Veeraporn Nitiprapha, one of Thailand’s most famous contemporary authors, speaks about her novel Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (published in translation in 2022).
Memories tells an entirely new story of Chinese migration to and personhood in Southeast Asia as it chronicles the history of a Chinese-Thai family throughout much of the twentieth century.

Introduction by Prof. Thak Chaloemtiarana (Cornell University)

Two-time Southeast Asian Write Award winner Veeraporn Nitiprapha is one of Thailand’s most famous contemporary authors. Spearheading a current wave of Chinese-themed literature, Veeraporn revises understandings of region and identity in tandem. Her second novel Phuthasakarat Asdong was published in translation in 2022 as Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat. Chronicling the history of a Chinese-Thai family, it tells an entirely different story of Chinese-Thai migration and personhood than previous literary and scholarly works. Using fantasy and centering female and feminized characters, Veeraporn tells this history as a critical, non-triumphalist one and highlights the lives of working and middle class migrants. China’s and Thailand’s histories are dynamically interwoven in this story. Surprisingly, China’s cultural history becomes intricately connected to Thailand’s. Veeraporn’s work provincializes China in certain ways but, more importantly, provides us with a rich idea of the mobility of trans-Asia histories of cultural circulation. In Thailand, she debunks dominant rags-to-riches myths of Chinese social and economic ascendancy. The author uniquely preserves minor histories of migration that are in danger of being erased by China’s hegemonic rise. Critiquing a military-led nation, Veeraporn’s work moreover imagines belonging anew.

Hosted by the Department of Asian Studies
With the generous co-sponsorship of

the Society for the Humanities,the Migrations Initiative,the Southeast Asia Program,the East Asia Program,Comparative Literature, andthe Department of Literatures in English

Bartels World Affairs Lecture

Fantasy author N. K. Jemisin discusses how she learned to build unreal worlds by studying our own—and how we might in turn imagine a better future for our world, and reshape it to fit that dream.

Jemisin's lecture kicks off The Future—a new Global Grand Challenge at Cornell. We invite thinkers across campus to use their imaginations to reach beyond the immediate, the tangible, the well-known constraints. How can we use our creativity to plan and build for a future that is equitable, sustainable, and good? Learn more on October 4.

After her talk, Jemisin joins a panel of distinguished Cornell faculty to explore how we can take a brave leap into the visionary future. What can we collectively achieve when we focus on "what we want," rather than "what I can do"? And when we've imagined a better future for our world, how do we chart the path—starting today—with practical steps to take us there?

Anindita Banerjee, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, College of Arts and SciencesJohn Albertson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of EngineeringKaushik Basu, Carl Marks Professor of International Studies, Professor of Economics, A&S***

A reception with refreshments will follow the lecture and panel.

Lecture: 5:30 | Rhodes Rawlings Auditorium, Klarman HallThe Future panel, featuring Jemisin and Cornell faculty: 6:15Reception and book signing: 7:00-8:00 | Groos Family AtriumReserve your free ticket for the in-person watch party.

General admission seating is now sold out. By registering for a watch party ticket, you will have an in-person seat reserved in an adjacent classroom near the auditorium where the lecture will be livestreamed. Please follow signage upon your arrival. All watch party attendees are invited to join the post-lecture reception and book signing at 7:00 in Groos Family Atrium, Klarman Hall.

Livestream: For Local, National, and International Viewers

The lecture and panel will be livestreamed. Register to attend virtually at eCornell.

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How are N. K. Jemisin’s novels acts of political resistance? Read a Bartels explainer by Anindita Banerjee.

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Book Signing

Ithaca’s cooperatively owned independent bookstore, Buffalo Street Books, will be selling a wide selection of N. K. Jemisin’s books after the lecture.

Meet N. K. Jemisin and get your book signed at the reception!

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About N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in the science fiction and fantasy genre’s history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula and Locus Awards. She was a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Jemisin’s most frequent themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She has been an advocate for the long tradition of science fiction and fantasy as political resistance and previously championed the genre as a New York Times book reviewer. She lives and works in New York City.

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About Global Grand Challenges at Cornell

Global Grand Challenges bring together Cornell's world-class strengths—vision, expertise, people, and resources—in a multiyear focus to understand humanity's most urgent challenges and create real-world solutions. Global Cornell organizes and supports related research collaborations, courses and academic programs, student experiences, campus events, and more. Cornell's first Global Grand Challenge is Migrations, launched in 2019.

