Reconfiguring colonial legacies: a performative framework for heritage tourism in urban spaces

This paper advances a performative framework for analysing how colonial legacies are continually re-enacted through heritage tourism in urban China. Focusing on two former concession areas (Shamian Island in Guangzhou and the Italian-style Town in Tianjin), it examines how semi-colonial spaces are transformed into consumable sites of cosmopolitan nostalgia and urban leisure. Drawing on field observation, interviews, and policy analysis, the study identifies three interrelated mechanisms of performative heritage-making: discursive enactment, material–aesthetic staging, and embodied participation. Together these processes demonstrate that colonial heritage is not simply represented or preserved but performed through speech, space, and bodily practice. Heritage tourism operates as a performative infrastructure that turns colonial heritage into affective and economic capital while displacing critical engagement. In contrast to dominant decolonisation discourses, China’s heritage governance re-narrates the colonial past through performance rather than resistance, mobilising aesthetic and experiential practices to align historical memory with contemporary political and developmental goals. The study thus contributes to critical heritage and tourism scholarship by theorising heritage as a performative process that mediates power, affect, and identity in postcolonial urban modernity.