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The above image comes from a media pass to the 1988 The Grand Exhibition of Silk Road Civilizations held in the city of Nara. Drawn from the archives of Silk Road memorabilia, the pass tells us something about an important juncture in “Silk Road” history. The exhibition took place at a moment when international interest in the concept was gathering momentum. Its organizers were evidently aware that the term should be treated with care and caution and thus judiciously added quotation marks to qualify its usage. In what might seem to be an insignificant gesture, scare quotes signal to a reader the need to hold up a term for inspection. They attempt to withhold familiarity and its propensity to conceal any semantic ambiguities and inaccuracies that may be lurking below.
In the three decades since the exhibition, the term has increasingly naturalized such that grammatical qualifiers are seemingly no longer required. Indeed, despite widespread recognition that the Silk Road is a nineteenth-century invention, we have not seen a sustained debate about its merits and problems as a framework for understanding complex historical events spanning continents and centuries. Likewise, all too often Silk Road discourses present regions, cultures, and peoples in contrived and romanticized ways, and yet the concept has rarely been subject to the types of scrutiny familiar to postcolonial scholarship.
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