East Asia Program Korean Studies Speaker Series presents "Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War"

Speaker: Suzy Kim, Professor of Korean History, Rutgers University

Description: While social movements may appear to have receded in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism (much like the upsurge of authoritarianisms today), the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.

Speaker Bio: Suzy Kim is a historian and author of the prize-winning book Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell 2013). She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick. Her latest book Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell 2023) was completed with the support of the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Talk by Alan Mikhail (Chace Family Professor of History, Yale University)

At the turn of the seventeenth century, a Dutch privateer is captured by Muslim pirates and taken to Morocco. To win his freedom, he converts to Islam and begins plying the waters off the Atlantic coast for prizes and booty. He marries a Muslim woman, and they have a son they name Anthony. Anthony enters the family business, raiding ships traveling in and out of the Mediterranean. He ends up in Amsterdam after one of his adventures and there marries a German barmaid and sometimes sex worker named Grietje. They travel to New Netherland, a recent Dutch acquisition, a place that in a few decades will be known as New York. This is the standard—and seductive—story of New Netherland’s purported single Muslim resident, Anthony the Turk, as he is usually known. As with so many good stories, this one is more myth than fact. This talk traces the life of Anthony—as best we can know it—from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam and then New Netherland to question many of the accepted tenets of his biography. In so doing, it points to the place of Islam in the early modern world and interrogates several conventional narratives about colonial America and the Atlantic world.

Alan Mikhail is the author of five books and editor of another. His work has helped to establish the field of Middle East environmental history, positioned the Ottoman Empire at the center of global early modern history, and creatively scrutinized the place of the archive in the making of past and present. He is currently working on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America. His most recent book, My Egypt Archive, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. His previous book God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and was named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Publishers Weekly, and Glamour. Before that, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History received the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History won the Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association. Both it and The Animal in Ottoman Egypt won Yale’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Mikhail’s articles in the American Historical Review, Environmental History, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies received prizes as well. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time.

Maritime movement has been essential to the current moment of capitalism, marked by the optimization of supply chains. As seaports continue to scale up tremendously, however, blockages, delays, and congestion persist and even multiply, complicating popular accounts of private capital unleashing an increasingly frictionless world. This article reports from research with logistics professionals in Mersin, Turkey—host to a privatized port operated by Singaporean state-held corporation PSA since 2007. Port advocates explain the recent growth in the port’s trade volume with the trope of efficiency increase under privatization. And yet, all around Mersin, talk about congestion in cargo movement will not stop. As parties disagree over whether congestion is a humanmade problem fixable by efficiency measures, or a near-inevitable reality of maritime trade beyond anyone’s immediate control, congestion becomes the terrain of politics—an exercise in designating objects of public governance. Through congestion conversations, many reflect on how wealth from maritime trade should flow—which frictions stand in the way of more prosperity and a more equitable distribution. Anchoring ourselves in a port city, we may be able to observe where new fault lines of politics have opened up across the frictional sites of contemporary supply-chain capitalism.

Canay Özden-Schilling is an anthropologist of capitalism, technology, and infrastructure, with past and ongoing research projects on markets of electricity and global port logistics. Broadly, she is interested in the scientific and technological work cultures that create and disseminate the economic formations with which we live. Her first book, The Current Economy: Electricity Markets and Techno-Economics (Stanford University Press, 2021), is an ethnography of the electric grid in the United States in the age of competitive markets and smart grids. Her current book-length project explores maritime shipping, as seen from the port cities of Mersin (Turkey) and Singapore.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative.

Keynote address of the 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference.

This talk, drawing upon years of fieldwork in Malaysia and South India has two main aims: First, in questioning the mobility and translatability of biomedical interventions given cultural conceptions of self, spirit, and wellness, I ask to what extent cultural difference really matters, as some have argued for South and Southeast Asia? Second, I query the extent to which mobility, modernity, and madness are inextricably linked, problematizing the very construction of inside and outside forces as sometimes naturalized by anthropologists, healers, and clinicians when writing on mental health, particularly when concerning spirit possession, that most “traditional” of afflictions. This binary, in turn, has effaced the complex entanglements of difference and difference-making, the heterodox and power-laden values that posit binaries by those powerful and vulnerable alike, albeit with different stakes. I argue that mobility and immobility within symbolic and semantic registers also matters, along with geographic and social mobility.

Andrew C. Willford is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University. His latest book, The Future of Bangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Difference in a Global City (University of Hawaii, 2018) examines the politics of language, religion, identity, and belonging in Bangalore, India. His previous research focused on forms of Tamil and Hindu displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia.

The conference schedule is available here.

More details are also available on the conference website here.

A full packet with information about all papers being presented is available here.

How is Southeast Asia animated and made to move? Who crosses boundaries, who stays still, and what jams, messes, conscriptions, and inscriptions are we bound to?

Resisting both dreams of frictionless passage and fantasies of fixed origins, the theme of the 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference waves in reflections on mobility and its constraints. We await explorations of that which is trans (-national, -Pacific, -imperial, -gressive) or in trans (-ition, -mission, -lation). We welcome interrogations on that which is mobile yet clandestine, unintended, or interrupted. What kinetic energies are released by diasporas in seeds, chemicals, finances, and tastes? What constitutes the motion in activist, insurgent, protest, or resistance movements, and who moves against the movers? What disturbed temporalities, what uncertain spatialities, what contingent choreographies are produced by the travel of soldiers, pollutants, scientists, viruses, and images of young hippos in Thai zoos?

Moo Deng and we invite submissions which agitate stagnant pools of nationality and syncopate staid rhythms of history. Viewing the academy itself as a site of stupor, we also welcome scholarship which unsettles the heavy dust of area studies.

The 27th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held on March 7-9, 2025 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York.

Please direct any questions to seapgatty@cornell.edu