Sonic Sensibility: Reading Soundscapes in Migrant Fiction

Talk by Tembi Charles (Oxford, UK).

Prevailing scholarship on forced migration, and the media coverage that shapes public understanding of it, has tended to privilege the visual and the spectacular displacement rendered as image, as violence, as spectacle. Literary criticism has followed the same ocular bias.

In this presentation, Dr Tembi Charles turns to aurality, drawing on soundscape theory and sound studies to argue that listening functions as a method for reading migrant fiction, revealing dimensions of displacement that optical and dramatic framings overlook. She develops this argument through her analysis of fiction that represents Zimbabwean migration to South Africa, treating sound not as background texture but as an epistemological register in its own right, a way characters negotiate displacement, home and identity. Tembi Charles is thinking about extending this methodology to migrant song and oral performance, the soundscapes within poetry, and ethnographic listening as a method in its own right. She brings this work to the colloquium not as new research but as a provocation, hoping to think through these possible directions with scholars working at similar intersections of literature, sound, and migration.