Auralizing Archives: (Post-digital) Emancipation of Colonial Archives

Abstract

In this essay, I focus on practices of everyday sounding and listening in the aural traditions and cultures of the regions often termed together as «Global South». Among these regions, in South Asia, archival practices are not as pertinent as the listening cultures are based on orality: e.g., orally transmitting knowledge. These societies like to be vociferous and singing out memories (e.g. songs in films and in rituals) than storing sound recordings in a dead archive. Traditional performing arts and musics are accompanied with sung texts, performed as situated ephemera. Delving into the limiting practices of recording and archiving these ephemera, this essay develops a polemical position against the unlistening embedded in the archiving device itself. This critical intervention generates an invocation of «auralizing» as situated acts of performative transgression to help liberate incarcerated archival sound object.