A Decolonizing Ear: Documentary Film Disrupts the Archive

"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

"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

"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