Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Sher Banu A.L. Khan, Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

An evocative and enigmatic story of East and West peacefully embraced in cultural, technological and trade exchange, the Silk Road has become one of the key geocultural and geostrategic concepts of the 21st Century, and a platform for international trade, diplomacy, infrastructure development and geopolitical ambition. Identified by two principal routes – maritime and overland – the Silk Road is a geocultural imaginary of connected pasts that now stretches across the Indian Ocean and Eurasian landmass.

Narratives of history tell us much about the anxieties, hopes and struggles of the present. For much of the 20th Century the Silk Road received little attention, overshadowed by nationalism and its invented pasts, and a world dominated by conflict and Cold War standoffs. So what does a concept invented in 1877 tell us about the modern era, and why did it require the events of the 1990s for such a stylized depiction of premodern globalization to become so popular? And why exactly, did one Silk Road become many?

This talk reveals the different paths the Silk Road has taken towards global fame, a century after the first evidence of contact between China and Rome was unearthed in the remote regions of Central Asia. It will highlight the modern reinvention of Marco Polo, the links between historical Buddhist and Maritime Silk Roads and the Digital and Health Silk Roads of the 21st Century, and why shipwrecks salvaged from Southeast Asian waters now enter a complex world of geocultural politics. In tracing these and other themes, the talk will set the scene for a discussion of the book The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Tim Winter is Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute of National University of Singapore, and was previously Professorial Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council and is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Tim’s interests largely revolve around understanding how the past comes to be constructed for public audiences and for diplomatic, geopolitical and nationalistic purposes. His current interests include the re-emergence of civilizational discourses from rising and middle powers across Eurasia, and how this speaks to current debates about a shifting world order. Tim also has projects examining maritime history politics, focusing on Southeast Asia’s response to the cultural internationalism of India and China. His recent articles on these topics are published in Geopolitics, International Affairs, International Journal of Cultural Policy, and his latest books are 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).

Yang Yang is a research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Human Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on transnational religious networks and the politics of ethno-religious identity in northwestern China. Her dissertation adopted an ethnographic approach to analysing the impacts of Hui Muslims’ grass-roots connections to non-Chinese Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in Hui’s everyday lives in Xi’an, China. Her current research examines transnational cultural heritage-based diplomacy between China and Southeast Asia under the discourses of the Silk Road.

The conceptual underpinnings of Kwa Chong Guan’s work are the interstices of history, security studies and international relations of Southeast Asia, with a focus on the implicit narratives underlying our framing of regional security. As Senior Fellow at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies of Nanyang Technological University, he continues to support a series of regional security projects with other regional institutions. These range from maritime security to non-traditional security issues of energy security, cybersecurity, nuclear energy safety and security and biosecurity. At the History Department of the National University of Singapore and Associate Fellow at the Temasek History Research Centre at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, he is interested in issues in the long cycles and deep history of Southeast Asian history and interfacing of the textual records with the archaeological evidence.

James D Sidaway has served as Professor of Political Geography at National University of Singapore (NUS) since January 2012. Previously he was Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam and prior to that Professor of Human Geography at Plymouth University, UK. During the 1990s, James was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK. His main research interests are; political geography and geopolitics, especially of cities, states and conflicts and the history and philosophy of geography. Together with colleagues at NUS, James has guest edited several journal special issues co-authored several papers on China’s BRI. For further details, please see: https://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geojds/.

REGISTRATION

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