The Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in the 1970s by a group of predominantly Puerto Rican artists on New York’s Loisaida (or Lower East Side), is the birthplace of the nuyorican aesthetic. In a live, virtual, Chats in the Stacks talk, Karen Jaime discusses her new book, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021), in which she documents how the Café, despite a popularly understood hetero-masculine history, has operated as a queer space since its founding, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Jaime’s new research, which draws from hip-hop studies, critical race, queer, literary, and performance theories, also examines how the term “Nuyorican,” originally a pejorative, race/ethnic identity marker, was reclaimed by the community it targeted and how it is connected to an aesthetic practice that recognizes and includes queer and trans artists of color.

Sponsored by Olin Library, the talk is followed by a live Q&A.

Jaime is assistant professor of performing and media arts and Latina/o studies at Cornell University. She is a former Institute for Citizens and Scholars Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Center), a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow, and a former Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While her poetry and critical writing have been published extensively, Jaime is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host and curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from 2003 to 2005.

Dial-In Information

Please register through the following link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SedjCm0MSGu4QxxhWmFO2w

"Bilingual Community-Based Language Pedagogy: An Arab-Jewish Language Café in Jerusalem"
Yarden Kedar
Israel Institute Visiting Faculty, Department of Psychology, Cornell University

The Good Neighbors – Abu Tor/Al-Thuri project is a grassroots, volunteer-based initiative that started in 2014 in order to promote a shared life approach and to build a joint community between Jews and Palestinians who live side by side in Abu Tor, a binational neighborhood, which is located on the seam between East and West Jerusalem.
This unique project, which is extraordinary given the long geopolitical and national conflict and the explosive daily tension between Arabs and Jews, includes initiatives such as language courses in Arabic and in Hebrew; a community organic garden; "Abu-Job" – a job placement project; a bilingual street library; and a variety of community events and festivities that are organized by and intended for Jerusalemites from both nationalities.
We focus on the Language Café, an authentic, bottom-up local initiative in which Jews and Palestinians actively teach and learn Hebrew and Arabic from each other. This study explores the unique bilingual pedagogy that has evolved in the Language Café and the participants' perceived language learning process and its outcomes (i.e., their motivations to learn the language of the other group, their attitudes toward the learning situation, and its potential outcomes, particularly sociocultural outcomes).
The findings reveal that the pedagogical model that has been developed and employed by the Language Café non-professional tutors promotes values of equity, equality, and mutual respect among the Jewish and Palestinian participants alike. Moreover, this new model builds on the language and cultural repertoire of the participants, hence affording them the opportunity to learn and teach each other's language and culture. Despite the long-standing political tension, the language tutors seem to have created a safe learning environment that allows both Jewish and Palestinian participants to feel at ease. Participants express genuine interest and desire to learn the language and culture of the other national, religious, and cultural group. Furthermore, they report having gained not only conversational language skills in the languages they wanted to learn but also novel insights about each other's cultures, enabling them to engage in various social activities within their neighborhood and beyond.
These findings may contribute to the development and advancement of both formal and informal pedagogical frameworks worldwide – in language as well as other subject matters – based on inter-group appreciation and collaboration. Such frameworks could also bring about more tolerant and integrated societies in conflict zones.

Bio: Yarden Kedar is an Israel Institute Visiting Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He has served as Head of the Early Childhood Education Department in the Faculty of Education at Beit Berl College between 2015-2021. He is also the Head of the Language and Cognition Development Lab at Beit Berl College.
Dr. Kedar received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology (2007) from Cornell University and then became a Kreitman Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University (2007-2010), focusing on the neurolinguistic aspects of syntactic processing in young children.
Dr. Kedar's research interests relate to Language Acquisition, Cognitive Development, and Early Childhood Education across several cultures and languages and a variety of child populations (e.g., infants, children, and adults; monolinguals and bilinguals; Arabic, English, and Hebrew learners). In other lines of research, he explores the interaction between language and socioemotional aspects of development such as immigration, gender, and various preschool educational environments.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom. Join us at the LRC or on Zoom.

The event is free and open to the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events, which include wearing masks while indoors and providing proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test.

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, in partnership with the Society for the Humanities, presents this symposium featuring five cutting-edge researchers whose work crosses disciplinary lines to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Join postdoctoral fellows Mohamed Abdou, Eman Ghanayem, Bamba Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter, and Grace Tran for a discussion of their work in the fields of migration studies and global racial justice. Topics will include identity, colonialism and decolonization, indigeneity and dispossession, refugee studies and mobility, economic and social justice, and critical race theory. Learn how new approaches and developments are changing scholarship in these critical fields.

Einaudi Center director Rachel Beatty Riedl will introduce the event, and Viranjini Munasinghe (Department of Anthropology) will moderate.

