Is the Einaudi Center's international relations minor for you? Join this Einaudi Center Student Info Session to find out.

In the international relations minor, you study the politics, economics, history, languages, and cultures of the world and gain a fresh perspective on your major field of study. Graduates go on to successful careers in fields like international law, economics, agriculture, trade, finance, journalism, education, and government service.

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Contact: irm@einaudi.cornell.edu

Talk by Denise N. Green

In 2015 I began teaching a class at Cornell about fiber, textile, and apparel production in India, which included a winter break field trip to manufacturing facilities. Inspired by the students' transformative learning experience and the connections we created, I wanted to expand the course to include Sri Lanka. Apparel is the country's leading export, making garment manufacturing one of Sri Lanka's largest industries. I began preliminary research in January-February 2022 by visiting factories, innovation centers, educational institutions, students, faculty, garment workers, industry leaders, and domestic designers. While the COVID-19 pandemic eroded revenues and significantly reduced production capabilities, apparel manufacturing was poised for a powerful comeback in 2022 when export revenues increased by 23% in January and projections anticipated 3-4% annual growth. As Sri Lanka's economic and political crisis worsened in spring 2022 and inflation in buying markets continued, manufacturers braced for a significant reduction in orders. Organizations like the Ethical Trading Initiative, Clean Clothes Campaign, American Apparel and Footwear Association, Workers United, among others, have called upon the fashion industry to support Sri Lanka with continued orders, timely payments, and price negotiations that account for rising costs of energy, raw materials, and labor. How did Sri Lanka become an exemplar of sustainable, ethical, and innovative production? The industry grew and expanded globally in the mid-late 20th century with the World Trade Organization's Multifibre Arrangement (MFA, 1974-1994) and Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC, 1995-2004), but pivoted after elimination of the quota system by creating the Joint Apparel Association Forum (JAAF) in 2002 and their subsequent “Garments Without Guilt” campaign in 2006. With nearly 90% of manufacturers participating, the industry conveyed collective commitment to sustainable and ethical production. Using examples from my recent fieldwork trip, I will consider how these commitments articulate with the aspirations, challenges, possibilities, and realities facing Sri Lanka's garment workers and apparel manufacturers today.

Denise Nicole Green is an associate professor of fashion design and management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell where she also directs the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection. She holds a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology, a Master's of Science in textiles, and a Bachelor's degree in apparel design, which has enabled interdisciplinary inquiry into the study of fashion as both an industry and an expressive medium through which individual and collective identities are produced and represented. She co-authored the book Fashion and Cultural Studies (2022) with Dr. Susan Kaiser and has written numerous journal articles and book chapters in addition to her curatorial work, design scholarship, and documentary filmmaking.

Talk by Dina Siddiqi

In Bangladesh, as elsewhere today, bodies marked Muslim are constitutive sites of feminist and other politics. The figure of the female garment worker – tasked with saving the national economy through her public, visible labor – has emerged as an especially dense site of debate and signification. This paper traces the ideological labor that garment workers, or rather their sartorial practices, perform for Islamists as well as the secular intelligentsia, in national as well as transnational spaces. Juxtaposed to accounts of how workers navigate the competing discursive economies in which they are embedded, the paper offers a situated reading of parda (practices of covering).

Talk by Faiz Ahmed

Just as a devastating humanitarian crisis, international isolation, and fraught governing regime mark the country’s present-day realities, recent years have witnessed a series of more optimistic anniversaries in Afghanistan’s modern history. As leading examples, 2019 marked the 100th anniversary of Afghanistan’s independence from the British Empire, and 2023 will mark the centennial of Afghanistan’s first written constitution. Commemorating the roots and legacies of Afghanistan’s independence and first national charter a century ago, Faiz Ahmed unearths a lost history behind the country’s emergence as a fiercely anti-colonial, constitutionally governed, and widely respected “Islamic nation-state” lodged between the late Ottoman Empire, Iran, and British India, the subject of his first book Afghanistan Rising. As the US and other global actors continue to debate the future of relations with and foreign involvement in this pivotal country, this lecture will explore what lessons we can learn from rediscovering Afghanistan’s own legal and constitutional history from Afghan and other perspectives of the region(s) it inhabits.

1991 > USA > Directed by Mira Nair
With Denzel Washington, Roshan Seth, Sarita Choudhury
A Romeo and Juliet romance that follows the tensions between passion and tradition when an Indian family, expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972, is forced to relocate to Mississippi. Intergenerational differences in assimilation, and racial tensions in the wake of Amin's rule are brought to the surface when eldest daughter Mina (Sarita Choudhury) falls in love with Black carpet cleaner Demetrius (Denzel Washington). More at www.janusfilms.com/films/2041
1 hr 58 min

In contemporary “Aspirational India,” Bollywood songs serve as potent mediums for desirable self-transformation and sites for articulating ideal forms of subjectivity. This talk offers an ethnographic lens onto the relationship between musical practice and processes of subject formation by examining the projects of self-making undertaken by students at the Institute for Performing Arts, a Mumbai music school that trained aspiring singers in Bollywood “playback singing.” I trace students’ visions of personal and professional futures that brought them to this site of aspirational musical practice while highlighting pedagogical discourses offered by our singing teachers that framed popular musical training as a privileged site for working on the self.

