A Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS) Public Issues Forum funded by the US Department of Education's Title VI UISFL grant.

As the wife of Jamaica's former Prime Minister, Beverley Manley Duncan conversed with global players such as Fidel Castro, Winnie Mandela, and Pierre Trudeau. In this no-stone-unturned documentary, Beverley forces herself to confront her complicated past. What was it like to be a Black woman seated at the table? Does she play a pivotal or supporting role? As a Black nationalist, she wore large Afros and head turbans in corridors of power where they were typically not welcomed. She is controversial in her outspoken views of women's sexuality, infidelity, and domestic abuse. She is a powerful voice with wisdom to teach the ages. She is a critical link to where we have come from and a seer of where we might be going. The film Beverley Manley Uncensored lies at the complex intersection of race, class, gender, politics, and global power in a post-colonial society. Join us for a riveting film screening in McGraw Hall and live discussion with Beverley Manley and the filmmaker Joelle Simone Powe, both of whom will join us virtually.

Beverley Manley Duncan is the former first lady of Jamaica’s most famous Prime Minister, Michael Manley. As a champion for Women’s Rights and Black Nationalism, Mrs. Manley implemented changes that radically transformed Jamaican society in the 1970s by founding the Jamaican Women’s Movement, introducing paid maternity leave and equal pay for equal work statutes. She is a keen eyewitness of the most tumultuous decade in Jamaican political history. In 2012, she published her autobiography, the Manley Memoirs, to great discussion and acclaim. The book created shock waves across the Caribbean and diaspora. The four-part docu-series Beverley Manley Uncensored, on Beverley’s life and work, garnered half a million views and sparked a national debate with its intimate interviews and historical reflections.

"The entire country has been waiting to hear from the former wife of late Prime Minister Michael Manley. Beverley Manley Duncan has much to say about sex, politics, classism, imperialism, and political violence"

-The Jamaica Gleaner 2022

Joelle Simone Powe is an accomplished documentary film director, writer, and researcher from Jamaica. Her work explores controversial personalities and topics in Caribbean history and culture. Her debut documentary, "Out There Without Fear," explores Jamaica’s Dancehall dance. Her subsequent work, "Beverley Manley Uncensored," a four-part docu-series on the former First Lady of Jamaica, created a national storm with its exploration of a very vexing time in Jamaican history. Joelle is the founder of Out There Without Fear Dialogues, an educational platform that illuminates Caribbean stories through film, performance, and discussion with regional voices. Her events showcase diverse points of view and challenge academics and students to participate in a robust discussion on issues of race, culture, gender, politics, and international relations.

Please see the link to RSVP

https://www.outtherewithoutfear.org/event-details-registration/beverley…

The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) gives students multiple ways to engage with Southeast Asia. Affiliate with our program to be informed of all SEAP events and activities. Undergraduates who minor in Southeast Asian Studies are advised by SEAP Program Faculty advisors who collaborate with them to construct a course of study based upon their area of interest. SEAP also runs the CU in Cambodia program for students interested in international travel.

Can’t attend? Contact seap@cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.

This conference brings together scholars undertaking new research on questions of democratic resistance and sources of resilience in response to global evidence of democratic backsliding.

We will work together to analyze domestic and international factors, including institutions, civil society, political parties, voters, media, and foreign policy. In an era marked by threats to democracy from within nominally democratic institutions, by elected officials, and with varying degrees of support from the voting public, we seek to understand the interactive nature of democratic threats and resistance strategies.

As democracy can be conceived of as a continued contestation over rights, responsibilities, and rules, we aim to use this critical historical moment of contestation to expand our comparative conceptions of democratic practice, strategies of endurance and deepening or weakening of democratic regimes, and the social, economic, technological, and institutional factors that contribute to varied outcomes worldwide.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the conference is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience.

Register to attend the conference

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March 22 Panels

Panel 1: Concepts and Measurement: Democracy 2.0
This panel will push beyond the measurement debates to address conceptual and ontological questions about how to measure democracy, and definitional questions at the heart of democracy’s weaknesses and promise in contemporary practice. Does the practice of a minimal definition of democracy contribute to public disenchantment, and is such practice durable?

Panel 2: Resilience Factors, Resistance Strategies, and Opposition Tactics
This panel will examine the social and economic bases of democratic resiliency, as well as various strategies, actors, and institutions that can fortify and even enhance democratic practice.

