Discussion 1

The capitalism brings hierarchies: at times the Chinese community has been negatively portrayed as forming a monopoly in small retail as a middleman minority with proximity to the white colonial structure (Goffe, 98) However, Chinese shops also provided not only food but also sonic social space for remixing, a black and Chinese cultural coproduction (Goffe, 98). The development of soundsystem furthered this effect: the commercial and conjugal intimacies in Jamaica between Chinese shopkeepers and black higglers, market women selling their wares, formed the intimate informal microfinance ecosystem that would facilitate sound engineers, party promoters, and DJs, interlinked by the everyday transactions and sociality of shop life. The Chinese shop was a space for the leisure of dance, whether indoors or outdoors on lawns. The reach of these men and women and their networks was bigger than the sound, forming an infrastructure of Afro-Chinese intimacies (Goffe, 99).