oa The Making of Chinese London: Diaspora and Heritage in the Digital Age

This article unpacks the way digital mediations of the city shape how diasporic individuals negotiate belonging and forge heritage. Drawing from an analysis of 40 storytelling tours with Chinese Londoners, this project examines how the everyday use of digital media facilitates new ways of remembering, performing, creating, and archiving diasporic heritage. I argue that digital diasporic practices reconfigure heritage away from essentialized, collective, and institutional preservation strategies to instead emphasize dynamic, individual, and forward- looking expressions of the diasporic self and lived experience. Such centring of the diasporic individual is furthered by the methodology, which incorporates physical and visual approaches that prompt not only a more nuanced understanding of the participants’ lived experiences, but also a generative, agentic process that itself constitutes heritage-making.