Heritage and History in the China–Australia Migration Corridor traces the material and social legacy of migration from China to Australia from the 1840s until the present day. The volume offers a multidimensional examination of the material footprint of migration as it exists at either end of the migration corridor stretching between Zhongshan county in south China and Australia. Spanning the fields of heritage studies, migration studies, and Chinese diaspora history, Denis Byrne, Ien Ang, Phillip Mar, and the other contributors foreground a transnational approach to the history and heritage of migration, one that takes account of the flows of people, ideas, objects, and money that circulate through migration corridors, forming intricate ongoing bonds between those who migrated to Australia and their home villages in China. ‘This is an excellent new addition to the growing literature on the history, heritage, and archaeology of the Chinese diaspora and transnational Chinese migration. This book is poised to be a major contribution to the history and heritage of the Chinese diaspora.’ —Barbara L. Voss, Stanford University ‘The quality of the research and writing is very high, and the theoretical framing is sophisticated and original. This book makes a much-needed contribution to overseas Chinese heritage studies, Chinese Australian history, transnational theory, and migration history. It also provides a model for how to work respectfully and successfully with descendants and community.’ —Sophie Loy-Wilson, University of Sydney

The China-Australia Migration Corridor traces the legacy of migration from China to Australia from the 1840s until the present day. It offers a multidimensional examination of the footprint of migration as it exists, stretching between Zhongshan county in south China and Australia. Spanning heritage and migration studies, as well as Chinese diaspora history, this book highlights a transnational approach to the heritage of migration and the flows of people, ideas, objects and money that circulate through migration corridors. Intricate, ongoing bonds are formed between those who migrated to Australia and their homes in China.

The Heritage Corridor argues for a transnational approach to investigating and recording heritage places that emerge from histories of migration. Addressing the material legacy of migration, this book also relates it to issues of contemporary importance. Presenting an image of the built environment of migration as one shaped by the ongoing flows of people, ideas, objects and money that circulate through migration corridors, Byrne proposes that houses and other structures built by migrants in their home villages in China over the period 1840–1940 should be seen as crystallisations of the labour, aspirations and longings enacted and experienced by their builders while overseas. Demonstrating that the material world of the migrant is distributed across transnational space, the book calls for an approach to the heritage of migration that is similarly expansive. It proposes and illustrates new methods and strategies for heritage practice. The Heritage Corridor is a book for scholars and students in the fields of critical heritage studies, migration studies and Chinese diasporic mobilities. It is designed to be accessible to heritage practitioners, readers with an interest in the material worlds of migration, past and present, and to all those with an interest in the ‘archaeology’ of transnational migration.

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics surveys the intersection of heritage and politics today and helps elucidate the political implications of heritage practices. It explicitly addresses the political and analyses tensions and struggles over the distribution of power. Including contributions from early-career scholars and more established researchers, the Handbook provides global and interdisciplinary perspectives on the political nature, significance and consequence of heritage and the various practices of management and interpretation. Taking a broad view of heritage, which includes not just tangible and intangible phenomena, but the ways in which people and societies live with, embody, experience, value and use the past, the volume provides a critical survey of political tensions over heritage in diverse social and cultural contexts. Chapters within the book consider topics such as: neoliberal dynamics; terror and mobilisations of fear and hatred; old and new nationalisms; public policy; recognition; denials; migration and refugeeism; crises; colonial and decolonial practice; communities; self- and personhood; as well as international relations, geopolitics, soft power and cooperation to address global problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics makes an intervention into the theoretical debate about the nature and role of heritage as a political resource. It is essential reading for academics and students working in heritage studies, museum studies, politics, memory studies, public history, geography, urban studies and tourism.

Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas is the first book to analyse the recent upsurge in museums on Chinese diasporas in China. Examining heritage-making beyond the nation state, the book provides a much-needed, critical examination of China’s engagement with its diasporic communities. Drawing on fieldwork in more than ten museums, as well as interviews with museum practitioners and archival study, Wang offers a timely analysis of the complex ways in which Chinese diasporas are represented in the museum space of China, the ancestral homeland. Arguing that diasporic heritage is highly ambivalent and introducing a diasporic perspective to the study of cultural heritage, this book opens up a new avenue of inquiry into the study and management of cultural heritage in China and beyond. Most importantly, perhaps, Wang sheds new light on the dynamic between China and Chinese diasporas through the lens of the museum. Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas takes a transnational perspective that will draw attention to the under-researched connections between heritage, mobility and meaning in a global context. As such, this cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to scholars and students working in the museum and heritage studies fields, as well as those studying Asia, China, migration and diaspora, anthropology, history and culture.

‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of ‘the East’ in ‘the West’. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference. By the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural constructions of Chinatown as an ‘other’ space – whether negative or positive – have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown. It speaks to the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia (and especially China) together; not just economically, but also socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further, the book elicits a particular sense of a place in Sydney’s Chinatown: that of an interconnected world in which Western and Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex delimitations. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global balance of power towards Asia, especially China.