Individual Medium Post #1
Gilmore’s idea that “capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it” sets the scene for the troubling issue of imperial control over Jamaica, which is explored in Goffe’s paper. Even so, the concept of race that Gilmore speaks of is deeper than surface-level, and this makes possible the beautiful cross-cultural bloom that shaped Jamaican sonic modernity.
In Gilmore’s concept of racial capitalism, we see that all capitalism requires some group of people to be held in hierarchical inferiority to the ruling class, who benefits from the labor beneath them. These racial divisions are not as simple as black, white, etc., as shown in her example of intra-European slavery. This is why it is important to create a distinction between the diasporic Chinese, who were victims of the British plantation system in Jamaica, and the big Chinese corporations, whose hands became entangled in Jamaica in ways similar to colonial UK and US powers.
While the diasporic Chinese in many ways controlled the means of production for Jamaica’s music industry, this relationship was largely beneficial to both Chinese Jamaicans and Black Jamaicans. The formation of a sort of Chinese middle class in Jamaica seemingly provided a way for both minority groups to step outside of the colonial sphere created and held in place by white colonialists. The same capitalist forces that drove Chinese and Jamaicans into indentured labor at the hands of the British had evolved to create an intermingling of Afro-Chinese coproduction. These collaborative efforts leading to the rise of Reggae and Jamaican soundscapes as a whole shined a new light on the extra-colonial economic opportunity of music production.
I think the article and video work very well together to challenge the way people tend to think of racial divisions. Adding the capitalism-based approach to racial division shows that racial tensions may be so engrained in our world due to the necessity to create a sense of otherness, a “necessity” perpetuated by capitalism itself.
While capitalism seemed to both destroy and build relationships between different groups of people in Jamaica, we can see that the beneficial side of things was not so present in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Similarly to Jamaica, when Chinese immigrants finished their terms working on plantations, they had to move somewhere, and thus, Honolulu’s Chinatown arose. Unfortunately, this place in which the Chinese immigrants tried to make their way in life, adapting to the capitalistic society they inhabited and making their own businesses, became a vehicle for internment. With the forced quarantine of Honolulu’s Chinatown following a bubonic plague scare, we see how in accordance with Gilmore’s idea of capitalism’s reliance on racism, the locale of Chinese immigrants’ extra-colonial bloom in Hawaii could so easily be turned against them.
