Speaker: Wah Guan LIM Associate Professor of Transcultural Theatre National Chung Hsing University

Description:

The 1980s was a most important decade for global Chinese theatre. In large part prompted by changes in regional geopolitics, the search for a local identity peaked among the Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia. This period coincided with the rise of the professional careers of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian 高行健 (b. 1940), Danny Yung Ning Tsun 榮念曾 (b. 1943), Stan Lai Sheng-chuan 賴聲川 (b. 1954), and Kuo Pao Kun 郭寶崑 (1939–2002)—whose efforts shaped the contemporary Chinese-language theater scenes across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. While the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, in contrast, these dramatists weaved together native, foreign, and Chinese elements in their theater praxis to give voice to the local. At the same time, by performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they also debunked the notion of a unified “Chineseness.” My talk highlights the key role theater and performance played in suturing identity in the diaspora and circulating people and ideas across geographical space, well before cross-strait relations were yet to thaw.

Speaker's Bio:

LIM Wah Guan (BA Hons 1 UNSW, MSt Oxford, MA Princeton, PhD Cornell) is Associate Professor of Transcultural Chinese Theatre at National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. His research interests span Chinese-language drama, cinema, and literature. His first monograph Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora (Cornell University Press, 2024) examines the role theatre and performance have played in identity formation in Chinese communities across East and Southeast Asia. Most recently the recipient of the Yushan Fellowship for Early Career Academics, he was the sole awardee in the Arts and Humanities category this year in Taiwan Ministry of Education’s effort to attract outstanding academics globally to strengthen the international standing of higher education in the country. He served previously as Assistant Professor at Bard College in New York and the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where he was Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Humanities and Languages, and Fellow of New College.

To join virtually: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92307207515?pwd=i3NiMc9IAzZN981x5PZnp4cqnM9GQ…

This lecture is sponsored by a grant from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and co-organized by the East Asia Program and the Department of Asian Studies.

Global Research Fellows are a new interdisciplinary research and professional development community at the Einaudi Center for advanced graduate students, Cornell postdocs, and visiting and local scholars. You'll find a community of fellow researchers with regional and international interests and a desire to foster a more equitable world.

Eligible students:
• Have completed at least two years of graduate education
• Engaged in research on a topic of global or regional studies significance
• Hold a strong desire to impact global challenges and create real-world solutions
• Interested in engaging and collaborating with other researchers

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

View the art, media, and writing of Cornell students and staff who share the ways that migration shapes their lives in this Mann Library exhibit. The exhibit will showcase winning submissions from the Migrations Program's creative writing and art competition and an interactive digital space where you can share your own migration story.

At the exhibit's launch, keynote speaker Cathy Linh Che will read poetry and join us for a Q&A session, and Pedro Molina will present his work.

About the Speakers

Cathy Linh Che is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. She is the author of Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), Split (Alice James Books), and co-author, with Kyle Lucia Wu, of the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: a Children’s Guide to Our History (Haymarket Books). Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. She teaches as Core Faculty in Poetry at the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and works as Executive Director at Kundiman. She lives in New York City.

Pedro X. Molina is an award-winning Nicaraguan political cartoonist known for his sharp critiques of authoritarianism and human rights abuses. Forced into exile in 2018 after government reprisals against independent media, he now lives and works in the United States, creating cartoons for outlets including Confidencial, Counterpoint, the Washington Post, and Politico. A 2021–22 Institute of International Education Artist Protection Fund fellow at Cornell University and current visiting critic with the Einaudi Center’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, Molina has also been a visiting scholar at Ithaca College and the Brunell Visiting Scholar at Cayuga Community College. His work has earned major international honors, including the 2021 Gabo Award for Excellence and the 2023 Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent.

Host and Sponsors

The Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, is hosting this event.

This event is supported by the Migrations Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative
Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Analyn Salvador-Amores from the University of the Philippines Baguio.

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

Abstract

Tattoos, or batok was once a place-based practice accorded to the members of Kalinga, an ethnolinguistic group in northern Luzon, Philippines. Batok served as badges of honor for the men who successfully participated in tribal warfare in the past; and as a form of aesthetics for the women, both of whom reflects the relevant social position they occupy in the community: religious, political association, and economic status. During the American colonial period at the turn of the century, the traditional tattoos were abhorred due to its association to “savages and criminality” and waned in the next century.