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About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. This flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

A GETSEA Simulcast Film Screening

Join us to watch the film Above and Below the Ground, followed by a discussion with audiences across over 20 North American universities.

This is event is hosted by the GETSEA consortium, and co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Program and the Southeast Asia Program.

About the Film

Above and Below the Ground depicts the Indigenous women activists and punk rock pastors leading Myanmar’s first country-wide environmental movement. When the Myanmar army and a Chinese corporate giant force Indigenous Kachin people off their ancestral land to build the massive Myitsone Dam, grandmother Lu Ra stands her ground. We see her struggle to save the sacred confluence and build a movement, mentoring young female law student Hkawn Mai. A Kachin punk rock band made of pastors, BLAST, also takes action, transforming their love songs into protest anthems. Our film follows these individuals through their journey of activism, from their underground beginnings during Myanmar’s military junta rule, to supposed “democratic” reforms and a sudden military coup. During such periods of fledgling democracy and dictatorship–in Myanmar and globally–our film asks how ordinary people can use the power of music, community organizing and women’s leadership to challenge authoritarianism.

Talk by Laura Lee Junker

The history of the Philippines is unique in Southeast Asia's islands in that the country has 14 massive islands, 7000+ smaller islands, and 200+ languages. Strangely, among the historical entities in these thousands of equatorial islands, none of the area's languages were written down. Both historical and archaeological evidence shows us that Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Indic populations all powered trade well before the 10th century. Area ports sent commerce and numerous missions to the Chinese court. Islamic groups in the Philippines, particularly in what would become Manila, as well as from the southernmost island of Mindanao prior to the influx of Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, also participated in diplomacy and trade. The extensive diversity of various groups on the rugged Filipino landscape, including small bands of Ata and tribal peoples (Bukidnon) living in the mountainous cores of massive islands, supplied equatorial products that connected chains of manufacture sailing from the west and north, down to the tropical belt. In this presentation, Archaeology melds with "material histories" (such as archaeology) and "written histories" (from many viewpoints) in telling this complex story.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, (Visiting Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University), who will discuss the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of the Philippines fine arts.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Known as the ‘master of Philippine sunlight,’ Fernando Amorsolo is the painter most associated with the Philippine landscape and Philippine pastoral, bringing to both a decided innocence, if not sunlit grace. More than merely formal experimentation with light, however, Amorsolo is canonical because of the distinctly national-pastoral conceptions his work elaborates. Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Fernando Zóbel de Ayala are regularly recognized as the three masters of Philippine fine arts. Their works dominate the Philippine canon and, by extension, elite notions of Philippine art. However Amorsolo’s particularizing of the (tropical) place of the Philippines separates him from his colleagues.

An anti-colonial, nationalistic celebration of precolonial, inherent “goodness”—a vision of a simple kind of goodness that I argue is explicitly tied to nature—charged Amorsolo’s works as well as his popular national reception. The American colonial period during the 1920s-30s sparked a wave of national nostalgia for the Filipino pastoral life, with Tagalog songs and Spanish poetry eulogizing the simple, happy barrio life that seemed to be increasingly receding. Amorsolo was part of this wave, which drew on the thwarted independence struggle of the Philippine Revolution, societal reaction to and cultural dislocations across the transition from Spanish to American colonialism, and ongoing political debates surrounding independence. Yet, despite round praise for his “democratic” art and celebration of the common Filipino, Amorsolo’s idea of goodness has deep connection to an underlying elitism in Philippine society and contributes to Amorsolo’s appeal among the elite class. In particular, his elitist vision of the good as grounded in nature had consequences for human relationships with the natural environment, while also being itself a result of existing class relationships with nature. This talk seeks to analyze the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of Amorsolo’s landscape and genre painting.

About the Speaker

Originally from the Philippines, Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is an Associate at Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge and a Visiting Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She was also formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University. Her broad research interests center on global intellectual history and Southeast Asian environmental and social history. Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, published by Columbia University Press in June 2020, charts the emplotment of ‘place’ in the proto-national thought and revolutionary organising of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers. Her current research analyzes the co-constitution of class and relationships with the natural environment over the 19th to the 20th centuries in the Philippines. Her research has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Philippine Studies, among other publications.