Panel 3: Stabilizing Forces? Historical Patterns and Contemporary Challenges
This panel will dissect the factors that have historically stabilized advanced industrial democracies—including party systems, modes of political representation, and patterns of capitalist development-- and their potential applicability to contemporary patterns of democratic backsliding and resistance.

March 23 Panel

Panel 4: International Actors and Regional Organizations
This panel will explore the ways in which authoritarian or democratic leaders and regimes exert influence on the regime types of other countries and the influence of regional organizations on participating countries’ regime trajectories.

Learn about Cornell's new Global Grand Challenge: The Future and how you can propose a research or curricular project.

Global Cornell is opening what will be The Future’s only call for proposals. Interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers from all Cornell colleges, schools, and departments are encouraged to identify a research issue of global importance and plan a path to a successful alternative future.

Teams may apply for research project support up to $150,000 per year for two years. Stand-alone curricular projects are eligible for up to $20,000 per year for two years.

Deadline for letters of intent to apply (1 page): February 26, 2024Deadline for full proposals (5–7 pages): May 6, 2024Register here to join the virtual info session. The session will include an opportunity to ask questions and network with others interested in finding collaborators.

The information session slides and Q&A will be posted online after the event.

Associate Professor Aliyah Khan from the University of Michigan will give a talk titled "Diasporic Devotions: The Indo-Caribbean Islamic Qasida and Gendered Performance" on Thursday, March 21.

The Indo-Caribbean Islamic qasida is a diasporic devotional song that propagates Indian subcontinental Islamic ritual practices and preserves the use of Urdu in the post-indentureship Caribbean through performances of religious authenticity. But it is simultaneously creolized in transliteration and translation, in part through Muslim women’s participation in public worship. This talk explores the gendered and racialized performances, songbook and vinyl record dissemination, and transliterated creolization of Urdu qasida poetic, devotional praise songs brought to Trinidad and Guyana by Indian Muslim indentured laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this lecture, Khan focuses on the evolution of women’s public devotional and competitive performances of qasidas in the Indo-Caribbean Muslim context of sectarian Sunni and Ahmadi differences, local engagement with global revivalist principles of bid’a (innovation), and the controversial emergence of women’s performance categories in new qasida competitions supported by nation-states and commercial interests. Indo-Caribbean women’s qasida performances, Khan argues, lie at the intersection of Indo-Caribbean postcolonial political identity—which is historically and continually defined by Indian women’s culturally “proper” dress, sexuality, and public behavior in visible opposition to Afro-Caribbean women—and worldwide Muslim debates and tensions over global and local iterations of Islam.

Dr. Aliyah Khan is an associate professor in the University of Michigan (U-M) Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of English Language and Literature. She is also the Director of the U-M Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC). Dr. Khan specializes in postcolonial Caribbean literature and the contemporary literature of the Muslim and Islamic worlds, with a particular focus on the intersections of race, gender, and Islam in the hemispheric Americas, including in immigrant communities in North America. She has also presented and taught widely in the field of Muslim representation in comics and graphic novel. She is on the editorial board of Bloombsbury Critical Guides in Comics Studies.

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press and University of the West Indies Press 2020), Dr. Khan’s first book, is the first academic monograph on the literature, history, and music of Caribbean Islam, focusing on Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, and on enslaved Muslim West Africans, indentured Indian colonial sugar plantation laborers, and their Muslim Caribbean descendants. Far from Mecca garnered honorable mention in the 2020-2021 Modern Language Association Prize for a first book. Dr. Khan is currently conducting research for a literary and musical book project on Caribbean hurricanes and climate change, including religious responses, reparations debates, and other community-oriented environmental mitigation strategies.

This lecture is part of the 'Religions on the Move' lecture series sponsored by the Religious Studies Program which is supported by a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. Additional support from the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, Society for the Humanities, Comparative Muslim Societies Program, and South Asia Program.

The Einaudi Center’s Foreign Language Introduction Program (FLIP) is heading into local communities to teach children about world cultures and languages. FLIP aims to connect our diverse Cornell community to K-12 students at local schools, libraries and community centers in Upstate New York. Cornell volunteer teachers will have the opportunity to share short introductory lessons on the foreign languages and cultures they are passionate about. Volunteer teachers should have at least an intermediate knowledge of their chosen language.

Register to attend either the Feb. 1 orientation in person or the Feb. 5 orientation over Zoom.

The Institute for African Development (IAD) offers 6-8 week summer internships that let you undertake challenging practical fieldwork in Ghana, Zambia, or Liberia. If you're a sophomore or junior, join this info session to find out how you can apply. Applications for Global Internships are due February 1.

Register for the information session.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.