The Silk Roads @ 黑料网大事记 initiative brings together experts from across 黑料网大事记 in a program of interdisciplinary projects exploring the ancient and contemporary human connections and material exchanges across Eurasia and the seas. We use 鈥楽ilk Roads鈥 as a concept of interrelatedness, rather than defined geographical routes. Combining research projects with cultural events and teaching activities, this initiative aims to be a platform for developing collaborative grants, innovative teaching and community-facing events that position the university at the forefront of a new global research frontier sparked by major programs such as the PRC鈥檚 Belt and Road Initiative and the formation of new multilateral agencies that span Eurasia (such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; Shanghai Cooperation Organisation).
- Our people
- Seminars, workshops and events
- Exhibitions
- Peoples, Sounds, and Religions
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Thursday, 26 August 2021, 12:00 to 1:00pm
Title: Iranian Literature after the Islamic Revolution: The Case of Iranian Writers in Australia.听
In this seminar, Laetitia will discuss Iranian writers in Australia, in the context of her recently published book which听explores how Iranian literature, especially prose, has functioned and circulated from the 1979 revolution to the present.听The book analyses contemporary Iranian literature in both Iran and its diaspora, in relation to the social, economic, and political fields. It is based on 15 years of fieldwork and travels in Iran and countries of the Iranian diaspora (North America, Western Europe, and Australia). After underlining the main ideas of the book, Laetitia will focus on one chapter studying Iranian writers in Australia, make comparisons to other diasporic locations and argue听that Iranian writers in Australia 鈥 perhaps because of, rather than despite, the short history of migration 鈥 have adapted to their Australian readers quickly by selecting certain forms, genres, and topics听attractive to Australian readers.听
About the presenter: Laetitia Nanquette is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at 黑料网大事记. She studied in France, the United Kingdom, Iran, and the United States, before coming to Australia. Nanquette was a DECRA fellow of the Australian Research Council between 2015 and 2019.听She travels to Iran for research fieldworks and translates contemporary Persian literary texts into English and French.听Her first book was听Orientalism Versus Occidentalism. Literary and Cultural Imaging Between France and Iran Since the Islamic Revolution听(I.B. Tauris, 2013). Her work on Iranian literature has appeared in leading journals including听Iranian Studies, The Translator, Interventions.听听was published in May with Edinburgh University Press. -
10 August 2021, 12:00 to 1:00pm Online
Speaker:听Alison Betts
Title:听When China first met the West听
Although China鈥檚 cultural development rose in parallel with the other early great Old-World centres in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus valley, her physical isolation meant that contact between China and the west developed very slowly and very late, relative to the rest of Asia. This talk presents the recently documented and听remarkable story of the first east-west contact, a story that is almost invisible, except for fragile traces in the palaeobotanical record.听
About the Speaker
Professor Alison Betts听is Edwin Cuthbert听Hall Chair of Archaeology and Mythology of the Ancient Middle East at the University of Sydney. She specializes in the archaeology of the lands along the Silk Roads from the Near East to China, with a particular interest in nomadic peoples. She has worked extensively in eastern Jordan, Central Asia, and China, and currently run major field projects in Uzbekistan and Xinjiang, both of which have been supported by ARC Discovery grants.听
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13 July听2021, 5:30 pm鈥6:30 pm Online
Speaker:听Rachel Harris, SOAS.
Title:听Music-making, National Survival and Social Heat: Heritaging Uyghur Meshrep in Kazakhstan.
This talk is based on an ongoing British Academy Sustainable Development project, which partners with academics and community organisations in Kazakhstan. The project explores how Uyghurs in Kazakhstan engage with discourses and practices of preservation and revitalisation in their responses to China's policies of cultural erasure in the Uyghur homeland (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region).听听
The project focuses on meshrep, a type of all-male gathering involving music, dancing and joking, which plays a prominent role in modern imaginings of Uyghur national identity, and in local processes of community-making. Since 2009, Uyghurs in Kazakhstan have engaged in new forms of 鈥渉eritaging鈥 meshrep, attempting to revive their role as a medium for strengthening communities, and sustaining language and culture. I argue that the unruly, affective and performative aspects of meshrep in Kazakhstan are key to the success of these social goals, highlighting the role of these musical gatherings as a space for the negotiation of tensions between religion, nation, and what I term 'hot male sociality.'
About the Speaker
Professor Rachel Harris is an ethnomusicologist and she teaches at the School of Arts at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on Uyghur religious and expressive culture, and the politics of heritage in China and Central Asia. Her latest book '' is published by Indiana University Press. She currently serves as principal investigator on a sustainable development to revitalise Uyghur cultural heritage in Kazakhstan.
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Tuesday, 22 September 2020. Online seminar: 12:30pm - 2pm听
Title:听Exiles or Intermediaries? Uyghurs in the Interwar Middle East听
Dr David Brophy
Abstract:听
Worsening political repression in Xinjiang has raised the question of the degree and nature of support for the Uyghur cause in the wider 鈥淚slamic world.鈥 Most discussion of Uyghur鈥痚xile political activity in the Middle East begins with the 1949 Chinese revolution and the relocation of prominent Uyghur activists to Turkey. This talk examines a series of individuals鈥痜rom Xinjiang who were active in the Middle East in the interwar period, with an emphasis on Egypt as a hub of intellectual exchange. While in some respects these activities laid the鈥痜oundations for the emergence of pro-independence agitation from the 1950s onwards, they also form part of a wider milieu of pan-Islamic and pan-Asianist thinking, which offered Xinjiang鈥疢uslims a role in mediating, as opposed to interrupting, the growing ties between Republican China and the Islamic world.听
About the speaker:听
David Brophy is a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney. He is the author of鈥疷yghur Nation鈥(Harvard 2016), and translator of the forthcoming鈥疘n Remembrance of the Saints鈥(Columbia 2020).
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Wednesday, 1 July 2020 - Online seminar - 5pm - 6.30pm (Sydney time)
罢颈迟濒别:鈥Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilities in and out of the South China Sea听
Dr Edyta Roszko, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway
Subsidised, militarised and state-supported fishers of Vietnam and China are at the forefront of the South China Sea dispute. Political scientists and economists have largely assumed that fishers, responding to regulations and incentives, are instruments of their states鈥 geopolitical agendas. This present-centric approach obscures the actual motivations and modalities of fishers鈥 expansion of their fishing domains. It also downplays the inter-ethnic networks which connect different fishers beyond state territories and localised fishing grounds in both past and present. Using a combination of ethnography and historiography, this research analyses how fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader, smuggler, and militia. I argue that these shifting occupational categories are predicated on ethnic networks within and beyond states. They reflect wider interconnections between modern state-supported and technology-driven fisheries with older pre-nation-state patterns of mobility, producing new forms of versatility under the states鈥 radars.听
About the Speaker:听
Edyta Roszko is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. Her research interests include religion and politics in Vietnam, maritime 'Silk Roads', and oceans and seas that emerge as social, political and economic arenas. Funded by European Research Council, her current project Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilities in and out of the South China Sea (TransOcean), expands her geographic field beyond Vietnam and China to include other global regions in Oceania and West and East Africa. Her monograph Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam is forthcoming in October 2020 with NIAS Press.听