silk road + (original) (raw)

Abstract

Academy of Media Arts Cologne theory seminar (postgraduate program) summer semester 2015, winter semester 2015/16 Some thirty years ago, I asked [Arnold J.] Toynbee what historical period and place he would most like to have been born in. He replied Xinjiang (now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China) soon after the start of the Common Era, because Central Asia at that time was a meeting point for Buddhist, Indian, Greek, Iranian, and Chinese cultures. -- Daisaku Ikeda (Japanese thinker) Starting no later than 2000 years ago, the Silk Road connected East Asia and Europe through trade and cultural transfers. With its breadth of influence, degree of connectivity and interactivity, the Silk Road in its many different variations is the first significant transnational project of the human kind. The land routes of the Silk Road gradually waned when sea trading routes advanced, lending the Silk Road new cultural meanings. As the world strode into the New Era when the transnational project was no longer based on mutual ground, order-imposing technologies were adopted, leading ultimately to the fall of transnationalization to imperialism and colonialism, the symptom of which – with advanced capitalism and its celebrated byproduct of globalization – we still feel today. The topic of the seminar is as much the Silk Road itself and what it symbolizes –nomadism, syncretism, rethinking nationalism and borders of all kinds. We will take transhistorical lines of flight to find strange connections that help us unpack our current frame of global geopolitics.

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