Abstract:

Sports came to play a significant role in nation building in a number of countries – especially those newly-independent states emerging on the end of decolonising movements in the middle of the twentieth century. Jamaica was no exception. Here, the process of nation-building was one that had to confront the legacies of European colonization and enslavement. It was almost inevitable that sport would play a key role in these processes. Jamaica had intimate experience with the power of sport as a political and ideological weapon in colonial times. Cricket in particular had initially served as a tool of British cultural imperialism and was one of the main ways in which agents and agencies of this mission sought to disseminate British cultural values. It was also initially an exclusive institution characterised by significant race and class prejudices. However, cricket (and other sports) became a medium of resistance to the very ideologies it was meant to inculcate, and in so doing, had by the middle of the twentieth century come to function as an ideological weapon of an anti-colonial, creole nationalism. In post-independence Jamaica, sport increasingly featured in public policy and resources were dedicated to the promotion and development of sporting activities. This presentation seeks to examine the ways in which successive Jamaican governments have employed sport to achieve various developmental objectives; but will also look more broadly at the impact of sport on nation-building on Jamaica. It argues that while sport did indeed help to achieve a number of important objectives, we must be cognisant of ways in which this influence might be overstated as well as ways in which sport served to undermine these objectives.

Bio:

Dr Julian Cresser is Lecturer in History, and Head of the Department of History and Archaeology, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. His main research interest is sports studies – particularly, the role of sport in nation building in the Caribbean. He has authored and co-authored journal articles on the history of cricket in Jamaica and links between participation in sport and juvenile delinquency in the Caribbean. In addition, Dr Cresser has an interest in the use of digital media in the teaching and presentation of History. His courses include: Digital History, Sport in the Caribbean since 1850, and the Idea of Caribbean Nationhood. He has also taught extensively in the Department’s Heritage programmes, and has served on the board of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust. Before joining the Department, he worked as a Senior Research Fellow at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica/Jamaica Memory Bank, where his work involved archival and ethnographic research on Afro-Caribbean intangible cultural expressions. In 2019, Dr Cresser was the O’Connor Visiting Assistant Professor in Caribbean Studies at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York.

LACS Public Issues Forum

Co-sponsored by Cornell Cinema, Literatures in English and Creative Writing, History of Art and Visual Studies, Performance and Media Arts, Romance Studies, and Society of the Humanities

Roundtable with Roberto Brodsky, Denisa Jashari, Kenneth Roberts, and Camilo Trumper moderated by Raymond Craib on Chile, the Unidad Popular, and the coup d’etat of 1973.

Writer and current Faculty Adjunct at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, Roberto Brodsky is the author of six fiction novels published in Chile and Spain, along with two essay volumes, Adiós a Bolaño (2018) and The Missing House. Enrique Lihn in the 80s (2021). A professional journalist for 40 years with broad experience in magazines and newspapers, he is also the scriptwriter of major Latin American films such as Machuca (2004), El Brindis (2007), and Mi vida con Carlos (2008). His most recent book, Balas perdidas ("Lost Bullets"), released by Rialta Publishers in September 2023 in Mexico, assembles chronicle pieces and articles written over the last 30 years about the coup d’état in Chile in 1973.

Raymond Craib is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Duke UP, 2004), The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016), and most recently Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).

Denisa Jashari is Assistant Professor of Latin American history at Syracuse University. Jashari’s book, tentatively titled, “Santiago’s Urban Battleground: Space and the Production of the Working Poor,” is a social and urban history of twentieth century Santiago, Chile. Jashari’s articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, and A contracorriente. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in 2020 and was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Kenneth M. Roberts is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University. His teaching and research interests explore the politics of inequality in Latin America and beyond. His published works include Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era and Deepening Democracy: The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru. His current research explores polarization and democracy in contemporary Latin American politics.

Camilo Trumper is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), with a specialization in urban and visual culture and the cultural history of political change in Chile. His first book, Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile (The University of California Press, 2016), is a cultural history of political change in late twentieth-century Chile. Ephemeral Histories is a study of the myriad ways in which traditionally marginalized individuals claimed city spaces as a political act. Their often-fleeting forms of urban and visual practice generated new ways of acting on and thinking about the city as a space of fluid democratic debate and a stage for creative political citizenship in democracy and dictatorship. His second book project, “Writing in Dictatorship: Politics, Exile, and Archives in Chile,1973-1990,” explores the multiple practices of writing to offer new insight into the everyday experience of power and contest under Pinochet in Chile and abroad. “Writing in Dictatorship” maps the connection between distinct forms of dissent, in Chile and in exile, that were tied together by the political practice of writing, by the line of the pen. Defining writing capaciously and creatively, it explores often-clandestine, often-unspectacular forms of political organizing and association that Chilean citizens built immediately after the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. It looks, in five different chapters at multiple places and practices of writing as dissent—prison writing; schoolhouse writing; writing on the street; writing in exile; and archival writing practices.

