ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a perspective on the role of media in the formation and maintenance of citizenship in migrant communities. Focusing on Chinese Australian children, we argue that their media consumption and interpretative practices are highly important to the production of migrant identity in a settler nation. In the following case study of first-generation migrant children in Western Australia, we trace the agnostic relationship between residual parental memories, emergent parental and child settler identities, and children’s attitudes to the parental homeland. The argument examines these sites of identity through media-related experience, but it also suggests that these sites are contingent and effective within the larger scope of political and social spheres of belonging. The premise of our suggestions is that the media are conditional to, although not guarantors of, a functioning modern public sphere.
