Ladislaus M. Semali is a Professor Emeritus of Education of Pennsylvania State University, in the Department of Learning and Performance Systems. Academically, he specializes in adult literacy education, comparative and international education and non-Western place-based educational epistemologies. He has published extensively and with renowned sources such as International Review of Education, Journal of Social Anthropology, and Comparative Education Review. He is author of Literacy in Multimedia America (Routledge/Falmer), Postliteracy in the Age of Democracy (Austin & Winfield) and editor of What is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy with Joe Kincheloe (Garland).

Register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAkf-Gurz0sHd0WqGZGgl4wpxWqT8…

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Roger Nelson, Curator, National Gallery Singapore

Image credit: Maung Tha Din. Not Titled (Seated Woman Smoking a Cheroot). c. 1920s-1930s. Bronze on wooden base. Collection of National Gallery Singapore.

A seated woman smoking a cheroot; a man chopping wood; a woman with a parasol: these are some common subjects found in cast metal figurines known as “Pegu bronzes.” Made in Bago, Myanmar in the 1920s and 1930s and shown in British imperial “handicrafts” exhibitions, “Pegu bronzes”—like many colonial-era “crafts”—have mostly escaped scholarly attention, and rarely been considered in relation to discourses of artistic modernity. But might “Pegu bronzes” reward closer scrutiny, for art historians studying the emergence of realism in the modern art of Southeast Asia? The figurines closely mirror compositions found in contemporaneous photographs made in Myanmar, and their finely detailed and lifelike forms emerged in parallel with Western-style representational painting in that context, which is often considered a milestone in histories of modern art in the region.

What might “realism” have comprised, in 19th and early 20th-century Southeast Asia? Curators of the 1994 exhibition Realism as an Attitude emphasised the importance of Asian artists in the 1990s “[taking] a stance that indicates a desire to actively interact with and express the reality in which they live.” This attitudinal realism was positioned in contradistinction to “realism in the narrow sense of the word, which denotes a formal style or the act of copying of something.” But might we now revisit the stylistic and mimetic forms of earlier realisms in the region?

This lecture asks if “Pegu bronzes” and other examples of metalwork, woodcarving, and other “crafts” might find a place within art-historical understandings of the emergence of Western-style naturalistic representation in Southeast Asian art. Drawing on curatorial approaches to the period at National Gallery Singapore, the lecture explores various intersections, including those between media, between representations in two and three dimensions, between Buddhist statuary and colonial commerce, between portraits and “types,” and between art and craft.

Rebecca Hester, Assistant Professor, Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech will join the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies for a discussion of “The somatic-security industrial complex: theorizing the political economy of informationalized biology,” Review of International Political Economy, Vol 20, issue 1, 2020, 98-124.

This piece is co-authored with Owain D. Williams, Lecturer in International Relations, School of Politics & International Studies, University of Leeds.

Please note that the author will not give a formal presentation of their work, so it is best to read in advance. A link to the reading will be sent to you upon registration.

Please pre-register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwvceGvrzwrHNSicEtRjCZE3DAdUR….

Organizers:

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology Studies and is part of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) Reading Group Series.

About the speaker:

Rebecca Hester is an assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society and an associate director of the Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD in Politics from the University of California Santa Cruz. She was subsequently a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member in the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Dr. Hester's research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of migration, health, the body, and security. Her current research examines contemporary accounts of “biological danger” and the social, political, and scientific implications of preempting, preventing, and eradicating such danger.

Speaker: Miki Kaneda, Music, Musicology, Boston University

What can graphic musical scores tell us about sounds yet to be heard, as well as the stories that may be told about their creators and their worlds? This talk examines two exhibitions of graphic scores, both held in Tokyo in 1962. Miki Kaneda offers a historical perspective on the role of graphic scores in locating Japan as a meeting place for a transnational avant-garde.

Faculty host: Andrew Campana, Asian Studies

Reading Adultery in the Criminal Records of Late Chosŏn Korea

Jisoo Kim, George Washington University

This presentation introduces the records of criminal cases in the Simnirok (Records of Royal Reviews), a collection compiled during the reign of Chŏngjo (r. 1776-1800). This collection includes 1,112 judicial precedents related to homicide, economic crimes such as counterfeit and theft, and social crimes such as arson and gravesite dispute. The majority of 1,004 crimes are related to homicide (964 cases) and suicide (40 cases). This presentation will first explain the source and translate the few selected homicide cases related to adultery. While translating the cases, it will also discuss sex crime in the context of eighteenth-century Korea.

CCCC is a reading group for students and scholars with an interest in premodern Sinographic text.

All are welcome, at any level of experience with classical Chinese. Please email us to register and receive the log-in credentials.

At each session, one participant presents a text in classical Chinese. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, and work together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

Presentations include works of all sorts, from the earliest times to the twentieth century.

No preparation required: all texts will be distributed at the meeting.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty series

Anissa Rahadiningtyas, PhD candidate, History of Art and Visual Studies Department, Cornell University

On a scattered typed up notes for an article or a talk in English, Ahmad Sadali (1924-1987) expressed his observation on the conditions that hindered the development of seni rupa Islam or Islamic art in Indonesia. Sadali identified that the loss of Arabic and its permutation of jawi as a writing script due to the colonial education system contributed to removing Islam further from the consciousness and daily practices of the people, intellectuals, and artists in Indonesia. Tulisan Jawi or jawi script is a localized writing system derived from Arabic that circulated in many parts of the Indo-Malay Archipelago. Jawi is the evidence of the adaptability of Islam and transmutability of Arabic script, and their profound influence in the archipelago since before the fourteenth century. In this paper, I will focus on the works of four artists: Ahmad Sadali, A.D. Pirous (b. 1932), Haryadi Suadi (1939-2016), and Arahmaiani (b. 1961), who explore the textual and artistic capacity of jawi in their contemporary artistic practices since the 1970s. I argue that each of the artists’ method and conviction have the potential to decolonize not only the practice of art-making but also the transmission of knowledge by reclaiming the tradition that was severely marginalized by the Dutch colonial education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the artists’ engagement with jawi brings to the fore distinct memories and experiences as each proposes their heterogeneous reinterpretations of the notions of becoming “modern” and “Islamic.”

Mexico-U.S. migration flow is the largest sustained movement of people between any two nations. Existing work focuses on income differentials between the two countries as the main reason underlying migration. Our work shows climate change, bilateral trade, and border enforcement policies to be critical – and underappreciated – factors in guiding people’s movements.

Presenters:
Filiz Garip, Professor of Sociology
Nancy Chau, Professor, Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_XTFbNwrKT-ez3yZLjntZTg

This lecture includes presentations on the following projects:
- “On the Triggers of Hazardous Border Crossings: Evidence from the US-Mexican Border,” presented by Nancy Chau (paper coauthored with Filiz Garip and Ariel Ortiz-Bobea)
- “Human adaptation alleviates the impact of climate change on migration,” presented by Filiz Garip (paper coauthored with Julia Zhu, Nancy Chau, and Amanda Rodewald)

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"