A Decolonizing Ear

Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive

By: Olivia Landry

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Hardcover | 9 November 2022

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Hardcover
232 Pages

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22.8 x 15.2 x 2.5

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The recording of Indigenous voices is one of the most well-known methods of colonial ethnography. In A Decolonizing Ear, Olivia Landry offers a skeptical account of listening as a highly mediated and extractive act, influenced by technology and ideology.

Returning to early ethnographic practices of voice recording and archiving at the turn of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the German paradigm, she reveals the entanglement of listening in the logic of Euro-American empire and the ways in which contemporary films can destabilise the history of colonial sound reproduction.

Landry provides close readings of several disparate documentary films from the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The book pays attention to technology and knowledge production to examine how these films employ recordings plucked from different colonial sound archives and disrupt their purposes. Drawing on film and documentary studies, sound studies, German studies, archival studies, postcolonial studies, and media history, A Decolonizing Ear develops a method of decolonizing listening from the insights provided by the films themselves.

About the Author

Olivia Landry is an assistant professor of German at Lehigh University.

Industry Reviews

A Decolonizing Ear is a timely and lucid intervention into discussions surrounding early sound reproduction, coloniality, and the archive as a contested site of epistemology.

- Tobias Nagl, Associate Professor of Film Studies, Western University

Boldly arguing that documentary film can be a tool for the decolonization of listening and the sound archive, Landry contemplates the many media-archaeologicalimplications of her argument. Insightful and rich in original research, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the many acoustic dimensions of colonialism.

- Brad Prager, Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of Humanities and Professor of Film Studies, University of Missouri

Landry makes a lucid and powerful case for the particularity of the Berlin sound archive as a colonial phenomenon and brings sophisticated attention to its decolonial afterlife as the object of critical remediation in a fascinating selection of recent films.

- Sara F. Hall, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago

Olivia Landry's groundbreaking and theoretically astute book urges us to reconsider what we often take for granted about audio capture and the act of listening. If you thought the ear eludes the eye's strategies of power, extraction, and control, A Decolonizing Ear will persuade you otherwise!

- Lutz Koepnick, Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts, Vanderbilt University

This book teaches us how to listen more closely to the machines and voices that mingled in twentieth-century ethnographic encounters. Landry brilliantly shows how the audio archive can be decolonized through archiveology, so that the ghosts subsisting in recordings from the past are finally heard.

- Catherine Russell, Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University

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