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.