HOMELAND RE-TERRITORIALIZED

Abstract

This paper examines migrants' use of the Internet to re-territorialize homeland, exploring the resurgence of geographical places in making and maintaining identities in the digital age. Conducting semi-structured interviews and participant observation, this research focuses on the London-based Chinese population and demonstrates various ways in which the Internet plays a key role in reinforcing these migrants' territorial attachment. In so doing, I seek to revisit the popular theorization that the Internet has led to the detachment of cultures from geographic places. The findings suggest that migrants use a variety of Internet applications to reproduce their home territories and ethnic cultural practices in both their intimate, personal spaces and public spaces. The linguistic, cultural, and social environments in China are transmitted into migrants' living rooms, London's Chinatown, and other public urban places through P2P applications, high-speed video sharing sites, and social networking sites. This online consumption of visual and audio products is often transmitted live, through which migrants' temporal practices in London become parallel to those in China. Through these uses of the Internet, the boundary between home and abroad is challenged and the power dynamics of the majority and minority surrounding urban land use are destabilized.

Keywords:

• Migration
• diasporas
• internet
• cities
• re-territorialization
• de-territorialization

Notes

Although there are Chinatowns in large cosmopolitan areas such as London and Manchester, they are primarily commercial areas and do not serve as ‘ethnic enclaves’ where the Chinese diaspora lives, unlike Chinatowns in other parts of the world, such as New York (Parker & Song 2006, p. 181; Song 1999).

Full-time students are excluded from the sample as the social settings and spatial experiences are largely different between students and full-time workers.

The most popular portal site where the informants obtain updated news is Sina (http://www.sina.com.cn). Web sites for diasporic Chinese around the globe that are most often visited by the informants include Powerapple (http://www.powerapple.com) and Chinaren (www.chinaren.com).

Although the music, videos, and other cultural products exchanged online are predominantly Chinese-speaking, there are also other cultural sources exchanged, including music and TV programmes from nearby Asian countries such as Japan and Korea, popular English-speaking TV series, and movies mostly from the United States. Popular P2P and video sharing sites among the informants include the P2P software PPStream, Xiaoli (http://www.xiaolu.cc), and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com).

The event was advertised in Chinatown arts space (http://www.chinatownartsspace.com), London Chinese community network (http://www.chinese-network.net), Spectrum Chinese community network (http://pswu.com), and the British Chinese community websites (www.dimsum.co.uk).