Join Grad student writers weekly to share goals and write in community. Sessions will begin with brief goal-settings. Then, the bulk of the time will be dedicated to independent writing in community. You’ll have the opportunity to share what you accomplished with a supportive group of peers.

Extractivism haunts the planet and leaves in its path the pain and tears of people who, ironically, suffer the blessing of mineral wealth. Extractivism produces invaded territories, dispossessed communities, persecuted leaders, devastated forests, annihilated biodiversity, desiccated lagoons, poisoned rivers, undrinkable waters, and unbreathable air. Ecuador, the country with the greatest biological diversity on the planet per square meter, has also been devastated by extractivism. In this planetary penumbra, the Rights of Pacha Mama or Rights of Nature in the Andes and in Ecuador are a spark that can be fanned. Pushed by indigenous peoples, ecologists, and intellectuals, in 2008 the Constituent Assembly recognized the Pacha Mama or Mother Nature as the holder of rights, and many historic fights have followed. In this talk Yaku Pérez Guartambel will present insights from his new publication Climate Emergency and the Ecology of Hope.

Presented in Spanish with English interpretation

Yaku Pérez Guartambel is a Kichwa Kañari leader, lawyer, teacher, and author of nine books. He has led historic legal proceedings in defense of the rights of nature in the Andes and the Amazon. For this work, he was detained six times and has also been the target of kidnappings and an attempted murder. He has dedicated thirty years to ecosocial fight in Ecuador for indigenous communities’ access to water, including as president of the Confederation of Kichwa Peoples of Ecuador (ECUARUNARI) and as the leader of a social movement that impeded water privatization in Ecuador. As a political leader, he has been elected the Prefect of Azuay Province and was a presidential candidate in Ecuador in 2021 and 2023 with a post-extractivist agenda focusing on the defense of water.

North American Practices of Forced Displacement, Detention, and Humanitarian Oversight in the 1940s

Nation states abide by international humanitarian law unevenly. They misrepresent their internal operations and deceive monitoring agencies. Yet, they often feel bound to give international agents the opportunity to observe and report, thus facilitating the endeavors they evade. During the Second World War, states notoriously evaded international law to perpetrate atrocities. Even the United States and Canada, whose mistreatment of civilians never generated international alarm, obscured their domestic undertakings from an international gaze. Nevertheless, humanitarian actors gained remarkable access to sites of mass internment and displaced people across the globe. In the decades since, their reports have served as fraught documentation for survivor communities, reflecting the biases of their creators yet capturing rare moments of traumatic pasts.

This presentation investigates the engagement of the United States and Canada with international humanitarian oversight of detention during the 1940s and its legacy within survivor communities, drawing from international, national, and community archives.

Delving into one case study, this presentation examines the creation and subsequent recontextualization of humanitarian photography in survivor communities. In doing so, it reveals the making of what Cathy Schlund-Vials calls, in a different case of twentieth-century displacement, a “transnational set of amnesiac politics.” In tracking the journey of these images, this paper situates North American wartime detention within the politics of liberal internationalism and considers what their remembering and forgetting can tell us more broadly about the commemoration and representation of histories of forced displacement.

About the Speaker
Kaitlin Findlay is a doctoral student in the Cornell History Department. Her research examines forced displacement, humanitarianism, liberal internationalism, and memory in the mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. Kaitlin completed her BA in History (Honours) at McGill University and her MA Thesis at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has over seven years of experience in community-engaged and public history, including with the award-winning Landscapes of Injustice project. She has published with McGill-Queen’s University Press and The Canadian Historical Review.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Hosted by the Gender and the Security Sector Lab, the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies, and the Reppy Peace and Conflict Studies Program, The Transition Home: Key Challenges for African UN Peacekeepers Upon Return is a unique collaborative effort, bringing together qualitative and quantitative evidence from surveys and interviews in Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Zambia.

In recent years, global shifts in peacekeeping contributions have led to African countries being some of the largest contributors of peacekeeping. Yet, many of the countries lack resources and have limited funding for their state security forces. On one hand, deployment to peacekeeping missions helps provide the country’s security forces with training, new experience, and funds. On the other hand, there is less information about the challenges that these peacekeepers face upon return.

