Knowing by Ear

Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915-1918)

By: Anette Hoffmann

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Paperback | 29 March 2024

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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.

Industry Reviews

"Baffling, confronting, and revealing-those are a few of the qualities that struck me as I read Anette Hoffmann's new book. I read it in one breath but with vicarious shame. Like her 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 shows how African prisoners of war were simultaneously 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

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