The Afro-Asian Silk Road: Chinese Experiments in Postcolonial Premodernity
Abstrak
Abstract This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China's connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the Cold War, China's Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West's Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China's short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.
Penulis (1)
Tamara T. Chin
Akses Cepat
- Tahun Terbit
- 2021
- Bahasa
- en
- Total Sitasi
- 10×
- Sumber Database
- Semantic Scholar
- DOI
- 10.1632/S0030812920000061
- Akses
- Open Access ✓