Geopolitics is aesthetic: CPEC,space,and signage

Abstract

In this work, I focus on the Pakistani component of the Belt-and-Road-Initiative (BRI), the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to examine its public discourse. I pay attention to the CPEC and CPEC-enabled street signage (broadly understood) and explore how this signage unfolds in the Pakistani public spaces. My argument is three-pronged. First, I argue that the public signage as street level visual discourse promotes social governability of this initiative by aestheticizing its geopolitical objectives – manifesting China-Pakistan alliance; imagining the future with BRI; and crafting everyday aesthetics that enable Sinicization of local spaces. Aestheticization is done by seeking to make the BRI-CPEC part of everyday public imagination and common sense. Second, through the BRI-CPEC signage, geopolitics becomes vernacular and Pakistani spaces suture the local, the Anglicized and the Sinicized visuality, on the one hand. On the other, the signage arranges aesthetic polemics of the geopolitics by making room for the Chinese political idiom abroad. Third, as the regional strategic scenario around BRI-CPEC is fast changing, I argue that the signage constitutes aesthetic capital that strengthens the “inevitable” China-Pakistan bilateral relations. In presenting street-level visual discourse, I seek to diversify and expand ethnographic exploration of the BRI-CPEC programme. My specific contribution attends to the political discourse studies of the BRI-CPEC.