HILD 12 Individual post 1 wk4
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?
As Ruth Gilmore states in “Geographies of Racial Capitalism”, focusing on small scale subjects such as sound/soundscapes can reveal how capitalism affects relationships of people on a universal scale. As Gilmore adds in the short documentary, capitalism depends on racial hierarchy and requires inequality.
This definition of capitalism can be understood by the example of how the soundscape created by Jamaicans and the Chinese as a result of Capitalism created new relationships and also destroy relationships. In Goffe’s “Bigger than the Sound: The Jamaican Chinese Infrastructures of Reggae”, there is evidence how the plantations in Jamaica segregated the groups of Jamaicans and Chinese, but Chinese shopkeepers developed a new relationship with the Jamaicans that worked in the plantations as a result of capitalism, reflecting the extra-colonial aspect that Goffe introduces(100). The new relationship of the Chinese and Jamaicans which centered around sound was the result of capitalism and colonialism, but at the same time this extra-colonial relationship originally built by segregation in the plantation environment ultimately led to the destruction of this relationship. As mentioned previously, Gilmore claims that capitalism requires inequality, which is reflected by the destruction of this new extra-colonial relationship of the Chinese and Jamaicans. The Chinese shop which was the part of the new relationship were distrusted by the Jamaicans as “they were perceived to be unfairly profiting from black people” (Goffe 125).
Taking account of sound/soundscapes as in the case of Jamaica, we can apply these concepts to the relationships in Hawaii’s Chinatown. Capitalism, or rather the American plantation owners developed a new relationship between the native Hawaiians and the Chinese as a divide and conquer strategy as discussed by Saranillio in “Settler Colonialism” (294). Between the government and the plantation owners, a new relationship formed as a goal to obtain Hawaii to make profit and establish a military base. This lead to the burning of Hawaii’s Chinatown and producing Yellow Peril as a new relationship between the Americans and the East Asians. Moreover, Goffe’s extra-colonial relationship is also present in this situation, as there is a relationships between the two oppressed groups of capitalism, Hawaiians and Chinese, who both compete who was “more oppressed” (295). In all, paying attention to these specific subjects including the sound/soundscapes reveals how capitalism creates new and destroys relationships, which can be applied on a universal level.
