Download or read book Listening to Colonial History. Echoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Southern Africa written by Annette Hoffman and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2023-10-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Pch in August 1908 have been retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into Pchs collecting expedition to the Kalahari. Pchs 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 Pchs travelogue, Hoffmann offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.triesries.