Towards a decolonization of the Tessmann Fang sound archives (1907-1908) - Archive ouverte HAL
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Towards a decolonization of the Tessmann Fang sound archives (1907-1908)

Résumé

Decolonization refers to the end of the colonial state. For a country and its inhabitants, it means marking its political, administrative, economic and cultural independence from a settler country. Since 1940’s, the decolonization movement in Africa led to the independence of several African countries. This gave them political, but not necessarily cultural, independence. In the case of colonial archives, for example, it can be observed that a large part of them remain colonized. They remain the property of the colonizing power, which may or may not authorize access to them. Decolonizing these archives means either returning them or allowing free access to them. In the specific case of sound archives, which are the subject of this study, it is not a question of restoring the physical carriers, but rather of unmuseumify them by "making them talk", in order to make their content accessible and comprehensible once again. This is a fair compromise allowing the collector to remain the owner of the collected media, and the source populations to access the heritage contained in the said sound archives. Our work focuses specifically on the sound archives collected by Günter Tessmann in the "Fang country", the former German Protectorate of Kamerun and dating from 1907-1908. These archives, originally on wax rolls (about 150), have been digitized and are available at the Berliner Phonogramm Archiv. Our work, which uses the ethnolinguistic approach, will make it possible to turn these sound archives, which are museum objects, into linguistic archives that are both research tools and a living heritage accessible to the entire source community. The ethnolinguistic approach allows for optimal treatment of oral sources. The unmuseumification of these archives is achieved through their linguistic description, transcription, translation and an ethnological explanation of the linguistic content.
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Dates et versions

hal-03916847 , version 1 (31-12-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03916847 , version 1

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Régis Ollomo Ella. Towards a decolonization of the Tessmann Fang sound archives (1907-1908). 24thMeeting of the Study Group on Historical Sources, Oct 2022, Tervuren, Belgium. ⟨hal-03916847⟩
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