Listening to Colonial History

<p class=ql-align-justify>European archives hold historical voice recordings that were produced by linguists ethnologists and musicologists during colonial rule in African countries. While these recordings reverberate with the poly­phonic echoes of colonial knowledge production to date acoustic collections have rarely been con­sulted as sources of colonial history. In this book Anette Hoffmann engages with a Southern African audio-visual collection which is located in five different institutions across Vienna Austria. Several recordings collected by the anthropologist Rudolf Pöch in August 1908 have been retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into Pöch's collecting expedition to the Kalahari. Pöch's narrative of his heroic journey is called into question by the Naro speakers' comments which address colonial violence and criticise the research practices of the anthropologist. By attending to the spoken texts on the recordings and reconnecting them to photographs ethnographic objects archival documentation and Pöch's travelogue Hoffmann offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.</p><p><br></p>