A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive

by Olivia Landry

Overview

The recording of Indigenous voices is one of the most well-known methods of colonial ethnography. In A Decolonizing Ear, Olivia Landry offers a sceptical account of listening as a highly mediated and extractive act, influenced by technology and ideology. Returning to early ethnographic practices of voice recording and archiving at the turn of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the German paradigm, she reveals the entanglement of listening in the logic of Euro-American empire and the ways in which contemporary films can destabilize the history of colonial sound reproduction.

Landry provides close readings of several disparate documentary films from the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The book pays attention to technology and knowledge production to examine how these films employ recordings plucked from different colonial sound archives and disrupt their purposes. Drawing on film and documentary studies, sound studies, German studies, archival studies, postcolonial studies, and media history, A Decolonizing Ear develops a method of decolonizing listening from the insights provided by the films themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487544850
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	11/09/2022
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Olivia Landry is an assistant professor of German at Lehigh University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Phonograph on Film

1. Colonial Listening and the Making of a Sound Archive

2. Decolonial Listening: A Methodology in Three Parts

3. The Noise of Decolonial Listening: From Here to Here and The Halfmoon Files

4. (Re-)Sounding Autoethnography in Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy

5. Weird Objects and Disembodied Voices: Audio Evangelism in The Tailenders

Conclusion: Sinister Listening and Its Afterlives

What People are Saying About This

Tobias Nagl

"A Decolonizing Ear is a timely and lucid intervention into discussions surrounding early sound reproduction, coloniality, and the archive as a contested site of epistemology."

Sara F. Hall

"Landry makes a lucid and powerful case for the particularity of the Berlin sound archive as a colonial phenomenon and brings sophisticated attention to its decolonial afterlife as the object of critical remediation in a fascinating selection of recent films."

Catherine Russell

"This book teaches us how to listen more closely to the machines and voices that mingled in twentieth-century ethnographic encounters. Landry brilliantly shows how the audio archive can be decolonized through archiveology, so that the ghosts subsisting in recordings from the past are finally heard."

Lutz Koepnick

"Olivia Landry's groundbreaking and theoretically astute book urges us to reconsider what we often take for granted about audio capture and the act of listening. If you thought the ear eludes the eye's strategies of power, extraction, and control, A Decolonizing Ear will persuade you otherwise!"

Brad Prager

"Boldly arguing that documentary film can be a tool for the decolonization of listening and the sound archive, Landry contemplates the many media-archaeologicalimplications of her argument. Insightful and rich in original research, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the many acoustic dimensions of colonialism."

Editorial Reviews

"Olivia Landry’s groundbreaking and theoretically astute book urges us to reconsider what we often take for granted about audio capture and the act of listening. If you thought the ear eludes the eye’s strategies of power, extraction, and control, A Decolonizing Ear will persuade you otherwise!"

—Lutz Koepnick, Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts, Vanderbilt University

"This book teaches us how to listen more closely to the machines and voices that mingled in twentieth-century ethnographic encounters. Landry brilliantly shows how the audio archive can be decolonized through archiveology, so that the ghosts subsisting in recordings from the past are finally heard."

—Catherine Russell, Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University

"Boldly arguing that documentary film can be a tool for the decolonization of listening and the sound archive, Landry contemplates the many media-archaeologicalimplications of her argument. Insightful and rich in original research, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the many acoustic dimensions of colonialism."

—Brad Prager, Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of Humanities and Professor of Film Studies, University of Missouri

"Landry makes a lucid and powerful case for the particularity of the Berlin sound archive as a colonial phenomenon and brings sophisticated attention to its decolonial afterlife as the object of critical remediation in a fascinating selection of recent films."

—Sara F. Hall, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago

" A Decolonizing Ear is a timely and lucid intervention into discussions surrounding early sound reproduction, coloniality, and the archive as a contested site of epistemology."

—Tobias Nagl, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Western University

From the Publisher