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, fellowships, internships, study abroad, exchanges, service learning, and more.

Due to capacity limitations at the venue, we invite you to register now to reserve priority access to this event. Walk-ins are also welcome, but there may be a wait if we reach capacity. Please wear a face mask during the event.

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.

Since 1947, the valley of Kashmir has become synonymous with a territorial dispute. Such is the emphasis on “territorial integrity” in the mediatized discourse on Kashmir, both in the South Asian subcontinent and the west, that the territorializing of the region is hidden under the self-evident notions of nationalism and statecraft. The political narratives on the contestations of sovereignty in the region assume a nexus between territory, state, and sovereignty at the cost of literary imaginaries. These literary imaginaries offer a space for historical thought to begin re-telling and remaking the topography of Kashmir as an instance of multiple histories, temporalities and human geographies. As some of the Kashmiri writers are celebrated in the canon of global English literature, identified by their representativeness of regional territory, their writing reveals an enquiry into how territorialism happens. By focusing on the key Kashmiri writers of the present, I will argue against the forgetting of issues of migration, an alternative subaltern postcolonial history and the solidification of sub-national orientation. These three axes of my argument intersect at the current reality of the political fragments of Kashmir, drawn across subcontinental nationalisms, which require a new imaginary to even begin describing the immense loss of lives, aspirations, languages and cultures of contact that is the Kashmiri condition since the last century.

Asiya Zahoor hails from Baramulla, Kashmir. She studied Caribbean literature, Kashmiri Literature and Psycholinguistics, at the Universities of Kashmir, Jamia Millia Islmia (New Delhi) and Oxford University (UK). Her research explores the issues of migration, representation, identity and cognitive processes involving language learning. Asiya has translated short stories from Kashmiri to English. Her film, The Stitch, has won the Critics’ Award for the Best Short Film at the South Asian Film Festival and Best Short Film at Third Eye Film Festival, Mumbai. It has been an official selection at several international film festivals, including Roshd International festival in Tehran and Sharam Al Sheikh Festival, Egypt. Asiya has curated a website www.bolbosh.net that aims to document the literatures and languages of Kashmir. Her latest book, Serpents under my Veil (2019) is a collection of critically acclaimed poems. Currently, Asiya is a Sanford Taylor Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University.

Actors across latitudes and cultures amaze their audiences by displaying at will the physical ‘symptoms’ of emotions such blushing, shivering, and weeping. Sanskrit sources offer almost two millennia of sophisticated reflections on the emotional life of actors, the hidden engine lying behind their almost eerie capacity to emote by exhibiting emotions that they might not even be feeling. In the most commonly known South Asian theory, it is the spectator who is the locus of rasa, the aesthetic experience of blissful savoring that even foreshadows the mystical experience of oneness with the absolute. However, an identical experience in the playwright and its indispensable transmission through the medium of the performer —be it an active or a passive recipient— are also vital aspects of the artistic process. The starting point of my presentation will be the seminal dramaturgical treatise by Bharata, the Nāṭyaśāstra, but the major protagonist will be Abhinavagupta (10th-11th c., Kaśmīr), a tantric master and philosopher who fashioned an innovative synthesis of earlier aesthetic theories. According to his vision, fictional detachment, emotional involvement and dynamic agency are integrated in the figure of the performer and in his liminal and all-encompassing nature of recipient, transmitter, and creator of the elixir of aesthetic experience. Such a mastery over one’s own emotional, mental and bodily sphere —the thespian experience— makes the actor a perfect metaphor and paradigm for the playful freedom of lordship, be it that of Śiva himself, the actor supreme, or of the nobleman, the supreme aesthetic connoisseur.

Daniele Cuneo is ‘maître de conférences' (lecturer) in Sanskrit and Indian Civilization at the Université Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris. After obtaining his PhD at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" under the direction of Raffaele Torella, he worked and taught in the three prestigious universities of Vienna, Cambridge and Leiden. His main areas of research are Sanskrit aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Tamil Culture, and South Asian Manuscript Studies. Across multiples texts and traditions, it is the cultural imbrication of language and emotions that represents the core of Daniele Cuneo’s historical and philosophical investigation. His publications include several articles on Indian aesthetics and philosophy such as ‘Detonating or Defusing Desire. From Utpaladeva’s Ecstatic Aesthetics to Abhinavagupta’s Ecumenical Art Theory’, Italian translations of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, the seminal work on Sanskrit jurisprudence, and of the Muttoḷḷāyiram, a celebrated collection of Tamil poems from the mid-first millennium, and numerous contributions to the digital catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscript collections at the Cambridge University Library. His current projects focus on the edition, translation, interpretation and study of several Sanskrit texts from late medieval Kashmir (Mukula’s Abhidhāvṛttamātṛkā of Mukula, the unpublished commentary by Sahadeva on Vāmana’s work, and Mammaṭa’s Śabdavyāpāravicāra).

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema demonstrates how the dancer-actress comes to be a central figure in articulating South Asian cultural modernities. Shifting attention from narrative-driven analyses and turning instead to gesture, movement vocabulary, and the social practices around on-screen dance production brings alive corporeal histories that are peopled by many laboring bodies. Referencing acclaimed and invisibilized performers from the 1930s to the 1990s, such as, Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, this talk will focus on the processes of training and rehearsal to reveal the networks of creativity and collaboration that produce Hindi film dance. Through material, technological, corporeal histories that unearth the labor, otherwise obscured, in discourses of skill, virtuosity, and talent, I examine how processes of dance training and rehearsal undergird techniques of the body, gender performance, and the specific figurations of Hindi cinema’s romantic-erotic energies. Mapping corporeal formations and relations between and across the bodies of dancer-actresses, choreographers, and spectators, and reading choreography as an archival-corporeal system of transmission and transformation that articulates body cultures, industrial systems, and labor networks enables new modes of writing cinematic and social histories.

Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Their book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines constructions of gender, stardom, and sexuality in Indian cinema with a focus on women’s labor and collaborative networks. Their next project is a study of the traffic of cultural forms between South Asia and the Caribbean, engaging with transnational perspectives on race, ethnicity, and migration. Dr. Iyer is Associate Editor of the journal, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art.

The Ithaca Asian American Association invites you to share your story through your lens, as you interpret and express your meaning of "Virus Has No Nationality."

You are encouraged to be bold in challenging issues of racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, heterosexism, classism, and all -isms. Through a five-minute film, we hope your creative expressions will inspire hope and possibilities for a better tomorrow.

The film festival is open to everyone regardless of age, experience, and status. All you need is a video recording device such as your phone. Films can be completed as an individual or group and must be submitted through FilmFreeway by Monday, May 31 to be screened on Friday, June 11, 2021, at 7:00 p.m. An award presentation will follow.

Filmmaking Criteria

Must be less than 5 minutes longCan be of any genreCan be created on mobile devices or digital camerasMust align with the “Virus Has No Nationality” campaign and feature a mask as a special propMust be submitted on FilmFreeway no later than May 31, 2021Awards

Six $500 Scholarship Prize awarded to best high school and college studentsTen $100 Gift Certificates to local businesses and eateries for best general submissionsSponsors

The film festival is made possible by the Park Foundation, and it is supported by:

Building BridgesCAN Cooperative Media/Sustainability SentinelCommunity Leaders of Colors (CLOC)Cornell Asian and Asian American Center (A3C)Dorothy Cotton InstituteGlobal CornellGreater Ithaca Activities Center (GIAC)Ithaca Mural AssociationKhuba InternationalLearning FarmsTompkins County's Office of the Human Rights.Please contact Ithaca Asian American Association at iaaa607@yahoo.com for more information and with any questions.