Friday, November 8, 2024 | 3:30PM-5:00PM | SOS 250 | RSVP 

EASC Guest Speaker Series: Talk by Dr. Ed Pulford (University of Manchester) with Faculty Moderator Prof. Joshua Goldstein
 

In many global locations, crossing state borders involves a sense of temporal shift. As migrants or travellers, modern citizen-subjects perceive a world divided into realms of greater or lesser ‘development’ or ‘backwardness,’ containers for the big-H national Histories written following European Enlightenment and empire. Yet inhabitants of (post)socialist states are inheritors of particularly intense constructions of both linear state borders and linear senses of time. As this talk explores drawing on a new book, at the three-way convergence of China, North Korea and Russia, populations with similarly stark but also very different experiences of socialism and its ambivalent aftermaths interact regularly, and in doing so shed unique light on the progressive state projects which have swept this borderland. Everyday cross-border encounters bring the temporal ideas spawned by Maoist, Soviet and Kimist socialisms, the Soviet collapse and ‘rise’ of China into direct contact. As a decade of fieldwork shows, borderlanders here remain haunted by divergent visions of progress and struggle to see their neighbours as ‘coevals’ in an era of postsocialist commerce and utilitarian friendships.

This event is co-sponsored by the USC Department of Anthropology.