Fugitive Sounds: On the Politics of Listening at Argentina’s Southern Border

Abstract

In this article, I trace the resonances of the alarido in numerous nineteenth-century Argentine nation-building texts, with a specific focus on Lucio V. Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. I analyze the recurrence of the racialised stereotype of the “Indigenous war cry” or “alarido”, in numerous literary and critical texts around the so-called “Conquest of the Desert”, not in order to uncover the “truth” of such voices but to instead study the dynamics underlying the gap between their inscription and audition and how they interrupt colonial logics of listening and sense-making. By situating such texts within the historical context of phono-ethnography and sound recording - inscriptive modes which presented similar anxieties around preserving disappearing voices - I argue that the alarido emerges not from a single source but instead resounds as an acousmatic, ghostly multi-vocality that these writers already locate in a melancholic past, foreclosing the futurity of the Indigenous voice in the demand for national integration. I then contend that such discordant vocalities resist gestures of inclusion into national literature and politics. I finally turn to the poet Cecilia Vicuña’s listening to Selk’nam chants recorded by the ethnologist Anne Chapman, where I advance a poetic mode of listening that resists capture.

Keywords:

• sound studies
• indigeneity
• Argentina
• voice
• nation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

2 Robinson (2020, 153) points to the “salvage paradigm” as indicative of this, where “a false ascription of the inevitable extinction of Indigenous cultural practices and the resultant desire to save them – was at the time motivated by a sense of ethnographic responsibility”.

3 Ángel Rama’s The Lettered City remains a key reference regarding the significance of writing as an index of power in Latin America. In this seminal text, he writes: “To the degree that this dying cultural universe depended on unwritten traditions and oral communications, one might say that urban letters came to its rescue, but only to hold its funeral services in writing” (1996, 62). In certain ways the above quote’s reference to “dying” cultures and “funeral services” may rehearse the same phonographic tropes I outline here.

4 Though this article does not engage with the role of testimonial literature in the orality/writing and orality/literacy debate at length, there is no doubt that it bears importance for destabilising notions of “orality” as linked to pure truth and authenticity. For an overview of these categories, see Sommer (1999); Moreiras (2001); Beverley (2004) and McEnaney (2019).

5 Acosta (2004, 10) develops the concept of “illiteracy” in order to complicate the notion of “orality” as an access to unmediated authenticity; he writes that: “Illiteracy reveals the gap that exists between orality and writing, a condition of excess and subordination that cannot be understood adequately within the framework of writing (…) versus orality, or modernity versus tradition (…) Illiteracy is what emerges when a regime of sensibility encounters ‘zones of indistinguishability’ between identity and difference, inside and outside, proper and improper, truth and error, and so on”. Ochoa Gautier (2014, 20), meanwhile, views orality as a “historical mode of audibility that emerges in divesting the voice of unwanted features while pretending to be speaking about it”. I join these arguments by proposing a different mode of hearing what was seen as Indigenous “orality” in these texts, reading it not as immediacy or inaccessible alterity but instead proposing that “orality” itself becomes read and represented as a spectral condition that forecloses Indigenous futurity.

6 My discussion of the acousmatic here is grounded in the film theorist Michel Chion’s use of the term, itself in dialogue with the French composer Pierre Schaeffer’s coining of it: “In film, the acousmatic zone is defined as fluctuating, constantly subject to challenge by what we might see (…) the principle of cinema is that at any moment these faces and bodies might appear, and thereby de-acousmatize the voices” (Chion 1999, 22). I am interested in the acousmatic here at this moment of fluctuation between a sound source’s appearance and disappearance: Hernández’s first question “¿Quién es?” or “Who is that?” firmly locates the alarido in the territory of acousmatic vocality, where it is heard as intrusive and eerie mystery before its source is fully revealed.

7 The notion of “fugitive sound” here speaks to Mansilla’s proto-phonographic recording of these voices in line with Brady (1999) reading of Thomas Edison’s famous claims surrounding the phonograph, as well as the ways in which it changed the ethnographic project. However, the analysis of the relationship between listening and capture in service of the national-popular project here bears affinity with Alexandra T. Vazquez’s notion of “listening in detail”, where she writes: “I challenge the usage of details as things to be excavated and made epistemologically useful to instead allow for their retreat back into whatever productive bunker they’ve been hiding. They effect in flashes and refuse analytical capture. The fugitivity of details allows us to honor their effects in the here-and-now and to imagine how they will perform in some future assembly” (2013, 21). In dialogue with Fred Moten’s own formulations on fugitivity and Blackness (2003), Vazquez’s methodological project also resounds here in order to consider how disruptions and details unravel Mansilla’s and Chapman’s own ethnographic projects.

8 This framework of spectrality here is also grounded in the work of the theorist Jodi Byrd, who writes of Indigenous presences within US imperial expansion: “American Indians and other Indigenous peoples have often been evoked in such theorizations as past tense presences. Indians are typically spectral, implied and felt, but remain as lamentable casualties of national progress who haunt the United States on the cusp of empire and are destined to disappear with the frontier itself” (2001, xx).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Kassavin

Jane Kassavin is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation centers on the poetics and politics of the voice in modern and contemporary Southern Cone and Brazilian literature with a specific focus on questions of performance, translation, and transmediality.