Sonic Poetics of Home and the Art of Making Do in Sinophone Toronto

This dissertation is an ethnography of the “homes” imagined and practiced through sound and music in Chinese-speaking immigrant communities of Toronto. The notion of “home” and the social imaginary of homelands have been theorized extensively as important linchpins for forming diasporic identities and cohering transnational migrant communities. Music plays a vital role in these processes, as the ethnomusicology of diaspora has demonstrated. Although important, the dominance of formal musical performance in both academic and popular discourses tend to eclipse the fine-grained work of everyday life in contemporary immigrant experiences. This dissertation offers a complementary alternative, arguing that diasporic subjectivities emerge more from accumulations of everyday practices than through self-conscious memorialization of the lost homelands. Based on ethnographic research, I examine how homeland imaginaries mediate diasporic experiences of “home” in everyday singing, speaking, and modes of listening. I also explore how a person’s sonic expressivity interacts with conditioning contexts such as Canada’s multicultural ideology. In the first of three case studies, I explore how ethnic and age identities were contested through sounding and listening in a Chinese nursing home. The second case study focuses on an apartment where queer immigrants gathered for respite from the palpable heteronormativity and homophobia of Toronto’s Chinese diaspora. The final case study follows a young woman as she aurally forged diasporic intimacy in ethnic retail spaces, a boarding house, and a kitchen. Each case study considers the emergence of a particular kind of diasporic subjectivity through accumulations of everyday sonic practices where mediations between public and private, and collectivity and individuality occur. Re-orienting toward the cumulative effects of everyday life, this dissertation reveals how diasporic “homes” can be unsettling and fractured. It also shows, by the same token, how senses of belonging are born out of continuous negotiations, and should not be taken for granted.Ph.D