Past Progress
eBook - PDF

Past Progress

Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea

  1. 352 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Past Progress

Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea

About this book

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, 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's three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores "post-historical" Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics since high socialism's demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats 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. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

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Yes, you can access Past Progress by Ed Pulford in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Asian History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Illustrations
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Linguistic Conventions
  8. Introduction: Progresses Past and Present
  9. Part I: Posthistory
  10. Part II: History
  11. Part III: Prehistory
  12. Appendix A: Transcription Glossary
  13. Appendix B: Titles of Selected Treaties between China, Russia, and Korea
  14. Notes
  15. Bibliography
  16. Index
  17. Back Cover