Acts of Ignorance: shared past, common future and the politics of sight

Critical analyses of China’s vision for new world order have become a top priority for Washington and many of its allies. While China’s ambition to establish its own international authority is no longer subject to debate, many observers still argue that Beijing lacks the credibility and legitimacy to assert its global visions. Partially, this lack is associated with the ambiguity of official statements, convoluted investment deals, and instances of pushbacks from various partners, especially as part of Belt Road projects. Given the profound impact of visuality in structuring our collective “common sense,” this paper explores questions of resonance and legitimacy by examining how local communities – both in China and beyond - (dis)engage with the official Belt Road vision of a shared past and common future. The paper especially focuses on the ways in which communities, located alongside the maritime routes, appropriate history and heritage as a way of assigning meaning and value to the connection between the past and the present. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, and his conceptualizations of the politics of aesthetics and “aesthetic ignorance”, the paper shows how ignoring calls to revive a shared history allows local communities to make sense of their place in a rapidly evolving world order. The turn to visuality and aesthetic practices also allows for productive exploration of political agency beyond the precedence of pushbacks and resistance to China’s economic outreach. Certainly, the consistent and widespread choice of unseeing a common past could be understood as a direct rebuttal and powerful opposition to Beijing’s political discourse and the Belt Road itself. Yet, I suggest the interplay between visibility and invisibility in the representation of the maritime past speaks to two overarching traits across many local communities. First, historical uneasiness with external imposition; and second, enduring identification with a post-colonial quest for self-determination. As such, at the local level, and where maritime interactions are concerned, the politics of sight reveals not only the “act of ignoring” and displacement of Beijing’s global vision; in addition, it offers critical resources in our efforts to rethink how we conceptualize and create tangible responses to the Belt Road.