Join us for a discussion with Vanessa Chan about her book, “The Storm We Made” - a dazzling saga about the horrors of war; the fraught relationships between the colonized and their oppressors, and the ambiguity of right and wrong when survival is at stake.

Participants should ideally have read the book, where possible!

About the Speaker

VANESSA CHAN is the Malaysian author of internationally bestselling The Storm We Made (Marysue Rucci Books, Jan 2024), Good Morning America Book Club Pick and BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick. The novel, her first, will be translated into more than twenty languages worldwide. Her other work has been published in Vogue, Esquire, and more. Vanessa grew up in Malaysia and is now based mostly in Brooklyn.

The Black Pacific: U.S. Empire, the Colored American Magazine, and José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere in Translation by Edlie Wong

The transnational turn in American literary studies has forged new epistemologies and approaches for thinking about post-national cultural forms while centering empire and imperialism in the development of U.S. culture. My talk reviews these critical conversations and takes up the recent concept of the Black Pacific to examine how the redefinition of the U.S. as an empire-state rather than as a nation-state has transformed the study of race and comparative racialization in the long nineteenth century. In so doing, my talk considers some lesser-studied Black American writings on and responses to the Philippine-American War as part of an emerging Black American discourse on the Pacific, as Asia became more geopolitically significant to the U.S. The essay pays particular attention to publications from the era’s most influential Black literary magazine, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine. Specifically, it examines the complex Black American reception history of José Rizal’s landmark novel of Filipino nationalism, Noli Me Tangere (1887), which was translated from Spanish into English and published in the U.S. as two dramatically different abridged novels in 1900.

Edlie Wong is Associate Chair and Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (NYU 2015) and Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (NYU 2009), and the co-editor of a scholarly edition of George Lippard’s The Killers (UPenn 2014). Her work has also appeared in such journals as PMLA, American Literary History, Social Text, American Literature, African American Review, American Literary Realism and American Periodicals. She is currently at work on a book project under contract with Cambridge entitled, Black Pacific: American Empire and the Long Reconstruction. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mellon Foundation and served as the President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (2020-22).

Q&A to follow lecture.

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

This event is presented by the Department of Literatures in English

Since the Myanmar military seized power in Burma/Myanmar in a coup d’état in February 2021, People's Defense Forces (PDF) and Ethnic Revolutionary Organizations (ERO) have been fighting to remove this military regime and restore civilian government. In this context, ethnic minority leaders in the country appear determined to seize the current opportunity to propose a fundamental renegotiation of the political and governance arrangements in Myanmar, addressing the historic grievances of the ethnic minorities – and Bamar political leaders have also expressed their willingness to work with all ethnic groups.

This panel of ethnic minority leaders will discuss the structure of a new Myanmar, with a particular focus on the views and expectations of the ethnic minorities.

This panel discussion will take place at the Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave; and via Zoom. For questions, contact seap@cornell.edu.

Panelists

1. Evelyn Lyn, Vice-Chairperson, Karenni State Consultative Council (KSCC)

Around 90 percent of Karenni State is no longer under the control of the Military regime. In these areas the KSCC and Karenni armed groups have established a functioning local administration. Evelyn will discuss how the people involved in establishing these new governance structures in Karenni State envisage the new federal, democratic Myanmar.

2. Aung Kyaw Moe, Deputy Minister of Human Rights, National Unity Government

As a prominent, young Rohingya human rights activist, he will discuss how marginalized groups, such as the Rohingya, might fit into the new Myanmar.

3. Naw Hser Hser, a representative of the Women's League of Burma and the Karen Women's Organization.

Naw Say Say will discuss expectations for the future of Myanmar from the perspective of an ERO with a history of governing areas under its control.

4. Zo Tum Hmung, Executive Director, Chin Association of Maryland, and former Executive Director, the Ethnic Nationalities Affairs Center-Union of Burma (ENAC)

Chin armed groups now control a large part of Chin State and are aiming for a similar status to that enjoyed by Mizoram in India. Zo Tum Hmung will discuss the current situation in Chin State and the expectations of the Chin for a new Myanmar.

5. Moon Nay Li, Joint Secretary of the Women's League of Burma

6. Sao Khuen Sai, journalist, and leading advisor to the Chairman of the Restoration Council of Shan State, and a former rebel leader

Shan State has the most varied ethnic population and the largest number of EROs of any State or Region in Myanmar. The military recently lost control of large parts of northern Shan State to Kachin, Kokant, Ta’ang, and Wa resistance groups. Sao Khuen Sai will discuss the changing dynamics of ethnic politics in Shan State and how the different ethnic groups in Shan State might envisage the new Myanmar.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Xinyu Guan, (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Cornell University), who will discuss air conditioning in Singapore.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

My talk explores citizenship as a form of landlordship and sensuous policing of noncitizen bodies in Singapore. Singapore’s much-lauded state-constructed housing program, under the Housing & Development Board (HDB), enables homeownership for more than 70% of the city-state’s citizenry. However, more than 360,000 people, mostly working-class migrants from surrounding countries, rent from Singapore citizens who are owners of HDB apartments, with little by way of tenants’ rights or protections. I discuss how these rental situations provide (often much needed) extra income for citizen-landlords, and house the migrants whose labor maintains the social and dietary infrastructures of HDB housing. The promise of egalitarian citizenship through mass homeownership in Singapore belies the vast power differential between citizen-landlords and migrant-tenants. Landlords dictate the daily routines of tenants to maximize rental extraction, reducing tenants’ bodies to abstracted quantities of space and time. I examine air-conditioning as an everyday site of discipline, contestation and “bordering” (de Genova 2017) of bodies and domesticities in these rental situations. I consider how the sensuous, atmospheric interfaces between citizens and noncitizens shift the stakes of citizenship and the right to the city in Singapore.

About the Speaker

Xinyu Guan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University, with graduate minors in the Southeast Asia Program and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. His work examines the logics of citizenship by which queer and migrant communities are incorporated into state-constructed housing in Singapore. Xinyu’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Hu Shih Fellowship, and the Global PhD Grant.