Knowing by Ear

Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918)

Anette Hoffmann (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

224 Seiten

2024
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4780-2484-2 (ISBN)

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During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear, Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens up possibilities for new historical perspectives and the formation of alternate archival practices and knowledge production. She foregrounds the archival presence of individual speakers and positions their recorded voices as responses to their experiences of colonialism, war, and the journey from Africa to Europe. By engaging with the recordings alongside written sources, photographs, and artworks depicting the speakers, Hoffmann personalizes speakers from present-day Senegal, Somalia, Togo, and Congo. Knowing by Ear includes transcriptions of numerous recordings of spoken and sung texts, revealing acoustic archives as significant yet under-researched sources for recovering the historical speaking positions of colonized subjects and listen to the acoustic echo of colonial knowledge production.

Anette Hoffmann is a Senior Researcher at the University of Cologne’s Institute for African Studies and Egyptology. She is the author of Listening to Colonial History: Echoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Southern Africa.

Note on Sound Recordings ix
Prologue: Catchers of the Living 1
Fragment 1. Samba Diallo: “The War of the Whites” / "Catcher of the Living"
Introduction: Listening to Acoustic Fragments 11
Fragment II. JÁmafÁda: “The War is Horrible”
1. Abdoulay Niang: Voice, Race, and the Suspension of Communication in Linguistic Recordings 23
Fragment III. Asmani Ben Ahmad: “Once Upon a Time”
2. Mohamed Nur: Traces in Archives, Linguistics Texts, and Museums in Germany 66
Fragment IV. Josef Ntwanumbi: “We are Initiates”
3. Albert Kudjabo and Stephan Bischoff: Mysterious Sounds, Opaque Languages and Otherworldly Voices 101
Fragment V. Mamadou Gregoire: “The Sea Requests Fish from the Rivers”
Afterword: Knowing by Ear 147
Acknowledgments 157
Notes 161
References 183
Index 201

Erscheinungsdatum	29.03.2024
Reihe/Serie	Sign, Storage, Transmission
Zusatzinfo	16 page color insert
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	476 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Geschichtstheorie / Historik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10	1-4780-2484-4 / 1478024844
ISBN-13	978-1-4780-2484-2 / 9781478024842
Zustand	Neuware