Listening to Colonial History. Echoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Southern Africa

Annette Hoffman

Description

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 poly�phonic echoes of colonial knowledge production, to date, acoustic collections have rarely been con�sulted 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 P�ch in August 1908 have been retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into P�ch�s collecting expedition to the Kalahari. P�ch�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 P�ch�s travelogue, Hoffmann offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.triesries.

Sujets

• African Studies
• Histoire
• History
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Basler Afrika Bibliographien
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9783906927404
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

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Listening to Colonial History

OF IN FROM SOUND ECHOES AFRICA COERCIVE SOUTHERN HISTORI AL KN P O R W O L D E U D C G I E R N ECOR DI NG S

Anette Hoffmann

Listening to Colonial History

Anette Hoffmann

LISTENING TO COLONIAL HISTORY Ecoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Soutern Africa

Basler Afrika Bibliograpien

©2023 he autors ©2023 he potograpers ©2023 Basler Afrika Bibliograpien

Basler Afrika Bibliograpien Namibia Resource Centre & Soutern Africa Library Klosterberg 23 PO Box 4001 Basel Switzerland www.baslerafrika.c

All rigts reserved.

Translated and revised by Anette Hoffmann on te basis of er bookKolonialge- scicte ören. Das Eco gewaltsamer Wissensproduktion in istoriscen Tondokumen- ten aus dem südlicen Afrika,first publised by Mandelbaum Verlag in Vienna, 2020. Englis language editing by Rosemary Lombard. Cover designed by Candice Turvey.

ISBN 978-3-906927-39-8

CONTENTS

Preface

1 archive, swallow Phonograph,

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3

4

Spoken words disappear, a speaker becomes a dancer

Echoes of fear and the anthropologist as “Bushman”

|Kxara the Elder reclaims his knife

List of the sound recordings discussed

Glossary of characters appearing in the text for click sounds in Naro

List of illustrations

Bibliography

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105

133

152

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156

Fig. 1: Unnamed man, probably a teacher from

Berseba, listening to a sound recording. Detail from a

photograph by Hans Lichtenecker, German South-

west Africa (Namibia), 1931.

PREFACE

Echoes are heard with a delay. They arrive as distorted, perhaps abbreviat- ed, often attenuated resonances of something said, shouted, or sung else- where. As travelling reverberations, echoes may resound with the occasion of speaking or singing, not informing listeners where they come from, or who is speaking. As echo, the voice is transformed; sometimes it multiplies and becomes polyphonic. Bouncing and delayed, echoes carry gaps of meaning, and thus become disorienting to listeners. Their source, but also their intended audience, might remain obscure. To the archival echo of colonial history we have begun to listen only recently. In Ovid’sMetamorphoses, the nymph Echo(vocalis nymphe)is punished by the goddess Juno for distracting her with beguiling talk. The sanction or measure against distracting talk for Echo is her disablement: the loss of her ability to speak. From then on, she can only repeat abbreviated, and therefore distorted, versions of someone else’s words. This durable de- tachment of voice from person has major implications: the îgure of Echo becomes a repercussing automaton, the host of a mimicking voice that is severed from (her) intentions. Sounding like the acoustic materialization 1 ofpalilaliaplaces each of Echo’s utterances outside of meaningful articu- 2 lation or communication and thus is the verdict of her social death. When she falls in love with Narcissus, she cannot respond, let alone address him, but must merely repeat his words, and, as Joan W. Scott tells us, her re- 3 sponse as Echo can only be a deformed fragment of Narcissus’ words. Her inability to speak or respond as a person, that is, to speak according to her own intentions and in her own(ed) voice, leads to Narcissus’ rejection of Echo. In grief her body withers away until nothing remains of her but a voice(vox manet).Thus her voice becomes the disembodied, dislocated sound effect we know as echo.

