Events at The University of Manchester
  • University home
  • Events
  • Home
  • Exhibitions
  • Conferences
  • Lectures and seminars
  • Performances
  • Events for prospective students
  • Family events
  • All Events

CIDRAL Public Lecture: Wiktor Marzec (Warsaw): From Cotton and Smoke: Lodz – the Industrial City and Discourses of Ansynchronous Modernity

image
Dates:9 October 2019
Times:17:00 - 19:00
What is it:Lecture
Organiser:School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
Who is it for:University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students, General public, Post 16
See travel and contact information
Add to your calendar

Other events

  • In category "Lecture"
  • In group "(ALC) Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Arts and Languages"
  • In group "(ALC) Russian and East European Studies"
  • By School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

This event is part of CIDRAL's Work, Leisure, Culture strand.

Co-hosted by the Russia and Eastern European Studies Seminar.

Wiktor Marzec (University of Warsaw) will deliver a public lecture entitled 'From Cotton and Smoke: Lodz – the Industrial City and Discourses of Ansynchronous Modernity'.

In my lecture I will attempt to forge a practical approach for researching and analysing multi-layered settings of debates about being modern in the cities of the Global East. The insights are grounded in a larger, “longitudinal” research project conducted in recent years with a team of historians, sociologists and cultural theorists. Our initial case study has been focussed on a particular location, a textile industrial hub, the city of Lódz in today’s central Poland. The project examined local press debates during four pivotal periods, each of which stimulated self-reflection on the idea of the modern city: Rapid industrial growth in the tsarist borderlands; State crafting after the First World War; Socialist restructuring after 1945; Transition and deindustrialization after 1989. Together these insights constitute a multifaceted portrait of twentieth-century urban experience beyond the metropolis, in different historical contexts.

The urban debates are marked by a constant urge to become “truly modern” - whatever that meant in each particular context. This motive, perpetually surfacing in different historical moments, fanned the desire for the urban self-assertion of the local elites, despite the fact that the actual “modernity” of the examined city was simultaneously the reason of its wide-spread rejection among Polish symbolic elites. Against this background, asynchronous modernity appears as a deeply historicizing description of attitudes of the local actors, who in their practical knowledge and vernacular theorizing positioned themselves in the heterogenous modern world. What I want to stress is their own, self-imposed feeling of inadequacy, will to improve, and problematic position toward the present state of affairs – an attempt to be modern according to their own changing and contested imaginations. In this way, the asynchronous status of Eastern modernity is deeply historicized, as a category of practice employed by the historical actors themselves. This allows us to maintain the sensitivity for local specificities resulting from the global positionality of the region, with the wide-spread feeling of inferiority, lack and oppression, having tangible consequences. Yet, it is no longer a top-bottom gesture of placement on any hierarchy of modernity and progress. It is a locally and contextually imagined modernity, which perpetuates progress, no longer a teleological one, but always unfolding from within a particular historical moment instead.

Wiktor Marzec was educated at the Central European University, Budapest. He is an Assistant Professor and project leader in The Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. He is the author of Rising Subjects. The 1905 Revolution and the Origins of Modern Polish Politics (forthcoming with Pittsburgh UP) and several articles on Poland within the Russian Empire focusing on labor history and history of concepts. Currently he runs a comparative project on political trajectories of the late tsarist borderlands.

From Cotton and Smoke: Lodz – Industrial City and Discourses of Asynchronous Modernity, 1897–1994, eds. Agata Zysiak, Kamil ?miechowski, Kamil Piska?a, Wiktor Marzec, Kaja Ka?mierska, and Jacek Burski, was recently published by Jagiellonian University Press.

Travel and Contact Information

Find event

A115
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester

Contact event

Tristan Burke

tristan.burke@manchester.ac.uk

Share / follow event

Contact us

  • +44 (0) 161 306 6000

Find us

The University of Manchester
Oxford Rd
Manchester
M13 9PL
UK

Connect with the University

  • Facebook page for The University of Manchester
  • Twitter page for The University of Manchester
  • YouTube page for The University of Manchester
  • Google+ page for The University of Manchester
  • Pinterest page for The University of Manchester

  • Privacy /
  • Copyright notice /
  • Accessibility /
  • Freedom of information /
  • Charitable status /
  • Royal Charter Number: RC000797
  • Close menu
  • Home
    • Featured events
    • Today's events
    • The Whitworth events
    • Manchester Museum events
    • Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre events
    • Martin Harris Centre events
    • The John Rylands Library events
    • Exhibitions
    • Conferences
    • Lectures and seminars
    • Performances
    • Events for prospective students
    • Family events
    • All events