The tender longing for the stars, an impulse familiar to many, has unfolded alongside another trajectory in modernity: from Captain Cook’s pursuit of Venus to NASA’s Space-Age invocation of Christopher Columbus, tracing a historical course intertwined with imperial expansion. The cultural imagination of space exploration, arguably most concentrated in the genre of science fiction (sf), is also haunted by what Gerry Canavan calls a “bad [colonial] conscience.” While scholars such as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., John Rieder, and Jessica Langer have examined the colonial and postcolonial operations within the genre, others, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Grace Dillon, Lou Cornum, and Taryne Jade Taylor, have turned to minoritarian SF traditions—Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and Latinx futurism—that foreground speculative geographies illuminating decolonial concepts of temporality and subjectivity.

Engaging with this constellation of scholarship on colonial speculation and alternative futuring in the Anglophone sphere, this presentation turns to early revolutionary Cuba, whose anti-colonial, socialist, and Cold War conditions offer a unique historical, linguistic, and cultural vantage point for speculative imagination. Specifically, I focus on Ángel Arango’s 1964 short story “El cosmonauta” (“The Cosmonaut”)—an early exemplar of Cuban science fiction—and ask: How does Arango’s playful engagement with Indigenous narratives, Caribbean postcolonial writing, and European colonial travelogues reconfigure the genre’s inherited traditions? In what ways does it invite us to rethink our relation to history and the human subject? In other words, what alternative visions might it bring to complicate prevalent capitalist techno-utopian discourses of space exploration?

Lu Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Studies. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Hispanophone Caribbean and Mexican literature, visual culture, and intellectual traditions. She is currently developing a project on alternative perspectives of space exploration in Latin American speculative imagination, from the 1950s to the present. This project emphasizes non-Western ideas of temporality, technology, ecology, and the human, while also highlighting how space ambitions create complex dynamics among postcolonial modernity, decolonization, and racialization.

This talk examines how to ensure Indigenous Peoples are meaningfully involved in jurisdictional REDD+ initiatives, with their rights safeguarded and their perspectives actively shaping decisions. It highlights practical approaches for designing benefit-sharing systems, implementing safeguards, and establishing governance models that reflect both climate goals and Indigenous priorities. Drawing on lessons from diverse regions, it showcases successful collaborations among governments, Indigenous organizations, and civil society that have advanced equitable, transparent, and high-integrity climate finance. Attendees will gain concrete strategies and real-world examples to strengthen Indigenous participation in REDD+, fostering trust, resilience, and lasting outcomes for both climate and biodiversity.

Edgar Godoy is a senior environmental strategist and trained biologist with over 15 years of experience in sustainable forest governance, climate change mitigation, and jurisdictional REDD+ implementation. He holds a degree in biology and has built his career through leadership roles in international NGOs, government collaborations, and multilateral platforms. He is a former Director for Rainforest Alliance Latin America and has provided technical support to Mexico’s National Protected Areas Commission (CONANP).
Edgar specializes in forging lasting partnerships with subnational governments, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities to design and scale high-integrity forest carbon finance solutions. With deep expertise in policy frameworks, safeguards, and benefit-sharing mechanisms, he ensures technical assistance aligns with country priorities while fostering inclusive climate action.
His leadership has been pivotal in advancing carbon market readiness, facilitating ERPA negotiations, and engaging diverse stakeholders across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. By connecting policy, science, and local priorities, Edgar brings strategic insight and diplomatic skill to the fight against deforestation, helping shape equitable, lasting climate solutions.

View the art, media, and writing of Cornell students and staff who share the ways that migration shapes their lives in this Mann Library exhibit. The exhibit will showcase winning submissions from the Migrations Program's creative writing and art competition and an interactive digital space where you can share your own migration story.

At the exhibit's launch, keynote speaker Cathy Linh Che will read poetry and join us for a Q&A session, and Pedro Molina will present his work.

About the Speakers

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books), and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Pedro X. Molina is an award-winning Nicaraguan political cartoonist known for his sharp critiques of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. Forced into exile in 2018 after government reprisals against independent media, he now lives and works in the United States, creating cartoons for outlets including Confidencial, Counterpoint, the Washington Post, and Politico. A 2021–22 Institute of International Education Artist Protection Fund fellow at Cornell University and current visiting critic with the Einaudi Center’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, Molina has also been a visiting scholar at Ithaca College and the Brunell Visiting Scholar at Cayuga Community College. His work has earned major international honors, including the 2021 Gabo Award for Excellence and the 2023 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent.

Host and Sponsors

The Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, is hosting this event.

This event is supported by the Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative
Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program

Come learn more about this spring opportunity with spring break travel, developed in partnership with Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), National University of Singapore (NUS), and as part of the Jeb E. Brooks School’s Global Policy Exchange Lab. This collaborative online international learning (COIL) and community-based global learning (CBGL) course allows a unique exchange as highlighted in our overview of the Spring 2024 program. The program invites Cornell students to explore the complexities of education policy and practice in the United States and Ecuador with students and faculty from USFQ and NUS as well as with teachers, administrators, and policy makers in both contexts.

Come learn more about this spring opportunity with spring break travel, developed in partnership with Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), National University of Singapore (NUS), and as part of the Jeb E. Brooks School’s Global Policy Exchange Lab. This collaborative online international learning (COIL) and community-based global learning (CBGL) course allows a unique exchange as highlighted in our overview of the Spring 2024 program. The program invites Cornell students to explore the complexities of education policy and practice in the United States and Ecuador with students and faculty from USFQ and NUS as well as with teachers, administrators, and policy makers in both contexts.

This talk explores an unconventional form in which knowledge on Mexico's "war on drug trafficking" is produced and circulates, and the kind of symptomatic reading that it performs. By analyzing two such instances—a journalist's testimony on her experience of drug-war violence before a federal government committee and a protest of relatives of the war's victims—I examine how this form of shadow knowledge operates through simultaneous concealment and revelation, illuminating key contradictions at the core of the drug war—the large-scale militarized combat of drug trafficking organizations that began in 2006. While this conflict's structuring logic follows the principles of the US security state—including the designation of an external enemy that threatens the national community and must be fought militarily—its unfolding within the Mexican territory reveals the impossibility of such a designation. Instead, as I will explore in this talk, those discursive articulations outline the symptoms of a new kind of state formation that has emerged in Mexico's drug war: an entity that makes itself felt through the traces of its extralegal violence. Those traces, I will argue, point to two kinds of indistinction: first, that between the state and its criminal enemy—el narco—and second, that between such an enemy and the national community the state was supposed to protect.

Agnes Mondragón-Celis is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. Her research explores the forms of knowledge production and circulation that emerge in contexts of generalized violence and opacity. She analyzes the psychosocial and performative effects of these forms of mediation, including how they sustain or challenge political authority. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Anthropology News.

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program provides fully funded immersive summer programs for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to learn languages of strategic importance to the United States’ national security, economic prosperity, and engagement with the world. Each summer, over 500 American students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States spend approximately eight weeks studying one of a dozen languages either overseas or virtually. Participants gain the equivalent of one year of language study, as the CLS Program maximizes language and cultural instruction in an intensive environment.

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.