The Story as a Drum

This article focuses on the effects of sounds and silences in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, which he published as his Relación in 1542. By shifting attention from the written word to the audible dimension that his account entails, this text contributes to a discourse in sound studies that is invested in decolonial practices of sound and hearing encounters, as proposed by Dylan Robinson. Further following Ursula Le Guin’s concept of story-as-container, this article proposes to read Cabeza de Vaca as a drum, one that holds meaningful silences and important sounds amplifying Indigenous presence. This contribution thereby shows how a focus on sound and a conception of a story-as-drum generates antiheroic historiography and brings to light more nuanced power relations in European colonial writing.