China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, initiated 2013 under Xi Jinping) is a large transregional infrastructure project that aims to connect trade, politics and people between China, Africa, Europe and Asia to create “win-win-situations” and harmonious relations. Up until now, the BRI has built a network of individual projects and collective practices that span two thirds of the world’s population. It is not only goods, financial capital or technologies that circulate and anchor along China’s so-called “new silk roads” but also values, emotions and cultural practices. The latter are often contained in narratives that are communicated for and within so-called new silk road regions and affect the realities of participating local and regional actors of the BRI.
With our presentation, we introduce a decidedly (trans)cultural perspective on the BRI and its reciprocal relations in so-called new silk road regions, a perspective that has been largely neglected so far. In presenting examples of the fields of language and art, we shed light on dis/connecting cultural perceptions and practices in new silk road regions. We suggest concentrating on the narrative as a revealing conceptual and thematic figure of thought to tackle local responses to the BRI in new silk road regions. Narratives position and link events and realities in a strategic, coherent way in order to make sense of new and old phenomena.
Against this background, we are particularly interested in narratives of the “Chinese Dream”. Although the “Chinese Dream” as communicated by the Chinese leadership remains relatively vague it can be seen as the ideological background that materializes in the PRC's infrastructure projects around the world.
Chair: Adams Bodomo
Thursday, 15th June 2023, 3:00 pm
Department of African Studies - Seminar room 1
University Campus, court 5.1., Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Vienna
afrika@univie.ac.at, afrika.univie.ac.at
