Postcolonial discourse has called into question the historic Western Enlightenment by demonstrating its links to violent colonialism, chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and persistent institutional and cultural racism.

Sir Hilary Beckles suggests that the growing global reparatory justice movement—particularly as it emanates from the higher education sector—may present the best potential for an authentic 21st-century Enlightenment. Universities are now deeply researching their role, functions, and legacies within the Atlantic slave complex and exploring where these discursive discoveries, as crimes against humanity, will lead—back into the future or forward against the past.

Join the lecture live in the Rhodes-Rawlings Auditorium in Klarman Hall! In-person attendees have the chance to enchange ideas with Beckles during a Q&A session following the lecture. Or join the lecture virtually by registering at eCornell.

About the Speaker

Sir Hilary Beckles, eighth vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies, is a distinguished academic, international thought leader, United Nations committee official, and global public activist in the field of social justice and minority empowerment.

He received his higher education in the United Kingdom and is professor of economic history. He has lectured extensively in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He has published over 100 peer reviewed essays in scholarly journals and over 13 books on subjects ranging from Atlantic and Caribbean History, to gender relations in the Caribbean, sport development, and popular culture.

Beckles is president of Universities Caribbean, chair of the Caribbean Examinations Council, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, and advisor on sustainable development to former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. He was knighted by the government of Barbados. He has received numerous honorary doctorates from around the world and recently received the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace and Freedom Award.

Hosts and Sponsors

Beckles' lecture and campus visit are part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies' Distinguished Speaker series and ongoing work on Inequalities, Identities, and Justice. The lecture is the closing event in the 60th anniversary Public Issues Forum series of the Einaudi Center's Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program.

The event is funded in part by the A.D. White Professor-At-Large Program, the Migrations initiative, and a LACS Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The annual International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell), and Cornell's Language Resource Center.

Natural disasters and the dire effects of climate change cause massive population displacements and lead to some of the most intractable political and humanitarian challenges seen today. And yet, under current U.S. law, there is no such thing as a climate refugee.

To address today’s realities, U.S. migration policies need to change, argues María Cristina García in a live Chats in the Stacks talk about her book State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (UNC Press, 2022). The book offers a critical history of U.S. policy on migration in the Global South, with a focus on Central America and the Caribbean, where natural disasters worsen poverty, inequality, and domestic and international political tensions.

García is the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, where her work focuses on the history of displaced and mobile populations in the Americas. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. She is a recipient of a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the 2010 Cornell Stephen and Margery Russell Teaching Award, and the 2016 Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award.

This book talk is sponsored by Olin Library. Light refreshments will be served.

For decades now, efforts to understand Venezuela’s mutating crises have often reflected rather than risen above the same polarization that has turned the country’s politics into a winner-take-all conflict between Chavistas and anti-Chavistas. In turn, polarized accounts have often rested on incomplete pictures of Hugo Chávez and Chavismo aimed less at explaining than at apportioning or deflecting blame. Is a different account possible? What might a history of Chavismo that stresses contingency and contradiction over telos and consistency look like? This presentation offers a sweeping account of Chávez and Chavismo that emphasizes the evolving nature of both. Seen as a whole, Chavismo takes shape less as a single movement linked by an overriding ideology than as an assemblage of often contradictory movements and ideologies that developed in distinct stages. Though each stage created and responded to new challenges and opportunities, all were and remain thread together by the changing whims of its charismatic, polarizing leader, in life and long after his death.

Alejandro Velasco is a historian at New York University's Gallatin School and Department of History, and was Executive Editor of the NACLA Report on the Americas from 2015 to 2021. Velasco's first book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (University of California Press, 2015), won the 2016 Fernando Coronil Prize for best book on Venezuela, awarded biennially by the Section on Venezuelan Studies of the Latin American Studies Association. A frequent media contributor, his editorials and analysis have appeared in NACLA, Nueva Sociedad, The Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Current History, and others. Velasco also frequently contributes radio and television commentary in outlets including NPR, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, CBS, France 24, the BBC, and the CBC.