Faculty Showcase

Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies Meredith Gadsby joins scholars from around the country as well as authors Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tayari Jones, Edwidge Danticat, and U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo to celebrate Toni Morrison as Cornell University’s College of Arts & Sciences hosts a livestreamed reading of her first novel, “The Bluest Eye.”

The Oct. 8 livestream will include more than 80 other readers in a full reading of the novel on the 50th anniversary of its publication. Participants will also hear portions of the book read in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German. The event will take place from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and will be livestreamed on eCornell, as well as on Facebook. The public can register to attend “The Bluest Eye” event, and people are encouraged to listen to the entire reading or join in at any point during the day.

For more information on all of the Cornell Celebrates Toni Morrison events, visit the Arts Unplugged website. 

Chie Sakakibara, assistant professor of environmental studies and East Asian studies, has published the book Whale Snow: Iñupiat, Climate Change, and Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska (First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies) from the University of Arizona Press.

Whale Snow explores how Arctic climate change influences Indigenous society, and reflects upon Sakakibara’s ongoing collaborative endeavor with the Iñupiaq community of northern Alaska for nearly two decades. Sakakibara’s research and writing have been inspired and enabled by her collaboration and conversations with many Indigenous community partners, colleagues and students at Oberlin College & Conservatory as well as the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Arctic Social Sciences Program, the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium, the Earth Institute and the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, in addition to Oberlin College Dean’s Office, Grants Office, Bonner Center, and Environmental Studies.    

As a mythical creature, the whale has been responsible for many transformations in the world. It is an enchanting being that humans have long felt a connection to. In the contemporary environmental imagination, whales are charismatic megafauna feeding our environmentalism and aspirations for a better and more sustainable future.

Using multispecies ethnography, Whale Snow explores how everyday the relatedness of the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska and the bowhead whale forms and transforms “the human” through their encounters with modernity. Whale Snow shows how the people live in the world that intersects with other beings, how these connections came into being, and, most importantly, how such intimate and intense relations help humans survive the social challenges incurred by climate change. In this time of ecological transition, exploring multispecies relatedness is crucial as it keeps social capacities to adapt relational, elastic, and resilient.

In the Arctic, climate, culture, and human resilience are connected through bowhead whaling. In Whale Snow we see how climate change disrupts this ancient practice and, in the process, affects a vital expression of Indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately, though, this book offers a story of hope grounded in multispecies resilience.

All royalties from the sale of this book will go directly to the North Slope Borough Iñupiat History, Language and Culture Commission.

Andrew Macomber published a book, Buddhist Healing in Medieval China and Japan, with co-editor C. Pierce Salguero (University of Hawai'i Press, August 2020). He also contributes a chapter to the volume, "Ritualizing Moxibustion in the Early Medieval Tendai-Jimon Lineage," which examines how Buddhists sought to treat "corpse-vector disease," a mysterious illness that began afflicting aristocrats and emperors in the late twelfth century, through a combination of ritual therapeutics and Chinese medicine.