A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive

The recording of Indigenous voices is one of the most well-known methods of colonial ethnography. In A Decolonizing Ear, Olivia Landry offers a sceptical 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 ...