About this Event
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Dr Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.
Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book explores "post-historical" Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics; the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea; and the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound "end of history" which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress.
Join us as Dr Ed Pulford, The University of Manchester, discusses his book 'Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea', examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, chaired by the Lau China Institute’s Dr Thomas White. Thurs 19 Feb, 5pm in Room 2.02, Bush House South, KCL Strand campus.
This is an in-person event. Registration is required. Those without tickets will not be admitted.
About the speakers:
Dr Ed Pulford is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at The University of Manchester. He is an anthropologist with research interests in the past and present of socialism, transnational and cross-border connections across Eurasia, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. He completed his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2017, and before joining Manchester in 2020 held postdoctoral research positions at Hokkaido University in Japan and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
His first book Mirrorlands (Hurst, 2019) is an anthropological and historical account of life in the borderlands between China and Russia, which argues that senses of nationhood and identity in each major power have emerged in reference to the other. His second book, entitled Past Progress (Stanford University Press 2024), explores how socialist projects in China, the Soviet Union and North Korea have shaped local people's understandings of time and 'progress'.
Dr Thomas White is a Lecturer in China and Sustainable Development at the Lau China Institute, King's College London. He has a PhD and MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and a BA from the University of Oxford. He is an Affiliate of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge. Thomas has previously worked at the University of Cambridge, and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He studied for a Diploma in Mandarin at SOAS, before living and working for several years in China. His first monograph, China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier, was published in 2024
Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions or specific participatory requirements.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bush House, 30 Aldwych, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
