The displacement of populations due to climate change forecasts an unprecedented phenomenon in human history. Neither international law nor nations are prepared to face up to this challenge in a way that would secure refugee’s human rights or their appropriate resettlement. This panel brings together different academic disciplines to bear on the question of rehabilitation and resettlement as a form of reparation to current and future climate refugees. How is it possible to think of restitutions to climate refugees by acknowledging the accountability of the first industrializing countries of the Global North in imposing this displacement on the peoples of the Global South? The intention is to start a conversation with scholars working in the areas of migration, transitional justice, art, architecture, and environmental humanities on the possibility of a just response to the displacement of climate refugees.

Speakers

Ashley Dawson | City University of New YorkAnne Mc Clintock | Princeton UniversityBronwyn Leebaw | University of California, RiversideAnooradha Iyer Siddiqi | Barnard College, Columbia UniversityBilly Fleming | University of PennsylvaniaModerated by Esra Akcan | Cornell University

The panel is sponsored by the IES of Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. It is organized as part of IES’ Migration Series for its AY 2020-21 theme Repair and Reparations. You may find information about the past events including their video recordings here: https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/institute-european-studies/events/….

2019 > France > Directed by Agnès Varda
With Agnès Varda, Sandrine Bonnaire, Herve Chandes
The final film from the late, beloved Agnès Varda is a characteristically playful, profound, and personal summation of the director's own brilliant career. Suffused with the people, places, and things she loved...this wonderfully idiosyncratic work of imaginative autobiography is a warmly human, touchingly bittersweet parting gift from one of cinema's most luminous talents. In French. Subtitled. More at janusfilms.com/films/1944
2 hrs

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

Georgina J. Whittingham (B.A. Queens College, M.A. Stanford University, Ph.D. Rutgers University) is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the State University of New York at Oswego. She is the author of the book Gilberto Owen y la crisis del lenguage poético (Gilberto Owen and the Crisis of Poetic Language) published by Mexico's Autonomous State University Press and has published book chapters and articles on Hispanic theatre, poetry and narrative in texts issued by academic publishing houses and journals such as Iberoamericana/ Vervuert/Verlag, KARPA, Latin American Theatre Review, Romance Language Annual, Texto Crítico, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, and Studies in Modern and Classical Languages. Her recent research centers on image and text in contemporary Mexican Literature.

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

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which art became political through interactions with left-wing activism during the 1940s, and the afterlives of such interactions in post-independence India. Using an archive of artists and artist collectives working in Calcutta from these decades, Sanjukta Sunderason argues that artists became political not only as reporters, organizers and cadre of India's Communist Party, or socialist fellow travelers, but through shifting modes of political participations and dissociations. Unmooring questions of Indian modernism from its hitherto dominant harnesses to national or global affiliations, Sunderason activates, instead, distinctly locational histories that refract transnational currents. She analyzes largely unknown and dispersed archives—drawings, diaries, posters, periodicals, and pamphlets, alongside paintings and prints—and insists that art as archive is foundational to understanding modern art's socialist affiliations during India's long decolonization. By bringing together expanding fields of South Asian art, global modernisms, and Third World cultures, Partisan Aesthetics generates a new narrative that combines political history of Indian modernism, social history of postcolonial cultural criticism, and intellectual history of decolonization.

This event is co-sponsored by the Columbia University South Asia Institute.

Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her first academic monograph, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (2020), approaches film history as an ecology of material practice and practitioners. In her new research she is developing a media history of indenture and South-South migrations, spanning photography, communications infrastructures, and film traffic. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and has published in journals such as Film History and Feminist Media Histories.

Iftikhar Dadi is Associate Professor and Chair of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art, Director of the South Asia Program, and Board Member of the Institute for Comparative Modernities. He researches art from a global and transnational perspective, with emphasis on questions of methodology and intellectual history.

Dwaipayan Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Banerjee's first monograph Enduring Cancer: Life, Death and Diagnosis in Delhi presents the efforts of the urban poor in Delhi to carve out a livable life with cancer, as they negotiate an over-extended health system struggling to respond to the disease. He has also co-authored Hematologies: The Political Life of Blood in India with Jacob Copeman. Banerjee's current research—Decolonizing Science: Towards a Cosmopolitics of Art, Physics and Computing in 1950s India—tracks scientific and aesthetic internationalisms in early postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta.

Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian of 20th century aesthetics, working with the interfaces of visual art and political thought. She is interested in particular in the ways in which art reflects and reframes struggles, imaginations, and dialogues around 20th-century decolonization. Her first book, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (2020) studied left-wing aesthetics in dialogue with formations of modern art in late-colonial and early postcolonial India. She is currently working on two book projects: a co-edited volume on the aesthetics of the postcolonial left in South Asia (with Lotte Hoek, University of Edinburgh); and a monograph on ideas/forms of the transnational in the art of decolonial liberation movements. Sunderason lives and works in the Netherlands, where she is Assistant Professor in the department of History of Art, University of Amsterdam.

Spanish colonial accounts of the former Inka Empire chart a vast political landscape of diverse ethnic polities that were differentiated by language, dress, and custom. The ethno-territorial maps derived from these accounts have significantly shaped how archaeologists describe and classify stylistic variation in cultural practices. Specifically, archaeologists have come to view cranial modification, the intentional reshaping of the head during infancy, as a quintessentially ethnic emblem that marked one “kind of people” as distinct from another. This approach unwittingly adopts a view from the outside and above—outside because it makes an exotic practice legible through the Western concept of ethnicity; above because it reinscribes categories of difference historically politicized by the state. Shifting the focus from ethnic symbol to embodied subject, my research attempts an archaeological reconstruction of cranial modification as it was experienced by those who practiced it. Through a richly contextualized case study integrating historical documentation, archaeological evidence, and biocultural data from human skeletal remains, I show how head shaping practices intersected gender, kinship, and status identities and contributed to emerging social inequalities in the era before Inka imperial expansion (1000 – 1450 CE). Such diversity in lived experience is masked by ethno-territorial models that present the ethnic group as a homogenous unit. In their place, indigenous Andean understandings of personhood provide a better account of how social difference operated on the ground and became naturalized in the body.

Matthew Velasco is an anthropological bioarchaeologist who studies ancient populations of the Peruvian Andes through the analysis of their skeletal remains. His research explores the emergence of novel ethnic identities and cultural traditions during the era preceding and encompassing Inka imperial expansion in the 15th century. To explore how these dynamic social transformations impacted the lived experience of the body and its treatment at death, he analyzes and interprets indicators of social identity, biological relatedness, diet, and health status written on the human skeleton.

His teaching spans the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, covering topics such as mortuary practice, human skeletal anatomy, forensic anthropology, and human evolution. He is currently developing undergraduate courses and graduate seminars on bioarchaeology, the archaeology of death and dying, and the embodiment of inequality.

This panel will explore proposals in the early post-Soviet period to honor the memory of, and perhaps provide reparations to, the victims of Stalinist repression. They were replaced by official government efforts to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation and even rewrite the history of World War II. Organizations such as Memorial, formed to maintain the memory of Stalin’s crimes, have been declared “foreign agents” and obliged to curb their activities. This event brings together an interdisciplinary panel of experts to discuss the initiatives and missed opportunities in post-Soviet reparations.

Speakers:

Ivan Kurilla | European University at St. PetersburgNina Tumarkin | Wellesley CollegeEgle Rindzevičiūtė| University LondonNikolay Epplee | Independent Researcher

Moderated by Matthew Evangelista | Cornell University

The panel is sponsored by the IES of Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. It is organized as part of the IES Migration Series for its AY 2020-21 theme Repair and Reparations. You may find information about the past events including their video recordings here: https://einaudi.cornell.edu/programs/institute-european-studies/events/….

