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Paper short abstract:

We discuss recordings of soundscapes of Southern African nature. Based on close listening and conversation with people who lived in the area of recording we show their specific role within the construction of colonial African natures and multi-species hierarchies.

Paper long abstract:

For this paper we combine approaches from environmental history, sound studies and multispecies historiography to engage with recorded soundscapes of so-called ‘African nature’. The paper begins by locating recorded soundscapes within the larger subject of colonial recording, representation and conservation, of nature in Africa, and argue that these recorded soundscapes of Southern African nature deserve attention as a genre of recordings with distinctive features. We begin with a typology of the recordings in Southern African and British libraries. This allows us to place the recordings, as well as identify an intended audience and the anticipated ways of listening to them. A discussion on the ways in which animals and other nature sounds appear in the multi-species setting of the recordings is then put in conversation with the meanings of animal and other nature sounds drawn from interviews with people living in, or close to, the landscapes that had been recorded. Based on a close listening and examination of selected recordings, as well as interviews, we argue that while these soundscape recordings are implicated in well-established colonial representations and conservation narratives of African nature and wildlife, they can be simultaneously understood as complicating those representations; as a form of representation which does not necessarily adhere to the logics of colonial knowledge as they are found in other media and representations of ‘nature’ and ‘wildlife’ in Africa. Finally, we discuss the differing acts of listening in relation to multispecies theories and constructions of human to non-human animal hierarchies.