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he compulsive repetition of syllables and words, described as a tic or patological dis- order of speec. For Petra Germann, Eco’s voice asWiederolungstimme(voice as repetition) is terefore lifeless, yet unable to die  see “Die Wiederolungsstimme: Über die Strafe der Eco”, Doris Kolesc and Sybille Krämer (eds.),Stimme, Frankfurt am Main: Surkamp, 2006. Joan W. Scott, “Fantasy Eco: History and te Construction of Identity”,Critical Inqui- ry27 (2) 2001, p. 201.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s take on Echo suggests reconsidering the tale – arguably in response to the discussion of her famous, perhaps notorious, article “Can the subaltern speak?” – by offering a reading that seeks to fathom the elusive trace of female subalternity in hegemonic dis- course and the colonial archive. In her reading, the myth of Narcissus (as told by Ovid) is the tale of self as an object of knowledge, whereas the îgure of Echo is staged as a respondentas such, albeit responding with a twist – creating gaps of meaning and intelligibility, and leaving us with an ambiguous trace. While Ovid’s tale narrates the instance of acomplete severance of agency or intention from speech in the instance of Echo’s reverberations (that become a mere parroting, and thus are no longer “hu- man”), Spivak grapples with the possibility of an ambiguity withheld in his tale. She writes:

Throughout the reported exchange between Narcissus and Echo she be- haves according to her punishment and gives back the end of each state- ment. Ovid “quotes” her, except when Narcissus asks:Quid… me fugis? (Why do you y from me?). Caught in the discrepancy between second person interrogative (fugis) and the imperative (fugi), Ovid cannot allow her tobethe, even Echo, so that Narcissus, ying from her, could have made of 4 ethical structure of response a fulîlled antiphon.

In other words, when Narcissus asks “why do you y from me?” according to Spivak, Echo’s response (which is withheld in Ovid’s text) would have been “y from me”. This interpretative move considers the possibility of a reverberation that carries a shift of meaning, a difference, which cannot 5 be appropriated by that which it repeats. In this way, Spivak’s reading of the myth of Echo creates a space of ambivalence in which the echo that is almost, but never quite, the same opens a space of ambiguity or alterity 6 that allows for the possibility of a “faint residue” of an uncontainable, yet perhaps uncertain, intention.

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Gayatri Cakravorty Spivak, “Eco”,New Literary History, 25 (1)Culture and Everyday Life, Winter 1993, p. 25, italics in te original. See Jane Hiddleston, “Spivak’s Eco: heorizing Oterness and te Space of Response”, Textual Practice21 (4), 2007, p. 627. Ibid.

Echo’s voice is “stable-yet-unstable, same-yet-different, and non- 7 originary”. Whereas the difference between Narcissus’s interrogative phrase (why do you y from me?) and her answer that involuntarily must turn into an imperative (y from me!) marks the impossibility of echo- ing as sameness, and designates the asymmetric positions of Narcissus and Echo, it is Ovid’s position to îll in the lacuna. Which, as Spivak tells us, is impossible: the account of what happened is never quite what hap- pened – but always a belated interpretation, which can only îll the gap with a difference. Echo, writes Spivak, guards this dissimilarity, since her imitating-yet-not-quite-the-same response must always slightly alter the meaning of the phrase, which is her “punishment turned into reward, a 8 deconstructive lever for future users.” The notion of echo offers a starting point from which to conceptu- alize particular voice recordings as sonic traces from the colonial archive as neither merely signifying the theoretically “untouchable” îgure of the 9 subaltern – nor marking an unproblematic recuperation of subjective agency in collections of sound recordings. In this book I engage with historical voice recordings as alternative historical sources, reverberating with several instances of narrative agency, which, for instance, surface in the choice of the topics and tropes that appear to be out of sync with their archival position as examples of language. These utterances are never entirely contained as examples of language, and leave open a space of resonance. In Gayatri Spivak’s decolonial interpretation of the speaking position inhabited by the nymph Echo in Ovid’sMetamorphoses,Echo appears as perpetually responding; she cannot speak without prompting. Her take on subaltern speaking positions resonates strongly with my understanding

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Spivak: Eco, p. 27. Ibid. Hiddleston, p. 624, writes: “Furtermore, wit peraps more nuance Peter Hallward criticizes Spivak’s concept of te subaltern for positing er voice as singular and inac- cessible, and for failing to tink troug te means by wic se migt consolidate er identity and voice. For Hallward, te subaltern, in oter words, is te teoretically untoucable, te altogeter-beyond-relation: te attempt to “relate” to te subaltern defines wat Spivak quite appropriately names an“impossible etical singularity”. he result is apparently tat te critic deprives te subaltern of a voice wile endlessly te- orizing and reteorizing te mecanics of er own critical, and unavoidably Western, enunciation.’” SeePeter Hallward,Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between te Singular and te Specific,2001, p. 30.

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