Esra Akcan
Michael A. McCarthy Professor of Architectural Theory
The Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) addresses the transnational scope of the modern in its multifarious engagement over centuries with capitalism, and colonialism, and follows their ramifications in the present. With an emphasis on developments outside of the historically constituted hegemonic spaces of Europe and the United States, ICM promotes the study of multiple axes of artistic, intellectual and social movements and the struggles attending the emergence of modern institutions and forms of knowledge. Such an orientation involves both attention to counterclaims of sovereignity and resistance that constitute the extended history of decolonization, and also serious attention to conflicts and critique within the West. Crucial to the ICM’s mission is inquiry into epistemologies and paradigms emerging from non-hegemonic societies and spaces.
The Institute hopes to galvanize work in this direction by encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborative research that advances a global analysis of modernity that is also grounded in geographical and historical specificity.
The Institute brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the humanities and the social sciences who are interested in the issue of comparative/global modernities. It aims to contribute to the intellectual environment at Cornell and beyond through seminars, lecture series, symposia, and publications, and by encouraging related on-going initiatives and research projects. While the ICM’s programming, on the whole, engages the entire Cornell community, the Institute has also developed more focused initiatives directed toward two constituencies in particular—faculty at an early stage of their careers at Cornell, and graduate students.
The Institute fosters new scholarship in the area of comparative modernities, and helps faculty advance in their academic development. In order to promote the scholarly research of collaborating colleagues and outside speakers, the ICM has developed a publication series that provides a venue for the Institute’s initiatives (conferences, workshops, etc).
The ICM also seeks to provide greater opportunities for graduate students from across the campus to engage each other through interdisciplinary and collaborative research working groups. To that end, the Institute provides meeting space as well as seed money for the establishment and the maintenance of several graduate student research working groups a year. Graduate students are encouraged to organize research working groups that include a minimum of six participants, from at least two different disciplines. The funding provided by the Institute sustains a year-long project (renewal for a second year is possible in some instances). The project culminates in a public presentation of the group’s research (the form of such a presentation is determined in large part by the group itself).
The Institute hosts international scholars and artists in an effort to foster greater international intellectual and artistic exchange. Scholars and artists are brought to campus to engage with the Cornell community either as part of an in-residence program, or as participants in conferences, workshops, collaborative projects, or formal and informal interaction with students
Department website
Begüm Adalet
Assistant Professor
Publications
2024 “An Insurgent Mood: Politics of Home in Lorraine Hansberry’s Writings,” American Political Science Review https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055424000157
2024 “An Empire of Development: American Political Thought in Transnational Perspective” American Political Science Review https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305542400025X
Forthcoming, “Towards a Radical International Thought: An Introduction,” with Alina Sajed, South Atlantic Quarterly
Forthcoming, “Empire and Radical International Thought,” co-edited with Alina Sajed, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly
- “W. E. B. Du Bois and transnationalism: a conversation” International Politics. Roundtable Discussion on Inés Valdez’s Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Kant, Du Bois, and Justice as a Political Craft, (with Charisse Burden-Stelly, Adam Dahl, Katrin Flikschuh, Inés Valdez), 2023
- “Erupting Out of the ‘Zone of Non-Being’: The Cunning of Solidarity.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 30(1): 79-81. Symposium on Geo Maher’s Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (with responses from Henry Aoki, Kevin Bruyneel, Geo Maher, Althea Sircar, Anna Terwiel), 2022
- "Infrastructures of Decolonization: Frantz Fanon and Scales of Worldmaking” Political Theory, 2022
- “Agricultural Infrastructures: Race, Land, and Statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2022
- “Mediating the Kennedy Presidency: James Baldwin’s Decade in Turkey,” Globalizing the U.S. Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy, ed. Cyrus Schayegh, Bloomsbury Series “New Approaches to International History,” 2020
- “James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere” (Review of Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again) Public Books, 2020
- “Tensions, terrors, tenderness: James Baldwin’s Politics of Comparison,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38 (3), December, 2018
- Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey, Stanford University Press, 2018
- “It’s not yours if you can’t get there”: Mobility and State-making in Turkey. The Funambulist Magazine: Politics of Space and Bodies, 17, May-June issue on Weaponized Infrastructure, 2018
Departments and programs
Fouad Makki
Associate Professor, Director of the Polson Institute for Global Development
Departments and programs
Links
Viranjini P Munasinghe
Associate Professor
Publications
Academic Articles
2007 Dougla logics and nation building in Trinidad. South Asian Review. Special issue on “Empire and Racial Hybridity”. Edited by Deepika Bhari. 27(1):182-204.
2006 Claims to purity in theory and culture: Pitfalls and promises. American Ethnologist 33(4): 588-592.
2006 Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization. American Ethnologist 33(4): 549-562.
2005 Narrating a Nation through Mixed Bloods. Social Analysis 49(2): 155-163.
2002 Nationalism in Hybrid Spaces: The Production of Impurity out of Purity. American Ethnologist 29(3): 663-692.
2001 Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle in Trinidad. Journal of Asian American Studies 4(1):1-34.
