VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

This paper critically examines how Macau’s fragmented postcolonial identity emerges through strategic heritage politics, selective nostalgia, cultural hybridity, and ambivalent memory practices. Challenging conventional decolonization narratives, Macau’s 1999 retrocession to China—distinctly framed as a negotiated return rather than liberation—set the stage for unique identity articulations. Drawing theoretically from Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, Garcia Canclini’s cultural negotiations, and Halbwachs’ collective memory, alongside regionally grounded analyses by Carmen Amado Mendes, Francisco Lima da Costa, and Maria José de Freitas, I demonstrate how heritage serves as a political and symbolic resource to manage competing narratives of Portuguese legacy and Chinese sovereignty. The research methodology involves analysis of architectural palimpsests and museum exhibitions that simultaneously preserve and erase the colonial past, crafting sanitized multicultural narratives while marginalizing contentious histories. The romanticized aesthetics of decadence and ruin, exemplified through symbolic sites and cinematic representations, further complicate heritage politics, illustrating the interplay between memory construction and purposeful forgetting. Following a structured progression, the paper examines how these architectural elements function as political resources, how aesthetics of decadence shape cultural narratives, and how Macau’s diasporic communities actively reconstruct fragmented identities across digital platforms, challenging dominant state-sponsored propaganda about heritage. Ultimately, this analysis positions Macau as a paradigmatic case, where nostalgia becomes mobilized to navigate postcolonial liminalities and secure geopolitical visibility, making explicit the political dynamics of memory and identity formation in contemporary heritage discourse.