Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference, Luis E Cárcamo-Huechante, 2025, Duke University Press
A theatrical play little known outside Ireland captures well the motive and spirit of Luis Cárcamo-Huechante’s book on the soundscape of the oppressed Mapuche people on the other side of the world.
Translations, a three-act work by the playwright Brian Friel written in 1980, was a small hit when it first toured Ireland and Britain although it is hard to know what, if any, impact it has had beyond their shores.
Nonetheless, set in a small village in 19th-century Ireland, the themes it addressed of linguistic disinheritance, cultural imperialism and miscommunication as resistance have enriched post-colonial discourse and debates.
Cárcamo-Huechante’s book makes a more contemporary contribution to this subject and recaptures many of the same elements as Friel’s play of the linguistic subjugation of a native people in what is now southern Chile and Argentina.
As the Irish were, the Mapuche have been at the receiving end of centuries of colonial expansion—and their languages were among the first victims.
As the author points out, colonisation is also a sonic phenomenon which “put ears and bodies into a state of fear”.
The writer has experienced this first hand, having grown up in the Tralcao near Valdivia, at the time in the 1970s a Mapuche-Williche community with few non-Indigenous families.
He traces relentless linguistic colonalism and cultural erasure, beginning with European conquest, extending as the Chilean nation-state eventually consolidated after Independence alongside Catholic missionary zeal, and thereafter continuing into the modern era.
As his point of departure to explore what he conceptualises as “acoustic colonialism”, he points to the phonetic Hispanicisation of the name of his hometown, Tralcao.
Cárcamo-Huechante writes: “As a term rooted in Mapudungun [the language of the Mapuche people] but transmuted through the phonetics of Spanish, the very name Tralcao is simply a linguistic disfigurement of what originally could have been Tralkawe, ‘place of thunderstorm’.
“The name honoured the very nature of the land where the Huechante, the Pangui, the Lefno, and other Williche kinships dwelled.”
While this is a book primarily about how language is a prime target of colonial violence, it is not exclusively so, and considers the broader soundscape as an important dimension of cultural oppression, from music to the arrival of new mechanisms of violence and technology.
Acoustic colonialism, the author argues, can be characterised as “a regime of massive, iterative, and invasive linguistic, ambient, social, and technological mechanisms that alter and disrupt the lifeways of a Native territory”.
It manifests in several terrains—what we hear or listen to, and by the sounds that permeate our everyday lives within a territory, a community or at home
This begins inevitably with sociolinguistic dominance, the marginalisation or exclusion of native languages or, more radically, their erasure or elimination, what some scholars define as “linguicide”.
However, it is reinforced by media systems and related technologies of representation and communication that become key actors in the infrastructure of colonial domination.
A third, and perhaps less recognised, aspect of it are the technological and infrastructural apparatuses of colonising powers—from the noise of industrial machinery, airports, hydroelectric plants, forestry machines and trucks to the the weaponry of the state.
Just as in the case of Gaeilge (Irish), even though Mapudungun has survived across time, the number of speakers is dwindling, Chilean Spanish dominates private and public spaces, and increasingly English is taking over, especially in virtual spaces and music.
Cárcamo-Huechante writes: “Linguistic and discursive colonisation fractures and permeates many Mapuche ears and speaking bodies, as media outlets, social institutions, and technological forces constantly deploy the sounds of Spanish throughout Native environments.
“In this complex web of acoustic colonialism, dominance and hegemony take shape through the spread of the settler language, along with the deployment of economic, social, cultural, technological, and media agents over Mapuche territories.”
Chapters explore Chilean literary and settler cultural representations of the Mapuche sonic environment, and Mapudungun literary and media interventions that developed in the context of the neoliberal and extractive capitalism of the recent era.
This book is also a reflection on resistance, and Cárcamo-Huechante analyses how the Mapuche have used literature, arts, and the media to formulate responses to acoustic colonialism—from the Mapudungun poetry of the 1980s, to the Wixage Anai radio programme that began broadcasting in 1993 in Santiago produced by Mapuche activists, to the music of the Mapuche rap group Wechekeche Ñi Trawün.
He writes: “This book embodies and embraces a will to be in tune with the voices and sounds that are currently resurging as part of the historical struggle of Ngulu Mapu [what is today central and southern Chile] and, more extensively, Wallmapu—the broader Mapuche territory.
“… For the Mapuche, this soundscape is a battleground where they struggle to undermine, disrupt, and rechannel the continuous waves of colonialism.”
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Categories: Chile