Today, there is a strong wave of revival of traditional tattoos in the contemporary period. Foremost inspired by Apo Whang-ud, a 90-year old elderly woman and a tattoo practitioner from a remote village in Buscalan, Tinglayan in Kalinga. It has generated a growing interest on Kalinga tattoos from the local and international market. The wave of revival of traditional tattoos among the younger Kalinga has been accompanied by a steady influx of urban and diasporic Filipinos of non-Kalinga origin visiting Buscalan to get tattooed. It is here that the most dynamic process of the transformation of tattooing can be observed. In what seems to be an ongoing revival or reinvention of traditional tattoos in the contemporary times, the tattoos now are also commodified due to the advent of tourism.

The popularity of Kalinga tattoos has opened new arenas for both traditional and contemporary forms of expression dissociated from the symbolic meanings – tattoos as graphic designs devoid of ritual acts. Due to the influx of tourists to the village of Buscalan since 2014, which burgeoned in 2015 and continues to grow even until now. Initially, Whang-ud started with an apprentice of her niece Grace Palikas; today there are two hundred fourteen (214) other young female and male tattoo artists in the village who tattoo tourists from their homes, and have travelled to the cities to tattoo outside of the village.

With the vibrant economy bolstered through the quest for authentic tattoos by Apo Whang-ud, a significant new phenomenon developed, of local people patronizing the younger tattoo artists in the village and getting inked by the same tattoos that they abhorred forty years ago. The pain, perforation of the skin, and permanence (embodied) that one experiences to construct individual and social identities through appropriation of the batok resulted in the re-contextualization of the tattoos in the present.

About the Speaker

Analyn Salvador-Amores is Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the Museo Kordilyera at the University of the Philippines Baguio. Her research interests include anthropology of the body, non-Western aesthetics, material culture, endangered cultures, ethnographic museums, Indigenous peoples and colonial photography in the Philippine Cordillera. She studied for her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University. In addition to her award-winning book, Tapping Ink, Tattooing Identities: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Kalinga Society (University of the Philippines Press, 2013), she is the author of many scholarly articles published in various books and journals.

As a public service professor, she continues to engage Indigenous communities in her work, and promoting Indigenous knowledge in different platforms. She actively carries out anthropological fieldwork among the Indigenous communities in Northern Luzon, and have published extensively on this subject. Recently, she is involved in the research on Northern Luzon Philippine collections in the archives and museums in the US and Europe, reconnecting historical documents, archival photographs and material culture to communities of origin in Northern Luzon, through digital repatriation and rematriation. The culmination of this collaborative work with German museums is the book, Hunting for Artifacts: 19th Century German Travelers in the Luzon Cordillera (2025) published by the Cordillera Studies Center, University of the Philippines Baguio.

Update: This lecture has been canceled.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Maria Hwang, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies from McGill University.

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

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Jangai Jap, Assistant Professor from the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia.
This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract

Since independence, most of the ethnic minority groups in Myanmar—though not all—have rebelled against the central government, making it home to the most simultaneous and longest ongoing armed conflict in the world. In this talk, I track the origins of armed ethnic organizations in Myanmar and argue that political exclusion—a primary grievance widely thought to motivate ethnic rebellion—played a rather minimal role in the onset of ethnic rebellions. Instead, what distinguishes ethnic groups in rebellion from other ethnic minority groups is the claim of having an ethnic “homeland” within Myanmar. Individuals from such ethnic groups form nascent armed groups, which are then fostered and supported by more established ethnic armed organizations. I illustrate this dynamic through the role of the Karen National Union and the Kachin Independence Organization in the proliferation of robust ethnic armed organizations in Myanmar.

About the Speaker

Jangai Jap is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs. She researches ethnic politics, nationalism, minority-state relations, and Burma/Myanmar politics. Her ongoing work examines interethnic relations, bureaucratic experiences, and ethnic rebellion. Previously, she was an Early Career Provost Fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Politics of Race and Ethnicity Lab. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University and a B.A. in Judaic Studies and Political Science from Yale University.