The Berlin Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) consists of an extensive collection of sound recordings, compiled for scientific purposes in the first half of the 20th century. Recorded on shellac are stories and songs, personal testimonies and poems, glossaries and numbers. This book engages with the archive by consistently focusing on the colonial conditions under which the recordings were produced.

With a firm commitment to postcolonial scholarship, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive is a hist...