Oceanic Asias: Sonic Geographies of Hawaiian Whaling between China & Mexico

Organized by: SFU Global Asia Program — https://www.eventbrite.com/o/115370452311

How the migration of whales and the whalers that pursued them brought together east coast of China and west coast of Mexico

This event is part of the SFU Global Asia Program 30th Anniversary, Fall 2026 Speaker Series. You may participate in-person or online, please specify when registering. Light refreshments will be provided for in-person attendance.

This talk considers how the migration of whales and the whalers that pursued them brought together the east coast of China and the west coast of Mexico in the nineteenth century. In this period, North Atlantic economies sought to procure whale oil as a source of illumination and lubrication for the machines that powered the industrial revolution. The expansion of this industry prompted Euro-American powers to conscript Hawai’i as the crossroads of the Pacific and to rely on Hawaiian labor in this extractive oceanic enterprise. Centering indigenous Hawai’ian (Kānaka Maoli) geographic thought, this paper considers the utility of sound and the sonic dimensions of Pacific whaling to surface submerged Chinese Mexican geographies. It engages sonic speculation to discern patterns of inter-species mobility by imaginatively attuning to the songs that whales and their Kānaka hunters performed as key dimensions of their social lives at sea. Evoking these sounds raises questions about species, space, and gender as Kānaka whalers were almost exclusively men and only male whales produced song. Together they constructed a Chinese Mexican oceanic geography by elaborating a masculinist soundscape in their moves across the Pacific.

About the speaker: Matthew Chin is an Assistant Professor of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He received his PhD in Anthropology and Social Work from the University of Michigan and his interdisciplinary research engages feminist and queer histories of race of across the Caribbean and Asia. His first b