Acoustic Colonialism

Acts of Mapuche Interference

Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781478032632
  9781478029298
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478061533
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In Acoustic Colonialism, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante examines the role of sound in Chilean and Mapuche cultural production over the last two centuries. Cárcamo-Huechante theorizes sound as a territory of racial, patriarchal, and colonial hegemony as well as of Mapuche struggle, agency, and response to what he calls "acoustic colonialism." From the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Chilean literature, radio, and other media have exerted a historic role in disseminating distorted visual and sonic representations of the Mapuche. The enduring effects of what Cárcamo-Huechante defines as the colonial ear—the entry point for these misrepresentations—reflect the logic of the Chilean settler nation-state. In response to these aural and sonorous figurations, contemporary Mapuche writers, artists, and activists have produced their own literary, radiophonic, vocal, and musical expressions. The voices, sounds, and discourses of these Mapuche productions contest and disrupt the acoustic colonialism that has dominated the soundscape of the territory designated in present-day cartography as central and southern Chile. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Mañumtun/Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Disfiguring and Silencing of the Mapuche in the 1860s
• Two. Indio Pije: A “Mapuche” in the Mediascape
• Three. Listening Poetically: A Land That Resounds and Sings
• Four. Wixage Anai: Mapuche Voices on the Air
• Five. Enduring Listening and Sounds: The Contemporary Musics of Ngulu Mapu
• Coda
• Notes
• References
• Index