Discussion Week 2
Week 1 questions:
As areas advance into industrialization as a result of capitalism, the soundscape changes from something like bird chirps and wind to factories and televisions. Capitalism and the advancement of technology encourages us to buy products to fill up spaces of loneliness. In the past, the only way we could listen to music was through performances or local gatherings, but now we can carry much of what we enjoy audibly in our pockets. This causes us not to seek out the company of others as much and leaves us with more fractured relationships. Not to mention that most of the sounds of nature have been replaced with cars and with the tight living spaces in cities sound from your neighbors often bleeds into the background.
Conversely, the fusion of both Chinese and Jamaican influences can be heard clearly through much of the music described in Goffe’s article, whether it is the actual music or the space it is being listened to in. It represents marginalized groups collaborating outside the colonial system and create a new product that fostered a nonexploitative social and creative space. It represents that despite the Jamaica’s long and messy history of slavery and racial tensions that the intersection of different groups is capable of producing something meaningful and transformative that continues to be listened to and influence other artists today.
Week 2 questions:
In broad strokes, I think settler colonialism can be applied in Hawaii to show that the Chinese who settled there were not entirely free from fault when it came to depriving the locals of their land. Once the white settlers were removed, they were considered (and considered themselves) more deserving of the land compared to the indigenous people. The simplistic view is to say that all minority groups are subject to oppressive “whiteness” but Saranillio’s article demonstrates that marginalized groups still have power dynamics between each other that are sometimes even encouraged by white settlers as means of keeping the population fragmented and incapable of solidarity. In terms of Japan and the US, there are numerous examples of imperialism in Manchuria and the Philippines that was justified because the ruling power believed that the colonized people were incapable of self-rule and that they should be ruled by the more deserving class (i.e. the stronger military power). In this way, striping the means of production from the locals was done as a smokescreen for “their benefit” to that they could learn to be “civilized” in the Western sense.
Looking back to Jamaica and the British, once slavery was outlawed, the British probably used this same justification to hold onto the means of production for profitable sugar and cotton plantations. And in a similar vein to Hawaii, the Chinese acted as a sort-of third party between the British and the local people. The involvement of the Chinese, as characterized by Goffe, could be interpreted as helping the exploitative British or supporting the empowerment of the locals, depending on the situation.
