2 - Emotions and Memories of AfricAsia Solidarity: Unpacking the Role of Familiarity, Resonance, and Nostalgia

This paper examines the salient emotional discourses prevalent in Global South encounters, and investigates the means through which emotions are constructed, how they are diffused, and how they lend a political solidarity to Global South politics centering around positive attributes including solidarity, friendship, mutual respect, and so on. The paper aims to demonstrate that tapping into emotional resonance and triggers for expanding China’s influence in the Global South based on familiarity and resonance can both grow out of organic affinities (anti-colonial shared history) and also be cultivated by the state through creating memorials, diffusing narratives that aim at activating these shared emotions, and sometimes also constructing new narratives on the back of old histories, nostalgic remembering, and imagined or reimagined pasts. To illustrate this point, I examine the utilization of the Ancient Silk Roads and fifteenth century encounters between Chinese maritime navigators and Afro-Indian Ocean communities to present the Belt and Road Initiative as the new Silk Road which can revive the commercial prosperity of the Afro-Indian Ocean known to the area prior to the arrival of European imperial and colonial powers. The study contributes to scholarship that explores an array of nostalgic and other affectively charged narrative-memories in Global South politics.