HILD 12: Individual Medium Post 1
How might paying attention to sound/soundscapes help us think about all of the ways that capitalism destroys our relationships to each other, as well as about how people continue to form new relationships with each other? Think about this question by engaging Goffe’s concept of extra-coloniality.
After considering Tao Leigh Goffe’s article, “Bigger than the Sound: The Jamaican Chinese Infrastructures of Reggae,” paying attention to soundscapes helps us to understand how capitalism, by nature, encourages competition, and thus destroys our relationships to each other. Since only the most strong and successful businesses survive capitalism, such competition drives businesses to do whatever means necessary in order to stay on top, especially when the two businesses have completely different cultures and ideals such as Jamaicans and the Chinese. For instance, when the Chinese first began settling in Jamaica, they were met with strong resistance by native Afro-Jamaicans through negative portrayals as “forming a monopoly in small retail as a middleman minority with proximity to the white colonial structure” (Goffe, 98). The very existence of Chinese retail stores represented a threat to native Jamaican businesses and ideals, and as a result the Chinese were demonized through the juxtaposition with the negative views toward White settler colonialism, igniting the Afro-Chinese conflict.
On the other hand, paying attention to soundscapes also helps us understand how capitalism influences different groups to come together and cooperate towards a mutually beneficial arrangement, and thus forms new relationships with each other. For example, after native Jamaicans and Chinese settlers interacted with each other, Afro-Chinese communities not only got along with each other, but also flourished. It turned out that Chinese shops served as the perfect place for recreational dance and music which, in turn, led to the cultural exchange of the musical genre known as reggae. This exchange of culture ultimately led to reggae’s global popularity and was pivotal in the rise of Jamaica’s economic standing (Goffe, 98–99). The reggae phenomenon would never have surged in popularity as much as it did had it not been for the Afro-Chinese relationships that guaranteed its spread and enjoyment.
How might our understanding of Honolulu’s Chinatown change if we engaged this question of sound?
Similarly to Jamaica, the Chinese influence also spread to the United States of America. So much so that one can hardly find a single state without a Chinatown or, at the very least, a dense community of Chinese peoples. When I look at Hawaii and Honolulu’s Chinatown, I see a classic representation of culture shock and the tendency for same-culture peoples to stick together and form their own miniature communities away from neighboring ones in order to develop independently from one another. However, when factoring in the question of sound and soundscapes, my understanding shifts to one that considers the effects of sound on the building of infrastructures or, as Goffe notes, the “‘sound,’ or soundsystem, is a technological symbiosis of people… Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space” (Goffe, 99). With this in mind, Honolulu’s Chinatown can be seen as a building of infrastructure between native Hawaiians and the Chinese through the exchange of goods, values, and ideals over Hawaiian space.
