Beyond the Ethnic Enclave: Interethnicity and Trans-spatiality in an Australian Suburb

This ethnographic study investigates a suburban place in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. It aims to reconsider the spatial formation of ethnic Chinese in a Western immigrant society beyond conventional notions about a Chinatown, an enclave, or an ethnoburb. In public enunciations, this local district, Box Hill, is depicted as an emerging Chinese enclave. In contrast, this study sheds light on multicultural engagements, interethnic interactions, and translocal and transnational mobility among the subjects who are integral to the production of the Box Hill space, through their narratives and experiences that are all in some way linked to Box Hill. This study explores everyday accommodations of multiculturalism, and yet expands this notion by underlining intersecting concepts beyond culture which together produce narratives about a suburban Chinatown. The conceptual framework of interconnectivity suggests relations and links as well as interstices and discontinuities that undermine enclave theories and to which place-making practices across ethnicity and space are integral. [Chinatown, ethnic enclave, ethnoburb, interconnectivity, Chinese immigrants].