The Southeast Asia Program presents in coordination with Cornell Cinema, "Song Lang".

About the Film:

Set against the lush, golden world of 1980s Saigon, Leon Le’s debut feature film follows a blossoming relationship between debt collector Dung (Lien Binh Phat) and folk opera singer Linh Phung (played by Vietnamese pop star Isaac). In a chance encounter while collecting payment from a local troupe, Dung is unexpectedly drawn to Linh Phung, captivated by the singer’s passion for cải lương, also known as reformed theatre. As their paths intertwine, initial misunderstandings fade, and Dung’s stoic veneer begins to melt, revealing a deeper, unspoken yearning. Beneath the curtains of a fading, once-glorious art form, Song Lang reveals the unfolding desires of two men, the stage that frames them, and the stillness that lingers between their glances.

"Song Lang" refers to a wooden, tempo-keeping instrument used in Vietnamese folk opera, cải lương, also referred to as reformed theatre. In Sino-Vietnamese, the term "Song Lang" can also mean "two gentlemen" or "two wolves."

Directed by Vietnamese American filmmaker Leon Le, Song Lang offers a nostalgic ode to Vietnamese folk opera and a contemplative reflection on quiet intimacy and unlikely bonds.

About the Series:

Join us for a two-part screening series offering tender glimpses into queerness centered on East and Southeast Asian contexts. Seen through the eyes of diasporic directors—Cambodian British Hong Khaou and Vietnamese American Leon Le—Lilting and Song Lang weave delicate, lyrical narratives to contemplate unexpected connections. Both debut feature films speak not only to the happenstance of those who enter our lives but also to the ephemerality of these relationships.

This series celebrates queer Asian filmmakers who employ cinematic language to traverse difficult spaces, reminding us of the playful gestures that films can offer to resituate our understanding of presence and absence, of memory and healing, and of intimacy and unspoken emotions.

Featuring:
Lilting (2014, dir. Hong Khaou)
Wednesday, March 5, at 6pm
Song Lang (2018, dir. Leon Le)
Wednesday, March 12, at 6pm

Sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Southeast Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and co-presented by QGrads, Cornell’s LGBTQIA2S+ Graduate Student Association.

Free Admission! Part of our “Love, Loss, and Longing” series. Courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures. In Vietnamese with English subtitles.

East Asia Program Lecture Series Presents "Studying China in the Absence of Access: Relearning a Lost Art"

Speaker: Andrew Mertha, Director of the SAIS China Research Center, George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Description: As our access to Chinese data sources becomes increasingly constrained, many China scholars outside China have been scrambling to find new and innovative ways to mitigate these trends. One promising avenue is dusting off the tools Sinologists utilized from the 1960s through the 1970s, when it was impossible to contemplate the access that many of us have been able to take for granted, but which allowed these scholars to get so many things about China right. What are these skills—the analytical tools and the strategies to deploy them—and how might we be able to adapt them to the current research climate (and the foreseeable future)? This is the subject of the SAIS China Research Center’s first publication, featuring four eminent Pekingologists – Joe Fewsmith, Tom Fingar, Alice Miller, and Fred Tiewes. I present our findings here.

Refreshments will be provided.

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.

Where next for Palestine’s heritage and cultural scene? In this talk I will combine several strands of my research on these topics extending them into a consideration of future scenarios and potentialities. I will begin with the current moment: the utter destruction of Gaza’s heritage in the context of genocide. I compare it with other forms of destruction that have targeted Palestinian heritage and culture, exploring their relation to different types and moments of colonialism. Palestinians have responded to these threats of cultural and material erasure by self-organizing into networks of grassroots institutions taking care of culture and the built environment in resourceful, imaginative ways. I have argued that such creative institutionalism has fostered positive change and enabled societal resilience. I have also suggested that Palestine may serve as a model for cultural self-organizing elsewhere and for reimagining more just institutions by civil societies in contexts of state oppression and failure. In light of recent developments, does this idea still hold and how? Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Trained in socio-cultural anthropology, Chiara is an internationally significant voice in debates over the geopolitical trajectories of contemporary culture. Her wide-ranging research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of post- and decoloniality, globalization and state transformation. In particular, it concerns the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in cultural institutions and museums, and how artists and activists are contesting, claiming and reinventing these institutions. Against that backdrop, Chiara’s work shows how countercultures, arts practices, and decolonial struggles can drive change within public institutions and cultural discourses especially around heritage and identity. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014; European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in many international research projects, including leading now a major Dutch Research Council-funded project, named “Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation”. Sponsors: Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative, with support from Near Eastern Studies and Cornell Institute of Archaeology & Material Sciences.

East Asia Program presents "Lilting."

About the film: Junn, played by the beloved late Cheng Pei-Pei, is an elderly Cambodian Chinese widow still grappling with the death of her son, Kai. Her life is further complicated by Richard (Ben Whishaw), Kai’s boyfriend, seeking to build a more intimate connection despite their language barriers. With the help of a translator, the two uneasily embark on a journey of mutual understanding, transforming the prickly relationship into tethered solace. Through its non-linear narrative, Lilting delivers a tremendously insightful study of loss and coping, of fractured memories and graceful acceptance. Hong Khaou’s Lilting reminds us that grief can be a delicate bridge, a thin lifeline that transcends language and cultural barriers.

Free Admission! Part of our “Love, Loss, and Longing” series. Courtesy of Strand Releasing. In English and Mandarin (with subtitles).

About the screening series:

Join us for a two-part screening series offering tender glimpses into queerness centered on East and Southeast Asian contexts. Seen through the eyes of diasporic directors—Cambodian British Hong Khaou and Vietnamese American Leon Le—Lilting and Song Lang weave delicate, lyrical narratives to contemplate unexpected connections. Both debut feature films speak not only to the happenstance of those who enter our lives but also to the ephemerality of these relationships.

This series celebrates queer Asian filmmakers who employ cinematic language to traverse difficult spaces, reminding us of the playful gestures that films can offer to resituate our understanding of presence and absence, of memory and healing, and of intimacy and unspoken emotions.
Featuring:
Lilting (2014, dir. Hong Khaou)
Wednesday, March 5, at 6pm
Song Lang (2018, dir. Leon Le)
Wednesday, March 12, at 6pm

Sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Southeast Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and co-presented by QGrads, Cornell’s LGBTQIA2S+ Graduate Student Association.
"Love, Loss, and Longing" is curated by Vince Ha, a Fulbright visiting researcher for the Southeast Asia Program at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

CRICKET AND THE IDEA OF INDIA

‘Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’, it has famously been said. Today, the Indian cricket team is a powerful national symbol, a unifying force in a country riven by conflicts. But India was represented by a cricket team long before it became an independent nation.

My lecture tells the extraordinary story of how the ‘idea of India’ emerged on the cricket field in the high noon of empire. Conceived by an unlikely coalition of colonial and local elites, it took twelve years and three failed attempts before a representative Indian cricket team made its debut on the playing fields of imperial Britain in 1911.

This historic tour, which took place against the backdrop of revolutionary protest in the Edwardian era, featured an improbable cast of characters. The team’s young captain was Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, the embattled ruler of Patiala. The other cricketers were chosen on the basis of their religious identity. Remarkably, for the day, two of the players belonged to a community denigrated as ‘Untouchable’.

Over the course of a blazing Coronation summer, these long-forgotten Indian heroes participated in a collective enterprise that epitomizes how sport— and above all cricket—helped fashion the imagined communities of both empire and nation.