Affective encounters and urban heritage: Unpacking the interface/city assemblages of online Hanfu performances

Abstract

This paper engages with the discussions on affective platforms and digital urban scholarships by drawing on digital mundane practices and networked affect theory. In urban China, a growing trend involves visitors wearing Hanfu (a traditional Han Chinese clothing style) in heritage spaces and presenting themselves distinctively online. By employing multiple qualitative media methods on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform, we demonstrate how Hanfu performances involve certain interface/city assemblages of urban heritage spaces, through which digital, imaginary, and physical elements relationally converge. We argue that affect and emotion serve as vital mechanisms for mixing these multiple assemblages, facilitating their circulation and reproduction on social media platform that heavily relies on the algorithms of feedback loops. This specific affective-algorithmic mechanism enables individuals to collectively generate new expressions of and form attachments to heritage spaces, embedded within their mundane practices as they engage with collective memories, histories, heritage materiality, and urban public life. Moving beyond merely examining the digital-urban spectacle as an outcome of social media fashioning of urban spaces, this paper extends our understanding of digital-urban space-making by illuminating the ongoing process of (re)production and dissemination of the networked affect of urban space.