The need for a transnational approach to the material heritage of migration: The China–Australia corridor

Abstract

Currently, a unilinear, nation-bounded approach is taken to the recording and interpretation of the material heritage of immigration in settler nations, largely ignoring the transnational social fields to which the immigrants who created the heritage places and buildings belonged. Focusing on Chinese migration to Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, I offer the ‘heritage corridor’ concept as better representing the transnationally ‘stretched’ or ‘distributed’ built environment emerging from the cross-border flows of people, objects, ideas and money to which migration typically gives rise. I argue that intensities of affect and emotion have acted to entangle migrants and their relatives remaining at home in this environment. Remittance payments from Chinese migrants in Australia are shown to have been instrumental in the building of houses, temples, schools, shops, roads and bridges in the emigrant villages of Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province, many of which are now regarded as heritage items.