This dissertation centers on European colonial travel writings that represent “New World” soundscapes and sonic encounters. It employs theoretical sound studies concepts (e.g., soundscapes, sound imperialism, sonic warfare, and sonic encounter). But most importantly, it utilizes the theoretical concept of the acousmatic (sound whose source remains unseen) to highlight and examine the acousmatic scenes of encounter represented in these colonial travel writings. I energize my study by plugging in early modern (premodern) critical race studies to interrogate what these acousmatic scenes of encounter can tell us, through their sonic scope, about issues of colonialism, race, resistance, and empire-building. A similar colonial soundscape of using acoustic technologies that are acousmatic in nature is manifested in these texts to sustain an empire at the expense of those it racializes. By listening carefully to the cultural and political sonic warfare of the past, my study hopes to be a beacon of critical and compassionate reflection for how to abate future violence with our own advanced and acoustic technologies.

In chapter one, I focus on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación (1542) to anchor how this Spanish travel writer was, if not the first, then one of the earliest and most significant to depict acousmatic encounters with New World soundscapes, including that of the natural ecology coupled with Indigenous peoples’ singing and music-making practices. In my second chapter, I argue that Shakespeare recreates this New World acousmatic soundscape in The Tempest (1611) to similarly soundtrack how New World sound could be appropriated and manipulated to colonize, Christianize, and racialize Indigenous peoples and lands, as well as to enslave Africans. Chapter three then turns to another of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594?). I offer an acoustic reading that listens to how Midsummer’s racialized rhetoric of animality is tied to a transatlantic colonial context of mestizaje. The acousmatic spirit in Midsummer, as in The Tempest, is staged as a surveillance technology of terror to enforce aristocratic-colonial power. However, as in The Tempest, the staging of acousmatic sound also carries subversive potential in Midsummer. Lastly, I engage with two utopian travel fictions: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). The acousmatic surveillance technologies evident in these two texts are rhetorically fashioned (in content and form) to offer the illusion of a non-violent utopian global empire. Both texts racialize the New World and its inhabitants while presenting a new New World (one on an island named Bensalem and the other on the moon) with advanced technologies of sound and travel.