The Colonial Ear: Disfiguring the Mapuche in Times of Acoustic Colonialism
Welcome guest Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante (The University of Texas at Austin; Comunidad de Historia Mapuche), Friday Feb 14, 3:30pm, Rubenstein Room 249
Hegemonic literary, radiophonic and musical media in Chile has established a longstanding aural, phonetic and vocal practice of acoustic disfigurement of the Mapuche people. To demonstrate this phenomenon, this talk will offer a critical analysis of the 19th century brief novel Mariluan published in 1862 as part of the literary trilogy Un drama en el campo by Chilean criollo writer Alberto Blest Gana; and contemporary musical and radiophonic examples from the show Residencial La pichanga (Radio Corporación, 1960s-1970s). Through this context, I show how what I call the "colonial ear" becomes the boundary, or auditory filter, between the very body and mind of the colonizer against the Indigenous acoustic territory. This racialized practice of misrepresentation imposed upon the Mapuche has historically been a mechanism to reinforce a broader regime of what I conceptualize as "acoustic colonialism."