Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Sabina Insebayeva, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Framed as a ‘revival’ of the Silk Roads for the 21st century, China’s Belt and Road Initiative rests on a compelling, romanticised idea of pre-modern history; a story of peaceful trade, of East meets West and of civilisations in harmonious dialogue. Such Silk Road themes were fashioned by explorers and scholars in Central Asia in the late 19th century, and in the aftermath of World War II and Cold War the Silk Road emerged as a platform for fostering intercultural dialogue, peace and tolerance. Today Beijing takes up such themes for its own strategic purposes and to link continents and partners by land and sea.

This presentation explores how a political economy of Belt and Road connectivity is transforming long-standing ideas about culture and history, reframing and displacing discourses of history and heritage rooted in national and ethnic categories with a language of routes and shared pasts.

It traces how this co-opting of the Silk Roads—overland and maritime—challenges canonical ideas about Afro-Eurasian histories of connectivity and communication, the prototypical categories of the modern and pre-modern, as well as the significance of Central Asia and the MENA and Indian Ocean regions within narratives of world culture and world history. Crucially, as China and other states seek influence by forging connectivities across multiple sectors, we are seeing new transcontinental, transoceanic imaginings of the past come to the fore. It is a geopolitical reality that folds in organisations such as UNESCO around the celebration of a heritage of intra-regional and inter-cultural dialogue.

The talk considers such issues by exploring questions of identity within today’s emergent geocultural politics of civilizational grandeur and associated transcontinental, transoceanic discourses of shared pasts.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tim Winter is Australian Research Council Professorial Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His work addresses how the past comes to be constructed and reconstructed for public audiences and for diplomatic, geopolitical and nationalistic purposes. He is the author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (Oxford University Press, 2022, see silkroadfutures.net).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.