Re-Enacting the Silk Road: Transnational Encounters for the 21st Century

Informed by the AHRC's 'Translating Cultures' highlight notice, the research network will investigate the concept of the Silk Road as a seemingly privileged site of cultural transmission, translation and exchange, in order to consider its radical potential to challenge the bounded, oppositional geopolitics that still determine the conventional categories of 'East' and 'West'. An international, inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral forum, the network is intended to spark new conversations and collaborations between academics, travel writers, professionals from museums, art galleries and the tourist industry, and practitioners in the creative and visual arts. In doing so, it will serve to enable a wider public re-imagining of this ancient, long-distance trade route linking towns and cities from eastern China to western Europe, so that it speaks to 21st century global concerns.

The Silk Road has featured prominently in historical geographies of Europe and Asia for more than a century, and remains a powerfully evocative metaphor around which narratives of east-west relationships are constructed. Investigations into the economic, cultural and intellectual exchanges between Europe and Asia are almost as old as the interactions themselves. The systematic study of ancient overland trade routes however, only began in the late 19th century when European historians, geographers and archaeologists produced the first scholarly accounts of the main trans-continental conduits along which people and commodities, particularly high-value, low-bulk textiles such as silk, moved in waxing and waning cycles over many centuries. Classic early works on the Silk Road include those by Scottish Orientalist Henry Yule (1820-1880), who re-introduced the adventures of the Venetian traveller Marco Polo to the Victorian reading public, and German explorer and academic Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905), who coined the phrase 'Seidenstrasse' in 1877. These pioneering ideas were developed in the early 20th century by explorers, collectors and writers such as the controversial Swedish adventurer Sven Hedin (1865-1952) and the remarkable Hungarian-born traveller Aurel Stein (1862-1943), as well as by more sedentary geopolitical theorists such as Halford Mackinder (1861-1947). Since World War Two, new forms of historical and archaeological research have transformed the terms in which the Silk Road has been interpreted, rejecting the imperialist connotations of earlier accounts and emphasising instead the shared traditions and mutually constitutive encounters between regions shaped by comparable though different economic, social and intellectual forces. Despite these more critical approaches however, exoticising imaginative geographies of the routeway persist. Stories of the Silk Road reproduce images not only of intercultural exchange, but also of luxury, the exotic and the adventurous, as evident in contemporary travelogues, literary fiction, television programmes and other cultural performances produced and consumed in both western and eastern countries.

In the context of the rapid economic development of China, India and other Asian powers, and in response to increasing popular interest in the Silk Road, this network seeks to develop recent critical re-assessments of east-west economic, cultural and intellectual translation and exchange, so as to extend their impact within such public sectors as tourism, heritage and the arts. Although the network will include specialists in Silk Road studies, the workshops are not primarily designed to advance historical and archaeological research. Rather, these events will bring together academics and non-specialist professionals from the creative and tourist industries, travel writing, and the visual arts to explore how recent scholarship on the Silk Road might facilitate a wider public re-imagining of this ancient trade route.

Serving to support a public re-imagining of the concept of the Silk Road through particular creative and public engagement activities, the proposed network has the capacity for cultural and economic impact on a local, national and international scale. In particular, the network has the potential to enhance the international influence of the creative and cultural sector by laying the foundations for ongoing relationships between museums, galleries and archives in the UK and China. In the medium term it is hoped that this will be pursued through the development of a post-network arts project, for which additional research funding will be sought, involving two artists-in-residence from east and west who will be charged with producing new images, representations and enactments to be displayed in a travelling exhibition about the Silk Road's past, present and future, which will itself move along one version of the routeway through four or five cities.

In the short term the network will directly benefit particular organisations and individuals in the public sector, thanks to our collaborative partnerships with Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery and the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers), London. In particular, it will contribute directly to programmes of activity organised by Nottingham Museums Service and the RGS-IBG, London, as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, which aims to showcase innovation and excellence in museums, libraries and archives to a worldwide audience.

The network's second workshop is scheduled to coincide with an international exhibition at Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Living In Silk. Drawing together exhibits from the Museum's own collection of Chinese material, with a substantial loan from the China National Silk Museum, Hangzhou, the exhibition celebrates the global exchanges that have shaped and continue to shape fashion in the East Midlands, as part of Dress the World, a collaborative programme of three East Midlands' exhibitions. In doing so, the network will feed into the history of the local textile industry, with Nottingham as a place of textile heritage and contemporary fashion (e.g. Paul Smith). A further 'local' impact of this partnership with Nottingham Museums will come through the participation of a group of young people from across Nottinghamshire in the second workshop, where they will be invited to discuss their role in curating the Living in Silk exhibition.

The network will also contribute to the public engagement activities of the RGS-IBG. In collaboration with key network members, the Society will organise a display of historic collections materials relating to the Silk Road, which will be available to the public, as well as the participants of the third workshop. Additionally, further public events will be organised at the RGS-IBG to coincide with the workshops, including their 'Be Inspired' afternoon talks, and a Collections Showcase, which will draw on the expertise of those involved in the research network.

Finally, the RGS-IBG provides a useful opportunity to engage with travel writers and professionals from the tourist industry, through the organisation of a 'Discovering' or travel industry event focusing on the Silk Road. It is in this arena that the proposed network has the capacity for further impact. In particular, the programme has the potential to impact on the commercial sector by enabling the UK travel and tourism industry to develop more effectively, but also in a socially and environmentally responsible way, in an increasingly competitive international market. By bringing representatives from the travel industry together with those from the cultural and heritage sectors in the east and west, the network is concerned with promoting sustainable and historically sensitive travel from east to west, and west to east, that helps to conserve the historic environment of the Silk Road.