Hearing voices in the archive

This essay is an attempt to fathom the performative and textual potential of historical sound recordings from the Lautarchiv in Berlin, along the available written files and a particular set of acoustic files spoken by an isiXhosa speaker. Read and listened to together, these files document the event and rationale of the recordings of the Phonographische Kommissionwith a man from the Eastern Cape, who was recorded while being interned as a foreign subject, in a German camp for British civilians in World War I. Following the acousmatic voice that speaks on several recordings, the essay explores the position of the speaker and the enunciation that speaks of the experience of war and displacement, and the complexities of audible traces of imperial knowledge production.