Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture series

Vinh Phu Pham, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, Cornell University

As a field of study, Vietnamese Francophone literature is a historically specific phenomenon that does not fit neatly within the broader framework of postcolonial literatures. On a pragmatic level, it is a limited literary traditionthat continues to diminish each day due to the waning significance of the French language within Vietnam, withless than 1% of the population still fluent, and among the diasporic Vietnamese communities abroad. Because of this trend, readings of this corpus tended to have primarily been framed within the nostalgic mode, or as a literature that once was, rather than something that is still alive.The unintended consequence of these readings is a premature foreclosure on whatever other possible readings there might be. Confronted with the reality that this tradition might soon evaporate, one of my central concerns has to do with the question of what it means to work within an archive where the production of the cultural objects themselves must reconcile with the very possibility oftheir own effacement? Or more concretely, what will happen to Vietnamese Francophone if there is no Vietnamese audience to receive it?My goal, therefore, is not to predict the future vitality of this body of work, since such predictions always fall short, but to pose a hypothetical of whether one might be able to read some of these novels against the grain of unlikely futurity, as dictated by secondary criticism. Inmy reading of three novels by Marguerite Duras, Pham Duy Khiem, and Kim Lefèvre, I propose that it is indeed possible to locate a yet-to-come future within these works, or a conscious effort of the authors in moving towards something other, ratherthan a singular longing for the colonial past. Paying close attention to their representation of romance and historical transmission, I suggest that these works were intended to be read for many future generations, even when that future appears bleak.

This paper records the rising age at marriage for women and men in India and discusses the possible contextual influences on these trends – government policy, economic and social development, aggressive social advocacy, and a marriage squeeze – and then goes on to discuss the potential implications of each of these influences. It cautions against the complacent assumption in international and domestic advocacy that rises in the age at marriage reflect only positive changes in underlying circumstances. Accordingly, it also cautions against the complacent assumption that rises in the age at marriage can have only positive consequences for the health and social welfare of society. These mixed conclusions mean that later marriage cannot be treated as an unequivocal indicator of progress on the development agendas of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Alaka M Basu is a professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University and a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation in Washington, DC. For six years, she was also the Director of the South Asia Program at Cornell University. She has taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the Harvard School of Public Health and Georgetown University. Her primary research publications are in the areas of reproductive health and family planning, gender and development, child health and mortality, the interface of fiction and demographic facts, and the politics of population policy. She is a regular contributor to national newspapers in India. She served/serves on the governing boards of the Population Association of America (PAA), the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP), the Population Council in New York and the Population Reference Bureau in Washington DC.. She was/is the chair of the IUSSP Scientific Committee on Anthropological Demography, a member of the Committees on Reproductive Health and on Population Projections of the National Research Council at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a member of the Lancet-Guttmacher Commission on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. She is currently on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Population and Development Review and Asian Population Studies. She is the series editor of the Policy Briefs produced by the Sociology of Development section of the American Sociological Association.

When Madame Vice President, Kamala Harris, ran for president of the United States, news coverage focused on her unusual ethno-racial roots. Her Indian mother was from Chennai and her father, who is Black, was born in Jamaica. Some journalists also questioned whether progressive voters would be put-off by Harris’s past as a prosecutor and her reputation as something of a cautious centrist. The history of South Asian America offers a way to connect Harris’s family history to her politics—and to rethink what it means that Harris is now the Vice President of the United States. An important facet of her South Asian identity has been largely ignored: the fact that her mixed-race heritage connects Harris to the long history of South Asian Americans who never fit neatly in any one racial box. Put differently, it’s not just her mother who links Harris to the South Asian community; equally important is the fact that she has had to find her way outside conventional American racial categories. This talk will explore the racial borders of South Asian America by juxtaposing the life and career of Kamala Harris with the lives and activism of a range of other figures, including another famous Kamala: the feminist and anticolonial activist, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Through such comparisons, we will explore together histories of race, migration, and social struggle that continue to have profound resonance—not only in the United States but also in contemporary South Asia.

Nico Slate is Professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines the history of struggles against racism, imperialism, and caste oppression in the United States and South Asia. He is the author of four books: Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2012), The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind (University of Washington Press, 2019), and Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2019).

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

Oscar A. Pérez is an assistant professor of Spanish language and Hispanic studies at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York. He holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a master’s in the history of science and scientific communication from the University of Valencia, Spain. His research focuses on science, technology, and the environment in Hispanic literature and film. His work has appeared in critical volumes and various academic journals, including Hispania, Hispanic Issues Online, Imagofagia, Ibérica, and Film International. He is currently working on two book projects. The first one examines the relationship between authoritarianism and medicine in the Spanish-speaking world. The second one looks at contemporary narratives of disease in rural environments.

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