October—November 2024

Earwitnessing: Memory, Transduction, and Listening for the Past

Dr. Aidan Erasmus is based in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His research encompasses the comparative histories of race, technology, and sense, with a special interest in sound. He has presented and published on topics relating to sound, technology, music, and memory, and organized workshops and conferences on these and other related areas of inquiry. As a lecturer,  he teaches courses in African history, including a senior undergraduate course on the history of sight and sound reproduction technologies and colonial disciplines of knowledge.

He is working on an article titled Earwitnessing: Memory, Transduction, and Listening for the Past during his period in residence at the DHC at FU. The article examines recent global debates around European phonographic archives and how their objects have become sites to reconsider questions of memory, restitution, and history in relation to various histories of violence and conversations in postcolonial historiography and scholarship. Inherent in these debates are crucial questions of method for historical studies and how scholars might approach sound as an object of historical and mnemonic inquiry. In reflecting on this, the article asks what the relationship between sense, media, and memory does to how scholars have grappled with the aftermaths of violence in different global contexts, and routes this question through the dual concepts of ear witnessing and enunciation as historical and mnemonic methods of inquiry into the past and present.