Review in English of Anette Hoffman’s Kolonialgeschichte Hören (2020)

Heike Becker’s English review of the new book in German, Kolonialgeschichte Hören, by APC research associate, Dr. Anette Hoffman, was published in Anthropology Southern Africa under the heading ‘Listening to the Sound(s) of Colonial History. It offers a useful introduction to Hoffman’s ideas for researchers who are not able to read the German text. An English-language edition is due out in 2022. Here is a taster drawn from the review:

Hoffmann explores questions about the colonial archive, and particularly the sound archive, which has often been pushed to the side-lines of critical archive studies. The slim volume on historical sound recordings and the colonial archive acknowledges the importance of previous postcolonial scholarship on the problematic of the (colonial) archive. It further challenges the notion of the colonial archive as monolithic.

Central to the book is the idea that taking historical sound recordings seriously as resounding sources of colonial knowledge allows for a shift in perspective. Hoffmann argues that, if and when we approach colonial history as a listener of sound recordings rather than as a reader of written documents, we become able to incorporate different ways of expression from the past. She thus challenges the presumption that the colonial archive never allows expressions from a subaltern position, that it always overwrites them and makes them impossible.

Kolonialgeschichte Hören investigates how sound recordings can challenge the written archive; in turn, Hoffmann also shows how the echo of the recorded sound vanishes as it travels into, and is hidden within, the filing process and the location of documents in the archive as an institution. She argues that the technology of the archive, as it embraces the recorded voices of the people, suffocates and “devours” their words in systematic ways that render them absent. Hoffmann explains that the colonial archive is, at its core, an assemblage of discursive formations, which have determined that which was preserved by whom and what was categorized and documented as “knowledge”. This is where the epistemic violence of colonialism starts.

Hoffmann engages in wide-ranging theoretical discussions about the archive and decolonial epistemes. Yet the book brings to life the colonial technologies of recording and archiving, as well as the postcolonial revisionist research process, through a defined case study. Hoffmann’s work revisits a set of recordings that were collected in 1908 by the Austrian anthropologist, Rudolf Pöch, during a trip to the Kalahari in what were then British Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana) and German South West Africa (present-day Namibia). She analysed the Pöch recordings in collaboration with erudite Naro speakers, especially Job Morris, an activist for the rights of Naro speakers from D’Kar (Botswana).

Hoffmann shows graphically the practices and, significantly, the constellations of power and colonial violence that were central to Pöch’s “collecting” enterprise. She also brings out Southern African people’s challenges to Pöch. Hoffmann details, for example, a moment in the Kalahari where an older man called on the colonial anthropologist to adhere to the obligations of polite behaviour, based on a concept of human equality and respect; thus, back in 1908, he already strongly challenged the racist hierarchies within which Pöch operated.

The full review can be read here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23323256.2021.1972014.

If you don’t have institutional or personal access to the journal, please contact the review author at hbecker@uwc.ac.za for a PDF e-print.