This event is based on a policy brief that explores four potential challenges for African peacekeepers after they return from operations: relationship, psycho-social, economic, and career challenges. The report finds that the main challenges for returned peacekeepers upon their return appear to be relationship and financial. Women were more likely to experience financial challenges and social stigma whereas men had more physical and mental health problems. Psychosocial, mental health, and physical problems were more prevalent in the military than the police. The report ends with a series of policy recommendations. The policy brief will be available here after the event.

Register to attend this virtual event.

About the Panelists

Dr. Sabrina Karim is an Associate Professor in the department of Government. Her research focuses on conflict and peace processes, particularly state building in the aftermath of civil war. Specifically, she studies international involvement in security assistance to post-conflict states, gender reforms in peacekeeping and domestic security sectors, and the relationship between gender and violence. She directs the Gender and the Security Sector Lab.
Dr Maggie Dwyer is a Senior Lecturer in African Studies and International Development in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. She is Co-Director of the Centre for Security Research within the University of Edinburgh and is also a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
T. Debey Sayndee is Professor / Director, Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation (KAICT), University of Liberia. He has worked for many years on the complex nexuses of conflicts in West Africa, particularly Liberia and Sierra Leone. He has also served as a consultant for the UN, the University of Wyoming, and Women’s Campaign International on peace, security, and development issues. He is a Public Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer, Radio Broadcaster, and Mediator. He has contributed to several publications, most recently, Incomplete DDRR: A Prescription for Prolonged Fragility in Liberia; Post-War SSR in Liberia; and co-published: African Truth Commissions; and Social Mobilization and the Ebola Virus Disease in Liberia.
Addison Barton is a third-year PhD student and two-time Reppy Fellow whose research focuses on practices of humanitarian restraint in armed conflict. Host
Cornell University’s Gender and the Security Sector Lab
University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies
Reppy Peace and Conflict Studies Program

Photo credit: Clair MacDougall.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research in any field or teaching in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only. The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months.

Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called "green border" between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa are lured by government propaganda promising easy passage to the European Union. Unable to cross into Europe and unable to turn back, they find themselves trapped in a rapidly escalating geopolitical stand-off. An unflinching depiction of the migrant crisis captured in stark black-and-white, this riveting film explores the intractable issue from multiple perspectives: a Syrian family fleeing ISIS caught between cruel border guards in both countries; young guards instructed to brutalize and reject the migrants; and activists who aid the refugees at great personal risk.

Thirty years after Europa Europa, three-time Oscar¨ nominee Agnieszka Holland brings a masterful eye for realism and deep compassion to this blistering critique of a humanitarian calamity that continues to unfold. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Green Border is a poignant and essential work of cinema that opens our eyes and speaks to the heart, challenging viewers to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day.

Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland will join for a Zoom Q&A with Professor Ewa Bachminska, Senior Lecturer of Polish Language in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell, following the screening on Sunday, September 15, 2024 at noon.

Green Border screens as part of our "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

"Türkiye’s Christian Sites: Seven Churches of Revelation and Holy Sites, House of Virgin Mary, Early Christian Settlements and pilgrimage" lecture with Pelin Kumbet Cagman, visiting scholar at Cornell University.

Part of the "Exploring Turkish Language and Culture" lecture series.

Dr. Pelin Kumbet is currently a visiting researcher in the department of English and a Turkish language instructor at Language Resource Center at Cornell University. She is an Associate Professor in the department of Western Languages and Literatures at Kocaeli University, Turkiye. During her Ph.D. studies at Hacettepe University, Turkiye, she conducted her doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation discusses the cruciality of enacting dynamic, evolving, and living posthuman(ist) ethics, which embodies the acknowledgment of inherent and intrinsic values of all beings through different posthuman body representations, which was published as a book titled as Critical Posthumanism: Cloned, Toxic and Cyborg Bodies in Fiction. Dr. Kumbet’s general research interests include posthuman theory and ethics, posthuman bodies, transhumanism, medical and environmental humanities, ecocriticism in particular, the intersections between posthumanism, environmental humanities, gender issues, and science fiction. Her recent publications are “Toxic Agentic Legacy in Turkish Waters: From Sacrosanct Bodies to Toxic Bodies of Water,” “Invisible Agencies: Toxic Repercussions of Chernobyl and Bhopal,” “A Posthuman Quest for Establishing Self-Image Through Nature in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves” and “Reclaiming the ethno-divided land, identity and legacy in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees.” She has also been teaching Turkish as second language and has been working on the intersections between Blue humanities, Turkish waters and trauma, eco-psychology and displacement.

Photo credit: Wilhelm Salzenberg (* 20. Januar 1803 in Münster; † 23. Oktober 1887 in Vernex-Montreux, Schweiz)Edited by Verlag von Ernst & Korn Berlin, 1854, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons