Trans-Pacific soundscapes: oral storytelling as a transnational aesthetic in the colonial encounter

Trans-Pacific Soundscapes: Oral Storytelling as a Transnational Aesthetic in the Colonial Encounter takes a multimedia approach to theorize the transcription of sound in Indigenous texts extant in the many moments of encounter across the Pacific. Through a series of case studies – each in a form of storytelling like tapa and wayfinding (Chapter 1), public lectures (Chapter 2), Indigenous experimental music (Chapter 3), oral storytelling in the novel (Chapter 4), and Māori weaving and sculpture (Chapter 5) – I develop a method for listening to text. Bringing early Indigenous written texts and post-contact oral traditions into conversation, I turn to Pacific Islander material practices and, more specifically, the harakeke (flax) weaving of Aotearoa New Zealand and the mulberry bark cloth found throughout Oceania, some of which is identified as mnemonic and readable. These texts – among other Indigneous written practices – are readable yet commensurate with oral traditions. I explore how oral and woven forms of generational and spatial knowledge transfer alike are enmeshed with histories of Indigenous movement in and across fluid regional boundaries. As method, listening in relation to what appears to be visual disrupts a settler-colonial distribution of the sensible toward what is written and categorizable. This project asks what is possible when we attend to the ways of knowing that have been foreclosed by writing, inviting a a reading practice that crosses seemingly discrete media categories with openness to alternate modes of attunement. In other words, listening to text teaches us to enter into relation with knowledge systems not our own with an awareness of our own biases and to imagine other ways of thinking and being in relation to that knowledge. Trans-Pacific Soundscapes argues for a multimedia approach to textual studies that emphasizes epistemological multiplicity in not only canon development or disruption but also with how we enter into relation with knowledge. When interpreted through Indigenous theorizations of sound, what appears to be silent, like a textile or a novel, becomes a complex soundscape that we have been taught not to hear.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Cheslow, Erin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Wood, Gillen
• Rymhs, Deena
• Basu, Manisha
• Burchfield, Renata

• British Literature
• Indigenous Literatures
• Pacific Islands Studies
• Form
• Sound Studies

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Erin Cheslow

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130125

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130125