Mutual Learning among Civilizations through Comparative Literature Construction of Museum Discourse and Mutual Learning among Civilizations

Abstract

As one of the main fields for cultural dissemination, the museum preserves rich resources of cultural relics that carry the shared memory of the people along “the Belt and Road”（“B&R”）. The museum promotes cultural exchanges of the regions along “B&R”, and emphasizes a positive and far – reaching impact on their social development and national ideology. Acting as the historical basis, the museum also helps the countries along “B&R” to build “a community of shared future” as a “community of shared interest”. Utilizing museums to carry out cultural exchanges, the countries along “B&R” can deepen the consensus, acquire common knowledge of their shared heritage, and also restore and rebuild their sense of “community with a shared future”. Making the rich collections of cultural relics in the museums along the“B&R” come alive, the cultural dissemination can be promoted, the values of cultural heritage can be shared and spread to the greatest extent, and the confron­tation and conflict of civilizations can be better replaced by the mutual learning of different civilizations. The museums along “B&R” and their collections of cultural relics have precipitated the historical development of each country, and have also formed their own unique discourse tradition and narrative logic which not only convey different cultural values and spiritual temperaments in a specific way, but also strongly reflect the ability to spread the image of various countries and nations. By sorting out and analyzing the representative cases of mutual exchanges of museums along “B&R”, this article attempts to summarize and extract the charac­teristics of the discourse and narrative logic of various countries' use of museum resources for cultural communication. Combined with significant theories such as cross – cultural communication theory, this article also tries to analyze the important role of museum discourse in promoting mutual learning among civilizations and advancing the connectivity of people – to – people exchanges in the digital age and to discuss the feasible theory, method, and path for museums to participate in the construction of discourse system with Chinese characteristics.