1997 Culture Creators and Culture Bearers: The Interface Between Race and Ethnicity in Trinidad. Transforming Anthropology 6(1):72-86.
Books
2001 Callaloo or Tossed Salad?: East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (CUP).
Chapters
2009 Foretelling Ethnicity in Trinidad: The Post Emancipation Labor Problem. In Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology. Eric Tagliacozzo and Andrew Willford, eds. Pp 139-186. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2008 Rescuing Theory from the Nation. In Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present. Narmala Halstead, Eric Hirsch and Judith Okely, eds. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- American Studies Program
- Anthropology
- Asian American Studies Program
- Institute for Comparative Modernities
Links
Natalie Melas
Associate Professor
Publications
- All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford UP, 2007) (ACLA René Wellek Prize Honorable Mention 2008)
- co-editor of The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature (Princeton UP, 2009).
- "Poetry's Circumstance and Racial Time (Aimé Césaire, 1935-1945 or thereabouts)" special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Cesaire and Negritude, July 2016
- "Afterlives of Comparison: Equivalence, Value, Literature" for Ronan McDonald, ed, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical institutions, Scholarly Agendas. Cambridge University Press 2015
- "Comparative Non-Contemporaneities: Ernst Bloch and C.L.R. James" in Daniel Stout and Jason Potts, ed. Theory Aside. Duke University Press, 2014.
Departments and programs
Links
Salah M. Hassan
Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Africana Studies, on leave 2021 - 2023
Publications
Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination. Co-edited with Hoor Al Qasimi (Skira, Milan, 2021).
Ibrahim El Salahi’s Prison Notebook (English Edition). (A book based on El-Salahi’s prison diary drawings,1975-1976). Edited and Introduced (MoMA Publications and Sharjah Art Foundation, NYC, 2018)
Ibrahim El Salahi’s Prison Notebook (Arabic Edition). (Same as above published 2018)
How to Liberate Marx from His Eurocentrism: Notes on Black/African Marxism. (Kassel: Documenta 13 and Hatji Cantz Verlag Publisher, 2012) Notebook No. 091 published as part of “Documenta 13 100 Notes - 100 Thoughts.”
Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Co-edited with Carina E. Ray.
Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist. Editor (New York: Museum for African Art and Washington University Press, 2012). (Republished by the Tate Modern, London, in 2013)
David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-pons, Pamela Z.: Three Artists, Three Projects, Dakar Biennale: Diaspora, Memory, Place. Co-edited with Cheryl Finley. (Prestel USA, 2008)
"Strange Fruit: Lynching, Visuality, Empire." Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2006
Education
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- History of Art and Visual Studies
- Institute for Comparative Modernities
Links
Naminata Diabate
Associate Professor
Publications
Monograph
Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa. Duke University Press, 2020. https://www.dukeupress.edu/naked-agency
Peer-reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
“Nudity and Pleasure." Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 46, May 2020.
“The Forms of Shame in African Literature.” Routledge Handbook of African Literature, ed. Moradewun Adejunmobi and Carli Coetzee. New York: Routledge, 2019. 339-353.
“African Queer African Digital: Reflections on Zanele Muholi’s Films4peace and Other Works.” African Literature Today ALT 36 (2018): 17-37 (Queer Theory in Film & Fiction).
“The Cinematic Language of Naked Protest.” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 11.3 (2017): 248-268
“Genealogies of Desire and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote Pas Trop and Francophone African Literature.” Research in African Literatures 47. 2 (2016): 46-65.
“Women’s Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative Literature and Its Futures.” Fieldwork in the Humanities, ed. Debra Castillo and Shalini Puri. New York: Palgrave, 2016. 51-71.
“Jean Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and the Mevoungou: Ambivalence towards the African Woman’s Body.” Women, Gender and Sexualities in Africa, ed. Toyin Falola and Nana Akua Amponsah. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2013. 21-39
“Re-Imagining West African Women’s Sexuality: Jean Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and the Mevoungou.” Development, Modernism and Modernity in Africa, ed. Augustine Agwuele. New York: Routledge, 2012. 166-181.
“African Women and Missionary Writings: Nineteenth-Century Boloki Women of the Congo in John H. Weeks’ Among Congo Cannibals (1913).” Intersections: Women’s and Gender Studies in Review across Disciplines 5. (2007): 44-51.
Literary Interviews
“From Women Loving Women in Africa to Jean Genet and Race: A Conversation with Frieda Ekotto.” Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) 4. 1. (2010): 181-203.
“From Research in African Literatures (RAL) to Ira Aldridge: An Interview with Bernth Lindfors.” The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books 8. (Fall 2008): 38-42.
Encyclopedic Entries
"Ousmane Sembene." The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
"Yvonne Vera." The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Ed. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
“Côte d’Ivoire Pre-Independence Protest and Liberation.” The International Encyclopedia of Protest and Revolution: 1500-Present, ed. Immanuel Ness. London: Blackwell, 2009.
