Book Launch:
Going Backward and Forward at the Same Time: Ethnic Chrysalis and Making History Useful for Contemporary Ethnic Communities in Northeast China

Dr. Loretta Kim

10 April 2019 (Wed) 4:30-6:00
Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Loretta Kim will reflect on what she learned about crossing boundaries between academic disciplines and linking her interest in the past to contemporary issues related to ethnic and regional identities in Northeast China. She will explain how the process of tracing the impact of imperial administration on the Orochen people, who have and still maintain economic and social relations with relatives across the Sino-Russian border, led to her current projects on the classification of foodways and the data curation of non-Han names. Both of these studies explore how historical knowledge can inform everyday expressions of cultural identity and heritage preservation.

Ethnic Chrysalis is the first book in English about the early modern history of the Orochen, an ethnic group that has inhabited areas now belonging to the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. It examines how the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) was a formative period for Orochen identity.

Loretta Kim is assistant professor of China Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. She is a historian of late imperial and modern China. Her primary research areas include the comparative history of borderlands and frontiers, and Chinese ethnic minority languages and literatures. She is the author of Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration (2019).