Oralities, Voice, and Affect in Oral History Work in the Afterlives of Violence

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá

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Chapter 21 Oralities, Voice, and Affect in Oral History Work in the Afterlives of Violence

In: Handbook of Global Oral History

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Pilar Riaño-Alcalá

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 493–518

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004737181_023

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Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the field of oral history has moved in varied new directions, and a Western-based simplistic understanding of the opposition oral–written has been challenged. However, the binary framing remains firmly embedded in the praxis of oral history with its implied contrasts and hierarchies. The focus of oral history literature on “history” (historical reconstruction) and the techniques for recording “the eyewitness of the past” via interviews continue to neglect a more in-depth engagement with orality as knowledge, living and evolving. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic work in two emblematic sites of mass violence in Colombia – the Upper Guajira region and the Middle Atrato River in Chocó – I examine questions of orality in the practice of oral history. The chapter traces my research journey and engagement with questions on how to listen to the sounds and poetic records that silently germinate under the noise of “war” but also to the noise of “peace.” More specifically, I examine what is involved, ontologically and politically, in listening to the composition and singing of the alabaos (funerary songs) in the Middle Atrato River or the storytelling and commemorative practices among the Indigenous Wayuu people of the Upper Guajira within a complex soundscape of armed violence and the ongoing resistance to dispossession by the Indigenous and Black peoples of these regions. The chapter turns to notions of emplaced witnessing, the living archive, and voice to argue that these orality practices are part of a resonant web of relations and ways of re-membering loss by which rich and sensory worlds are sustained and repaired in the afterlives of violence. This form of multimodal attunement to orality and the ways the past is narrated and negotiated in critical spaces of encounter and friction offer a resonant place for an ethical interrogation of the oral historian’s work.

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Handbook of Global Oral History

Series: Handbooks of Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume: 3

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004737181

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 11 Oct 2025

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Chapter 21 Oralities, Voice, and Affect in Oral History Work in the Afterlives of Violence

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