Speakers

Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Non-statist Indigenous and Muslim Conceptualizations of Sovereignty: The Decolonial Inseparability of Race from Religion"

Eman Ghanayem, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature and Society for the Humanities"Being Native, Being Refugee"

Bamba Ndiaye, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Music and Society for the Humanities"From Mbas Mi to Mbëkk Mi: Covid-Induced Migration and Social Movement Advocacy in Senegal"

Eleanor Paynter, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Witnessing Migration 'Crises': Race, Coloniality, and Asylum in Italy"

Grace Tran, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Migrations Initiative"What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Transformative Effects of Vietnamese-American Engagement in 'Marriage Fraud' Arrangements"

Learn about the Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Program. Open to first- and second-year students, this 2-year program provides generous support to carry out internationally-focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and join a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities.

Join us to learn more about the program, its benefits, and the application process, as well as tips for approaching potential faculty research mentors and writing a successful application. Sponsored by the Tatkon Center for First-Year Students and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Tells the story of a migrant who found himself in the deadly stretch of desert known as "the corridor of death" and shows how one life becomes testimony to the tragic results of the U.S. war on immigration.

The Lingua Mater competition invites alumni to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater alumni competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. Winners included the Cornell Club of Thailand 2018 and the Cornell Club of Gaeta, Italy in 2019, and won financial support of a local alumni event.

2021 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it, wherever you may be!

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top entry will receive financial support and Cornell swag for a local alumni event.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 15-19, 2021) via Noteworthy, and the top video will be posted online that week. Be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the know of this competition and international alumni activities.

Entries may be submitted by any Cornell alumni groups outside of the United States and Canada.

Submission deadline: Monday, November 8, 2021 at 5 pm ET

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact the International Alumni Relations team if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Office of International Alumni Relations, the Language Resource Center, and the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs.

The Institute for Comparative Modernities' first Global South Translation Symposium, featuring presentations by our inaugural cohort of translators (see below), remarks by translation theorist Naoki Sakai and commentary by Brett DeBary and Jan Steyn. Registation is required for this online event. Registration link:

https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YiMmRJfJQPOUmiR4hK561g

With presentations from the following ICM Global South Translation fellowship recipients:

Wendy Call, on the poetry collection Stolen Flower (Guie’ ni zinebe / La flor que se llevó), from the Isthmus Zapotec and Spanish, by Irma Pineda

Guie’ ni zinebe / La flor que se llevó (Stolen Flower) is a collection of 45 poems by Irma Pineda, originally published in 2013 in a bilingual Isthmus Zapote/Spanish edition. Selected poems have been published in three languages in The Chicago Review. The collection explores gender-based violence against Indigenous communities, through multiple poetic voices. The author, Irma Pineda, is a spokesperson for the rights and autonomy of Indigenous Peoples, as well as for the families of disappeared persons.

Chamini Kulathunga, on selected poetry from Next Sweet Wines (Mīḷaṅga Mīvita), from the Sinhala, by Ruwan Bandujeewa

The work of contemporary Sri Lankan poet Ruwan Bandujeewa is highly acclaimed, particularly as writing that addresses class inequity, and describes the harsh realities groups living on the economic margins of an exploitative capitalist system. His popularity in Sri Lanka uniquely cuts across class boundaries. The poems in this collection comprise a selection of his most celebrated writing, as well as unpublished work.

David McKay, on the text We Slaves of Suriname (Wij slaven van Suriname), from the Dutch, by Anton de Kom

Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), is a classic anti-colonial work first published in 1934, but never published in English until David McKay’s translation. The author, Anton de Kom, was an Afro-Surinamese writer and left-wing political organizer who later lost his life resisting the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. De Kom’s historiographical book has been compared to the work of American authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois and to the anti-colonial writings of Frantz Fanon. In the Caribbean context, historians have likened We Slaves of Suriname to groundbreaking studies such as Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams and The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James.

Quyen Nguyen-Hoang, on the prose poem collection Midseason Moonplay (Chơi Giữa Mùa Trăng), from the Vietnamese, by Hàn Mặc Tử

Hàn Mặc Tử is a symbolist inspired major modern Vietnamese poet as yet untranslated into English. Midseason Moonplay, published posthumously in Vietnam in 1941 is a wildly experimental and virtuosic series of prose-poems that expands the canon of Vietnamese literature. Quyen Nguyen-Hoang writes that his work “stands apart from the stereotypical body of poetry that encloses Vietnam as a country attached to the US-Vietnam war legacies or a nation under the yoke of colonization and oppressive regimes.”

Jennifer Shyue, on the short novel The Illumination of Katzuo Nakamatsu (La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu), from the Spanish, by Augusto Higa Oshiro

Augusto Hiro Oshiro is a contemporary Peruvian writer born to immigrants from Okinawa. His short novels are considered vital and mesmerizing, some of the best contemporary writing in Spanish. This 2008 short novel La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu invokes the complexities of Japanese-Peruvian histories, and exemplifies the writer at the height of his powers.

Remarks by Naoki Sakai, Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus, Cornell University and commentary by Brett de Bary, Professor Emeritus, Departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature; and Jan Steyn, Lecturer in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa. Moderated by Natalie Melas, ICM Resident Director and Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University.