| Based on field research done in one of the largest Chinese Christian churches in the Greater Toronto Area, this thesis explores the extra-religious meanings of worship songs performed in this faith community of immigrants. It posits that the church's worship music conveys diasporic identities of the church's members in two main aspects. Firstly, the practice of singing worship songs in multiple languages mediates multiple sociolinguistic identities. Secondly, the church's worship music reveals a special kind of nostalgia; despite the close connection between the church's members with Hong Kong in the present, their music making alludes anachronistically to the memory of Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s and an idealistic identity of being "Hong Kong people."... |
