A Conversation with Nathan Thrall Abed Salama's world is turned upside down when he hears that his five-year-old son's school bus has collided with a semitrailer. Frantically, he tries to reach the site. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy explores one man's journey in navigating the bureaucratic, governmental and military obstacles for Palestinians in Jerusalem as he searches for his young son. Along the way, Salama encounters a wide cast of characters whose personal and political histories become interwoven with his own. Jerusalem based author Nathan Thrall will read from his book and be in conversation with Professor Mostafa Minawi. Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. He is also the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Guardian, London Review of Books, and New York Review of Books and been translated into more than two dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Part of the Palestinian Studies Speaker Series *** 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, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Government, History, Jewish Studies, Institute for Comparative Modernities, and Society for the Humanities.

Institute for African Development weekly seminar series examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists.

Examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists. Students write weekly memos about the talks. Graduate students (CRP 6770/GDEV 6770) facilitate one seminar question period.

The IAD seminar series examines a broad range of critical concerns in contemporary Africa including food production, human resource development, migration, urbanization, environmental resource management, economic growth, and policy guidance. The weekly presentations are made by invited specialists.

Rebecca Upton, Professor of Global Public and Environmental Health, Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University, is a medical anthropologist and global health scholar with research focused in southern Africa on issues of gender, migration, reproductive health and the implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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

Chile ’73: Fifty Years Later
Machuca follows the lives, over the course of a school year in 1972/73, of two young schoolboys in Santiago, Chile. One is from an upper-middle-class family; the other from a working-class family. Both attend the private boys school St. Patrick’s, whose principal seeks reduce the class segregation typical to Chile at the time and to follow the lead of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. The story follows the boys’ friendship and its relationship to the politics of the time, including the growing tensions in the city around Allende’s government and the right-wing reaction that would eventually result in a coup d’etat on September 11, 1973. Based on a screenplay written by Roberto Brodsky and director Andrés Wood whose own experiences mirror those of the protagonists, Machuca was released to wide acclaim in 2004. For the 20th anniversary of its release, this screening will include a talkback after the film with writer Roberto Brodsky.

Additional details can be found on the Cornell Cinema site.

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.