EALC Speaker Series
Speaker: Mark E. Frank
Research talk:
Title: Elemental Nationalism: Views of “China” from Earth and Air
Abstract: People have long seized on that which they consider elemental as building blocks of their symbolic worlds, including their national identities. Recent work in the environmental humanities contends that attention to “elemental materiality” can help us to decenter the human and think ecologically about social issues. In that vein, this talk looks at the formation of Chinese national identity from two fresh perspectives: firstly, human engagements with the earth, and secondly, human engagements with the atmosphere. The terrestrial perspective is more intuitive, since the concept of “national soil” persist into the twenty-first century. I connect this concept to the history of agrarian fundamentalism in twentieth century China, which forces us to grapple with the materiality of land and soil and disrupts popular ideas about the nature of nationalism. The celestial view is more counterintuitive: though tianxia (“under heaven”) is a popular shorthand term for China, it is typically land, not sky, that people see as constituting their national “geobody”. However, the history of atmospheric science in China reveals that scientists operating under international standards developed notions of the “Chinese climate”, in which China appeared to be a natural object. Taken together, these Janus-like perspectives help us to recognize the role of elemental forces in intellectual perceptions of China as a sovereign, limited, and transhistorical entity during the twentieth century.
Time: 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM, March 12 (Wednesday), 2025
Location: Lucy Ellis Lounge
Bio: Mark E. Frank is an historian of modern China in global context and an Assistant Professor of History at Fulbright University Vietnam. He completed his PhD in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UIUC in 2020 and spent one year as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Environmental Humanities at Yale University before moving to Vietnam to teach at Fulbright, where he is also the coordinator for the History program. His research interests include human relations with the environment, the history of science and technology, nationalism, and ethnic relations in modern China and surrounding regions. He is currently writing a book titled “The Rooted State: Plants and Power on Chinese Frontiers” that draws connections between agrarian ideology, environmental practice, and ethnic relations along the Chinese frontier during the early twentieth century.
