Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive

The colonial past through objects of sound

The Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on recordings produced under colonial conditions.

With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a historical ethnography of a metropolitan institution that participated in the production and preservation of colonial structures of power and knowledge. The book examines sound objects and listening practices that render the coloniality of knowledge fragile and inconsistent, revealing the absent presences of colonial subjects who are given little or no place in established national narratives and collective memories.

Irene Hilden is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

A richly-detailed and warmly-written ethnography of listening, this book is poised to be a leader in the fields of archival, curatorial and museum studies, and similarly stands out as a uniquely-well blended contribution to sound ethnography, sound studies, ethnomusicology, anthropology and digital humanities.Noel Lobley, University of Virginia