Eliza McCarthy

Thesis Title: Nonhuman Soundings of Environments in Caribbean Literature

Supervisor: Professor Malachi McIntosh

My doctoral research examines the presentation of nonhuman soundscapes and acoustic ecologies in Caribbean literature. This auditory exploration draws together Caribbean studies and sound studies within a wider ecocritical framework to illuminate previously occluded perceptions of the changing environments of the sonorous archipelago.

In its textual focus on authors including (but not limited to) Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer, Édouard Glissant, Alejo Carpentier, Dionne Brand, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, my research centres heterogenous diasporic modes of listening which rely on the interdependence of different modes of sensory understanding, thus complicating and countering colonial discourses that strategically separate sensory processes of epistemological understanding of environments. My project interrogates the auditory perceptions of ecologically and geopolitically shifting environments of the forest, plantation, urban spaces, and the oceanic and subaquatic spaces of the Caribbean, problematising the ocular-centric tendencies that consume the environmental humanities whilst also offering a departure from sound studies' previous denouncement of postcolonial discourse through its focus on the peripheralised sonic experience.

Research Interests: environmental humanities, critical ocean studies, sound studies, Caribbean literature, ecocriticism, urban studies, world literature, terraqueous ecologies.

Publications: 

McCarthy, Eliza. "“A Little Happy Sound”: Collective Labor, Ecocide, and Soundscapes in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland." Studies in the Novel, vol. 56 no. 2, 2024, p. 115-128. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2024.a928652.