Learn how the coronavirus crisis is affecting immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, including new healthcare, public benefits, and detention policies these populations face. Einaudi Center Migrations faculty fellows Steve Yale-Loehr and Gunisha Kaur will discuss Weill Cornell and Cornell University’s efforts to assist immigrants through Migrations: A Global Grand Challenge, part of Global Cornell.

Moderator: Eleanor Paynter, Einaudi Center Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow

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South Asia and Latin America represent two epicenters of migrant care work and the globalized reproductive market. Yet scholars and the media continue to examine them in geographical and conceptual isolation. South of the Future closes both these gaps. It investigates nannying, elder care, domestic work, and other forms of migrant labor in the Americas together with the emerging “Wild West” of biotechnology and surrogacy in the Indian subcontinent. The volume is profoundly interdisciplinary and includes both prominent and emerging scholars from a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, law, literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and social policy. These contributors speak to the dynamic, continually changing facets of the nexus of care and value across these two key regions of the global south. By mobilizing specific locations and techno-economics and putting them into dialogue with one another, South of the Future rematerializes the gendered, racialized bodies that are far too often rendered invisible in structural analyses of the global south, or else are confined to particular geo- and biopolitical paradigms of emerging markets. Instead, these bodies occupy the center of a global, highly financialized economy of creating and sustaining life.

This book is based on presentations and conversations at the South Asia Program symposium, “Gujarat/Guatemala: Marketing Care and Speculating Life,” held May 6-7, 2016 at Cornell University. Several videos of interviews with conference participants are now vailable for online viewing.

Anindita Banerjee is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her research focuses on science fiction and technocultural studies, environmental humanities, media studies, and migration studies across Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin and African Americas. Her first book, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity won the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize from the University of California. She is an editor of three other books, South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas (with Debra Castillo), Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (with Sonja Fritzsche), and Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader.

Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is past president of the international Latin American Studies Association. She specializes in contemporary narrative and performance from the Spanish-speaking world (including the United States), gender studies, comparative border studies, and cultural theory. Her most recent books include South of the Future: Speculative Biotechnologies and Care Markets in South Asia and Latin America (with Anindita Banerjee) and The Scholar as Human (with Anna Sims Bartel).

Registration is required for this virtual event

‘Our parents couldn’t teach us what Islam actually is!’ This assertion, made by a 24-year-old youth, epitomizes the critical stance of second-generation Italian-Bangladeshis towards the religiosity of first-generation migrants. Based on ethnographic research within the Bangladeshi community in Rome, this presentation illustrates the apparently oxymoronic characteristics of a discourse of Muslim-ness which, despite stressing the importance of a return to the primary sources of Islam, combines this revivalist attitude with a peculiar emphasis on ‘integration’, and with modernist positions. In fact, for these youths, the religion practiced by the adults is both ‘impure’, i.e. an Islam too much influenced by the ‘Bangladeshi culture’, and ‘not integrated’ in the European context, i.e. an Islam incapable of offering to the Italian society a modern, and reassuring, image of Muslim people, and consequently unable to cope with a growing Islamophobia. I will show how this counter-intuitive combination is not only inspired by the teachings of Tariq Ramadan, and by his idea of a ‘European Islam’, but first and foremost it is grounded in the concrete life conditions of Muslim youths who are both well-integrated in the Italian society and animated by religious zeal. In this way, I seek to shed light on the mutual entanglement of religious stances and life experiences, and to highlight the limits of what Samuli Schielke calls ‘exceptionalist’ and ‘literalist’ approaches to the study of religion.

Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) was a major Muslim figure in nineteenth century colonial India whose critical work on religion, education, archaeology and science influenced generations. While his work is viewed as an effort to bring Muslims out of their isolation, seek modern western education, his writings addressed key issues of faith, identity and knowledge. In a speech delivered in 1884, Khan said, "Today we are, as before, in need of modern 'ilm-al-kalam', by which we should either refute the doctrines of the modern sciences or undermine their foundations, or show that they are in conformity with the articles of Islamic faith.” My talk will focus on Khan’s calls for only ijtehad (re-interpretation) and seeking a new conceptual framework to review the Sharia. His work remains relevant in the 21st century for not just South Asian Muslims but for the Muslim world at large.

This event has been rescheduled from Wednesday, September 9, to Wednesday, September 16.

While Muslim societies are very diverse, a common feature is the high status of the written word, and the centrality of libraries. During our entire period, the authority of the ulamas derived from their ability to derive the law from the foundational books. On the other hand, individuals were encouraged to read, memorize, and follow the Qur’an as well as the important commentaries and fatwas. The library culture had other roots. Wealthy bibliophiles were mostly concerned with prestige and with the esthetics of calligraphy and illumination. An administrative book culture also emerged in the thirteenth century, and flourished with the Ottoman State elite. Finally, Nelly Hanna speaks of the different perspectives of the middle-class of Cairo or Damascus, once it owned its own books. In any case, each new social-cultural dynamic reinforced the central role played by public and private libraries in Islam.