Dr. Pulford's research focuses on experiences of socialism and empire in borderland and minority regions in Eurasia, including along the China-Russia border, the focus of his first two books. His most recent project examines the experiences of cross-border ‘Chinese’ minorities in Southeast, Central and Northeast Asia. In many global locations, crossing state borders involves a sense of temporal shift. Modern citizen-subjects often perceive a world divided into areas of greater or lesser ‘development’ or ‘backwardness’, containers for different versions of the big-H official Histories which nations have written since the era of European Enlightenment and empire. 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 varied aftermaths interact regularly, and in doing so shed unique light on the progressive schemes which have unfolded here.