Ithaca Premiere>2004 > Hong Kong > Directed by Wong Kar Wai
With Chang Chen, Gong Li
Originally conceived for the omnibus film Eros, this film - presented in this retrospective for the first time in its extended cut - tells the tale of Zhang, a shy tailor's assistant enraptured by a mysterious client, Miss Hua. A hypnotic tale of obsession, repression, and class divisions, The Hand finds Wong Kar Wai continuing to transition from the frenetic, energized style of his earlier films into a register that is lush with romantic grandeur. In Mandarin. Subtitled. Cosponsored with the East Asia Program.
56 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

Film Overview

The documentary film The River and the Wall follows five friends on an immersive adventure through the unknown wilds of the Texas borderlands as they travel 1200 miles from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico on horses, mountain bikes, and canoes. Conservation filmmaker Ben Masters realizes the urgency of documenting the last remaining wilderness in Texas as the threat of new border wall construction looms ahead. Masters recruits NatGeo Explorer Filipe DeAndrade, ornithologist Heather Mackey, river guide Austin Alvarado, and conservationist Jay Kleberg to join him on the two-and-a-half-month journey down 1,200 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. They set out to document the borderlands and explore the potential impacts of a wall on the natural environment, but as the wilderness gives way to the more populated and heavily trafficked Lower Rio Grande Valley, they come face-to-face with the human side of the immigration debate and enter uncharted emotional waters. The film is in English, with occasional Spanish subtitled in English. Running time: 1 hr 37 min. Streaming details and more information.

Panelists:

Heather Mackey '10, cast member and ecologist. Heather completed a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. She has worked as a field biologist and conducted conservation research in a variety of remote locations including Kodiak Island, Alaska and the Galapagos Islands, as well as the Australian rainforest where she contributed to research on the behavior of the Satin Bowerbird. It wasn’t until she began her MS research at California State University Los Angeles that she discovered the wonderment of West Texas. Through her two seasons on the Rio Grande researching the impact of riparian restoration on the bird and butterfly communities she’s developed a deep appreciation for the wildlife and the people of West Texas.

Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is past president of the international Latin American Studies Association. She specializes in contemporary narrative and performance from the Spanish-speaking world (including the United States), gender studies, comparative border studies, and cultural theory. Her most recent books include Mexican Public Intellectuals (with Stuart Day), South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America (with Anindita Banerjee) and The Scholar as Human (with Anna Sims Bartel). She has a longstanding collaboration with Teatrotaller, the Cornell Latino/a theater troupe.

Sergio Garcia-Rios, Assistant Professor of Government and Latina/o Studies, Cornell University. Sergio was born and raised in Durango, México, "but I consider El Paso, TX my second home, a fronterizo by choice." His research investigates the formation and transformation of Latino identities as well as the political implications of these transformations. Other academic interests include issues related to Latinos and the Voting Rights Act, border issues and border research, and the politics of Mexico.

Panel Moderator: John W. Kennedy, PhD Candidate in Romance Studies

Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell Cinema, Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge (part of Global Cornell), and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

2019 > USA > Directed by Ben Masters
With Heather Mackey '10, Ben Masters, Filipe Deandrade, Austin Alvarado, Jay Kleberg
This spectacularly photographed documentary follows five friends on an immersive adventure through the unknown wilds of the Texas borderlands as they travel 1200 miles from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico on horses, mountain bikes, and canoes. They set out to document the borderlands and explore the potential impacts of a border wall on the natural environment, but as the wilderness gives way to the more populated and heavily trafficked areas, they come face-to-face with the human side of the immigration debate. One of the adventurers is Heather Mackey, who earned her BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell 2010. She has worked as a field biologist and done conservation research, and spent two seasons on the Rio Grande researching the impact of riparian restoration on bird and butterfly communities. Cosponsored by Cornell's Migrations Initiative and the Einaudi Center. More at theriverandthewall.com
1 hr 49 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

1997 > Hong Kong > Directed by Wong Kar Wai
With Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Leslie Cheung
Wong Kar Wai deals with emotional entrapment in this film that won him the Best Director award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Taking as its subject two gay lovers from Hong Kong spending the last few months of British rule away from home -- in Buenos Aires, Argentina - the film is characteristic of the director, with visuals that grab hold and never let go, and a soundtrack -- a mixture of Astor Piazzola, Frank Zappa and the Turtles -- that is undoubtedly one of the most expressive in years. In Mandarin, Cantonese & Spanish. Subtitled. Cosponsored with the East Asia Program.
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