The migration heritage corridor: transnationalism, modernity and race

Abstract

Currently, heritage practice brings a nation-centric lens to the heritage of migration, privileging narratives of arrival and settlement over narratives of return, circulatory transnational flows, and cross-border connectivity. Drawing on the case of Chinese migration to Australia in the period from the 1840s to the 1940s, the ‘heritage corridor’ concept is proposed here as an aid in conceptualising a heritage that escapes the nation-state frame of reference. The aspirational modernity of Chinese migrants in this period led them to construct new houses, schools, and infrastructure in their home villages in China using money earned in Australia, even though in Australia at this time Chinese migrants were characterised as premodern misfits by a white majority that saw itself as modern and progressive. In relegating Chinese migrants to the past, white Australia conferred on them a state of non-belonging that I argue is perpetuated in the country’s heritage system by a form of structural racism which, embedded in site listing processes, minimises the visibility of Chinese Australians in the heritage record.