Overview

During the First World War, 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 their archival presence as individual speakers and positions their recorded voices as responses to their experience 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 and audio links to specific recordings of spoken and sung texts, revealing acoustic archives as significant yet under-researched sources to recover historical speaking positions of colonized subjects and listen to the acoustic echo of colonial knowledge production.

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9781478030027

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Reviews

“Baffling, confronting, and revealing—those are a few emotions Anette’s Hoffmann’s new book evoked in me. I have read it in one breath but with vicarious shame. Like in Listening to Colonial History, Knowing by Ear makes clear how much undiscovered information about colonial history is waiting for us in sonic archives all over the world. By investigating these sonic archives Hoffmann simultaneously shows how our African fellow humans were misunderstood, mistreated, and dehumanized.” -- Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands

“Baffling, confronting, and revealing—those are a few emotions Anette’s Hoffmann’s new book evoked in me. I have read it in one breath but with vicarious shame. Like in Listening to Colonial History, Knowing by Ear makes clear how much undiscovered information about colonial history is waiting for us in sonic archives all over the world. By investigating these sonic archives Hoffmann simultaneously shows how African POWs were misunderstood, mistreated, and dehumanized.” -- Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands “Knowing by Ear is a much-anticipated, urgent study of the coercive recording of African prisoners of war by German researchers during World War I. Challenging the original epistemic frames of this archive, Anette Hoffmann offers a sensitive analysis of the African speakers and their recordings. A highly rewarding read for all interested in war, media, and colonial archives, Knowing by Ear engages close listening, translation, and collaborative research as vital tools for reactivating these fragments today.” -- Carolyn Birdsall, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Author Information

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.

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