working on modern Egyptian history, with a focus on the production of territory in the Sinai PeninsulaEleanor Paynter, postdoctoral associate in Migrations with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, focused on displacement in the Mediterranean

WILD RELATIVES - Trailer from KLE on Vimeo.

CCCI welcomes Gerald Roche, Senior Research Fellow, Politics, LaTrobe University to speak on Tibet, China, and Settler Colonialism. Tibet, China, and Settler Colonialism He states:

The term settler colonialism is increasingly being used to describe the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and its so-called ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans and Uyghurs. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of settler colonialism as both a framework for scholarly analysis and real-world practice of domination. I will also explore how this term is being applied to the PRC, with reference to Tibet, and discuss how describing the Tibetan situation as settler-colonial differs from other approaches to the Tibet issue. As a way of illustrating this approach, I will discuss urbanization in Tibet as a technique of settler colonialism, particularly the relationship between urbanization and migration.

As a witness to the famine caused by the British in India, Partition and the bloody aftermath, the futile East-West Pakistan relationship, the language movement, and the inevitable Liberation War, Muzharul Islam was not contained by the typical “postcolonial" hangover and neither was he an advocate of the “regional”. Islam saw “modernity” as a “politics” of nation-building and was therefore able to hold three otherwise opposed positions, without any conflict with each other: Marxist politics, the progressive attitude of the west, and the need for a strong a cultural identity. His architecture not only laid the foundation of modern architecture in the region but also set on to voice a perception of “modernity” that would fuse a solidarity of the thinkers, artist, writers and even politicians of his time. “An Unchartered Modernity” is journey of the works of Muzharul Islam, seen beyond the typical “gaze” of modern architecture. Muzharul Islam is considered one of the greatest architects of the Indian subcontinent and his work till date remains not only as a source for understanding “modernity” in Bengal, but also to look beyond the confinement of “regionalism” and charters a path in architecture where architecture is able to recalibrate its role.

Dr Nurur Rahman Khan is a partner of the renowned architectural practice of Tanya Karim N R Khan and Associates. He graduated from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, and completed his Masters from the same institution with the honor of Ahsanur Rahman Gold Medal. He went on to do this Doctoral Degree at IUAV University of Venice. He is an educator who has taught and lectured in many Universities and Seminars and currently a Professor at Bangladesh University and adjunct faculty of Stamford University Dhaka, and visiting faculty at North South University. He also was a Masters studio guide at IUAV. He is a scholar on Muzharul Islam, Louis I Kahn’s work in the subcontinent and the critique of Modern Architecture in the region. He is the author of The Assembly Building, a book published on the occasion of the birth centennial of Louis I Kahn, and Muzharul Islam: Selected Drawings, the first book to be published on Muzharul Islam. .

Ithaca Premiere>2018 > Germany/Lebanon/Norway > Directed by Jumana Manna
Forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian civil war, an international agricultural research center must begin the laborious process of replanting its seed collection from the back-up bank located beneath the Arctic permafrost in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The film captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. In Arabic, Norwegian & English. Subtitled. Cosponsored by Cornell's Migrations Initiative and the Einaudi Center. More at www.jumanamanna.com/Wild-Relatives
1 hr 5 min

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first play date.
Reservations can be made here:
https://cinema.cornell.edu/virtual-cinema-order-form

WILD RELATIVES - Trailer from KLE on Vimeo.