The Power of Blank Spaces in Building a New Nepal
Topics: Political Geography
, Development
, Asia
Keywords: Critical cartography, Belt and Road Initiative, infrastructures, geopolitics, volumes, China, Tibet, Nepal
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 06:25 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 07:40 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 55
Authors:
Galen Murton, James Madison University
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Abstract
A variety of maps depict a usefully approximate but inexact network of roads, rails, sealanes, and other transport infrastructures to represent something called China’s Belt and Road Initiative. And yet, for a global infrastructural program that reflects and advances Beijing’s new position as a leader of international development, BRI maps remain largely imprecise and unofficial. Taking this ‘useful fuzziness’ (Nairns and Agnew 2019) as a starting point and drawing on methods of critical cartography, I show that BRI-related infrastructure projects throughout the Tibetan Plateau and Nepal Himalaya remain conspicuously absent from all but the most regional and state-level maps. By reading these BRI maps as texts of ‘cartographic silence’ (Harley 2001), I then ask what work they do (Wood 2010) in the negative register of empty space.
In contrast, however, to this apparent BRI invisibility, Chinese-facilitated development programs within Nepal are widely embraced and promoted as grand and spectacular things. To be sure, the BRI is very much present in Nepal – discursively, materially, and cartographically – and attention to the BRI is anticipated throughout the country across a range of social and spatial landscapes. That is, Chinese development in Nepal advances national promises and hopes for financial, hydrological, infrastructural, and geopolitical futures that operate volumetrically. Following this friction of representation in the terraforming of a new Nepal, I analyze the apparent paradox between the BRI as invisible thing and BRI as promised future to show the manifold ways in which infrastructures articulate politics and, vice-versa, how politics articulate infrastructures.