Shopping and Chopping: How Everyday Sounds Come Alive in Sinophone Toronto

Abstract

Abstract Through ethnography, this article studies the different ways in which two immigrant Chinese women listened to everyday sounds (blender growl, bone cutter shrieks, cleaver thuds) in relation to their environments (mall, supermarket, and kitchen) and to each other. I situate their frictions within dominant tropes of immigration, ethnicity, race, and gender under Canadian multiculturalism, in Chinese history, and through gendered Asian racialization in North America. Following anthropologist Veena Das's formulation of the everyday as sedimented histories in practice, I argue that everyday sounds are abuzz as the messy underside to musical identity articulations and as such may productively unsettle ethnomusicology's own intellectual habitus.