Talk by Kalyani Ramnath (History, University of Georgia)

For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period,Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires.

Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

Kalyani Ramnath is assistant professor of history at University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University.

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, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

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

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The often-fraught pathways of human migration come alive through art. From storytelling to innovative sculpture, theater, cartoons, and painting, students, faculty, and artists supported by the Migrations Global Grand Challenge will tell their stories and showcase their art.

Anindita Banerjee, associate professor of comparative literatureDebra A. Casillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies and professor of comparative literatureJuan Harmon, MFA creative writing candidatePedro Molina, Nicaraguan cartoonist and journalistNatasha Raheja, assistant professor of anthropologySharifa Sharifi, Afghan artistGemma Rodrigues (Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum) and Eric Tagliacozzo (history) will moderate.

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