“Côte d’Ivoire Post-Independence Era Protest.” The International Encyclopedia of Protest and Revolution: 1500-Present, ed. Immanuel Ness. London: Blackwell, 2009.
Book Reviews
The Amputated Memory by Werewere Liking, The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books 10. (2010): 67-69.
Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World by Ketu Katrak, The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books 9. (2009): 92-94.
The Bernth Lindfors Papers at the Harry Ransom Center. The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books 8. (2008): 42-44.
Postcolonialisms, Edited by Gaura Desai and Supriya Nair. The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books 7. (2007): 18-20
News
"Cornellians Explore Stories of Sexual Violence Around the World." The Cornell Daily Sun. March 10, 2019. https://cornellsun.com/2019/03/10/cornellians-explore-stories-of-sexual-violence-around-the-world/
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin (2011)
Portfolios in African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
M.A., Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin (2006)
Advanced Degree, Maitrise, B.A, Universite de Cocody a Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) (1998- 2001)
Departments and programs
- Africana Studies and Research Center
- Comparative Literature
- Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program
- French Studies Program
- Institute for Comparative Modernities
- Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Program
- Literatures in English
- Performing and Media Arts
Keywords
Agency, Resistance, Social Media, Digitality, Sexuality, Body, Pleasure, Shame, Biopolitics, Africa, Postcolonislism, Gender, Cinema
Iftikhar Dadi
John H. Burris Professor
Publications
Publications
Books:
Authored:
Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2022).
Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Edited:
The Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Pakistan, Turkey and their European Diasporas (New York: Routledge, 2023), co-edited with Esra Akcan.
The Lahore Biennale Reader 01 (Milan: Skira, 2022).
Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular (Sharjah: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022), co-edited with Roobina Karode.
Anwar Jalal Shemza (London: Ridinghouse, 2015).
Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (Ithaca: Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, 2012), co-edited with Hammad Nasar.
Selected recent essays:
“Art and the 1947 Partition of South Asia,” and “Pakistani Diaspora Artists in the UK,” in Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and Their European Diasporas, eds. Esra Akcan and Iftikhar Dadi (Abingdon: Routledge, 2023).
“Lithographic Assemblages: The Urdu Art Book in the Age of Print,” in Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia, ed. Sonal Khullar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023).
“Ganesh Haloi: Infinite Abstraction,” in Ganesh Haloi: A Rhythm Surfaces in the Mind, ed. Natasha Ginwala and Jesal Thacker (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2023).
“Introduction: Lahore Is Lahore,” in The Lahore Biennale Reader 01, ed. Iftikhar Dadi, (Milan: Skira, 2022).
“Legacies and Futures: An Interview with Iftikhar Dadi,” in Twentieth-Century Indian Art, ed. Partha Mitter, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram (London: Thames & Hudson, 2022).
“Between Neorealism and Humanism: Jago Hua Savera,” in Forms of the Left: Left-Wing Aesthetics and Postcolonial South Asia, ed. Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
“A Questionnaire on Global Methods,” October 180 (Spring 2022): 16-19.
“Installation,” in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 12, no. 1-2 (2021): 106-112.
“A Questionnaire on Decolonization,” October 174, no. 3 (2020): 27-30.
“Citizenship and Art,” PIX Citizenship Issue 16 (March 2019): 18–21.
“Affiliations of Postcolonial Art History,” Oxford Art Journal 43, no. 2 (August 2020).
“Visual Culture and the Popular.” Visual Culture Questionnaire - M+ Stories, January 14, 2020.
“Reflections on the Havana Biennial at Matanzas (2019),” Anthropology Now 11, no. 3 (June 10, 2020): 74–81.
“Abstraction in the Arab World,” in Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, ed. Suheyla Takesh and Lynn Gumpert (New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 2020), 50–59.
“Calligraphic Abstraction,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Volume 2, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 1292–1313.
“Lineages of Pakistan’s ‘Urdu’ Cinema: Mode, Mood and Genre in Zehr-E Ishq / Poison of Love (1958).” Screen 57, no. 4 (December 2016): 480–87.
“Modernity and Its Vernacular Remainders in Pakistani Cinema,” in Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan, ed. Ali Khan and Ali Nobil Ahmed (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2016), 77–100.
“Reflections on the Conception of Modern and Contemporary Islamic Art,” in Jameel Prize 4, ed. Tim Stanley and Salma Tuqan (Istanbul: Pera Müzesi, 2016), 70–78.
“Frayed Geographies and Fractured Selves: Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2014-15),” in My East is Your West (Delhi: Harper Collins, 2016), 70-75.
“The Aesthetics of the American Qur’an Project,” in American Qur’an: Artwork by Sandow Birk (New York: Liveright, 2016), 429–34.
“The Middle East and South Asia: Aesthetic Mobilities,” in Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary Works from the Barjeel Art Collection (Prestel, 2015), 81-88.
“Mapping Asia.” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13, no. 6 (2014): 82-89.
“Chughtai’s Revival of Mughal Cosmopolitanism,” Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past, ed. Derryl MacLean and Sikeena Karmali (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 127-155.
Education
Ph.D., Cornell University.