Crucially, while the students’ skill level and familial obligations seemed to preclude any chance of becoming professional singers, I suggest that rather than dismiss their endeavors as naive fantasy or “false consciousness,” the efforts underway at IPA be understood as forms of “dreamwork”: the musical and discursive work of promoting, imagining, and striving for desired selves and futures. And I emphasize the importance of attending to the incipient, fluctuating sensations of selfhood that characterize complex projects of becoming and the role of musical practice therein. In doing so, I build on anthropological literature on ‘becoming’ as well as recent critiques of “identity” frameworks in musical scholarship to ask how musical practice contributes to the formation of subjectivities that are always emergent, in-process, and incomplete.

Bio

Anaar Desai-Stephens is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Anaar received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Cornell University in 2017, where she received the annual Donald J. Grout award for best dissertation in music. Her work has been supported by Cornell University’s Randel Dissertation and Teaching fellowship, the American Musicological Society’s Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, and, most recently, the American Association for University Women’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship.

In Fall 2022, Anaar will be a faculty fellow at the University of Rochester’s Humanities Center, working on her first monograph, Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and the Dreamwork of Contemporary India. Trained as a violinist, Anaar is an active performer across a range of genres and currently plays with the Brazilian forró band “Forró estrellas du norte” (North Stars Forró).

Talk by Rakhee Balaram

Can Rabindranath Tagore be considered a "surrealist"? This paper questions the historiography concerning Tagore's art while simultaneously examining the cultural climate surrounding his 1930 exhibition in Paris. A contemporary re-evaluation of Rabindranath Tagore's work in this context opens up new questions about the historical avant-garde and its limits. In light of academic discussions about global modernism and following a landmark exhibition on international surrealism, a reconsideration of Tagore's art reveals it to be one marker in a larger relay of aesthetic practices happening within and outside of the West in the 1920s and 30s. The paper looks to South America and Japan to think about the genesis of Tagore's drawings and paintings which were exhibited in Paris in the wake of the celebrated African and Oceanic exhibition in 1930. Drawing on scientific, economic, and legal discourses, cross-cultural analysis, and popular culture, Tagore's erasures, drawings, and paintings offer revolutionary perspectives on current debates in the field.

Rakhee Balaram is an Assistant Professor of Global Art and Art History at the University at Albany, the State University of New York, where she specializes in modern and contemporary art. Her recent books include a co-edited volume on South Asian art history, 20th Century Indian Art: Modern, Post-Independence, Contemporary (Thames & Hudson, 2022), and a book on French artistic practices after May '68: Counterpractice: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Art of French Feminism (Manchester University Press, 2022). Balaram previously taught at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is currently completing a book on two icons of modern Indian art — Amrita Sher-Gil and Rabindranath Tagore.

Talk by Seuty Sabur

Both an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report (2016) and a World Bank report (2014) have spoken of the possibility of Bangladesh becoming an upper-middle-income country by 2021. From 1990 to 2010, the size of the middle classes expanded from 9% to 20%. Yet, despite this newfound interest in the middle class, questions about its composition, the practices, and aspirations of its constituents are hardly ever raised. The political implications of such questions are also never acknowledged, let alone debated. My longitudinal research attempts to make a section of this class tangible. In this essay, I explore the material conditions under which these gendered-class consolidations were possible during successive colonial and postcolonial periods. Through memoirs, genealogies, intergenerational family histories, and archives, I attempt to locate my interlocutors and their class position across space and time. Their intergenerational narratives reveal how their spatial mobilities (birth, marriage, work, and retirement) are entwined with the accumulations of various capitals and how that collided with Dhaka's urban formations as a metropolitan city.

Seuty Sabur is currently an associate professor of anthropology at BRAC University. She obtained her PhD in sociology from the National University of Singapore and her MA in cultural dynamics from Hiroshima University, Japan. Seuty Sabur teaches a range of undergraduate courses, including critical social theory, methodology, gender, class, kinship, and family. For the past few years, her core research interest has been the ‘Metropolitan Middle Class of Bangladesh’. As an activist and academic based in Bangladesh, she has been drawn to multiple recent social movements. She has been writing on the women’s movement, the Shahbag uprising, the gendered construction of the nation, and the culpability of left and liberal forces. Her research has been published in reputed journals such as ‘Fieldsights’ by the Society for Cultural Anthropology, ‘Journal of South Asian Development,’ ‘South Asia Chronicles’ and ‘South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.’ She has authored numerous op-eds for international and national newspapers and portals. She is currently working on her upcoming book “Marriage and Friendship: Social Networks of the Bangladeshi Affluent ‘Middle Class”.