Thursday, April 18, 2018
Noon to 1:30 pm
The Faculty Club
Biography
Tamara Chin is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies. She works on comparative approaches to early Chinese literature, and on the modern politics of antiquity. Her first book, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014), received the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. She is currently completing a second monograph, The Silk Road Idea: A History of Connected History, 1870-1970; and a volume of original annotated translations, Readings in Early Chinese Economic Thought.
For many, China’s recent One Belt One Road initiative poses a challenge to US hegemony. The “New Silk Road” infrastructure linking Asia, Africa and Europe asserts not simply a new world order, but also a new historical narrative—that of the modern restoration of an ancient world order once dominated by China’s silk trade.
This talk explores the modern politics of antiquity. It gives a brief history of the modern idea of the Silk Road, focusing on the Cold War period, when China’s diplomacy with the newly decolonized world popularized an Afro-Asian Silk Road that differed from the West’s Euro-Asian Silk Road. The Silk Road then, as now, became a contested geospatial framework through which historians, artists, and policy-makers—from Beijing to Mogadishu, Delhi to London--reimagined both past and future global connections.