A polemic spoken in revolutionary cadences. An essay that explodes spontaneously (Kelley Reference Kelley2000:7, 18). Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first published in 1950, declares Europe as “indefensible.” Highlighting the continent’s good fortune to have been a crossroads—“the locus of all ideas, the receptacle of all philosophies, the meeting place of all sentiments” (Reference Césaire2000:33)—he rails against the old European empires as they stood on the verge of collapse. The critique exposes a fabrication. A fabrication employed to posit Europe as a discrete entity, wiping out other cultural contributions, and silencing the long history of European reliance on the rest of the world. To maintain a sense of civilisational superiority, the colonial encounter required a deliberate destruction of the past. Or, as Césaire (Reference Césaire2000:52), puts it: “Start the Forgetting Machine!”

The machine in Césaire’s writing was figurative as much as it was about the mechanisms of empire, but this text shared a historical moment with the development of machines that were employed explicitly to capture and preserve history and tradition. The word ethnomusicology entered scholarly discourse in the same year as Césaire’s incendiary, with Jaap Kunst (Reference Kunst1950:3) placing recording technologies at the centre of the discipline. The same period saw the enthusiastic adoption of magnetic tape as a medium capable of capturing sound as it existed in the world. Kunst wrote, “the new apparatuses not only enable us to obtain an infinitely better rendering—hardly, if at all, inferior to the original performance” (Reference Kunst1955:21). Technology was invested with the ability to give direct access to traditional musics and cultural memory.

In Europe, these machines and dreams of fidelity were turned towards oral traditions perceived to be running out of breath. The International Folk Music Council (now International Council for Traditional Music) was founded in 1947 with a distinct European bias: fourteen of the seventeen members of its Executive Board represented European nations. A few years later, in 1955, the Council deemed it necessary to send a resolution to UNESCO and all the governments of the world expressing its “grave concern at the rapid disappearance of traditional songs, dances and instrumental music” and stressing the “urgency and importance of preserving folk music…saving it for posterity by means of mechanical recording” (IFMC 1956:1–2). This post-war decade saw a string of projects unfold across the European continent, producing recordings and building sound archives on a scale unlike anything heard before or since.

Forgetting machines, remembering machines. Jump forward a few decades, and these dynamics are now playing out through the digitisation and dissemination of historical recordings in online sound archives. National libraries, museums and broadcasters, university folklore departments and ethnographic archives have curated collections of recordings now recirculating and reaching new audiences. In many cases, these archives are strapped to discourses of heritage, belonging, and unmediated access to history. The British Library, for example, is running projects called “Unlocking our Sound Heritage” (www.bl.uk/projects/unlocking-our-sound-heritage) and “Save our Sounds” (www.bl.uk/projects/save-our-sounds). The digital platform of Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France), Gallica, posits itself as a “heritage library” (une bibliothèque patrimoniale; www.bnf.fr/fr/gallica-la-bibliotheque-numerique-de-la-bnf-et-de-ses-partenaires). Österreichische Mediathek (Austrian Media Library) asserts its responsibility for the preservation of “Austrian audiovisual cultural heritage” (www.mediathek.at/).

Heritage discourse is built into the online archives of the Museo do Fado (Fado Museum in Portugal; http://arquivosonoro.museudofado.pt/), the Danish Statsbiblioteket (Royal Danish Library; www.statsbiblioteket.dk/), the School of Scottish Studies archive (www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/en/), and numerous other online collections. Many of these institutions and archives have contributed to a European meta-repository, Europeana Sounds, which in turn proclaims itself as offering “Europe’s sound heritage at your fingertips” (www.eusounds.eu/). Heritage and cultural memory are the narrative logics—or what Eric Ketelaar (Reference Ketelaar2001) calls “tacit narratives”—of these collections.

And while these online archives are good at giving information on where and when this heritage was made and what recordings they contain, the archives are not so good at telling us why and how they were produced in the first place. Online archives are positioned as storehouses of truthful transmissions of national pasts, aggregated together to tell a European history. But a closer listen reveals processes of audio nation building and audio nationalism, often with clear lines drawn around ethnicity, race, and age, and predicated on concepts of traditional music as rooted in soils. A spirit of post-war diplomacy and peace building animated these endeavours in the 1950s: recording and archiving were employed to rebuild national cultures and international relations after the destruction of war. But these acts of national phonography (Western, in press) worked to produce purified nations in what was also a moment of massive population change in the aftermath of war and at the end of empires.

Migration—both within Europe and across empires—is notably silent, placed outside of history. The IFMC held the “migration of men” as one factor that was “causing a break in the continuity of the lives of the people and threatening the existence of folk music”—connected to industrialisation, urbanisation, and the influence of popular culture (IFMC 1953:12). This archival moment was also the moment of decolonisation (Shipway Reference Shipway2007), and the salvage impulse that animated these recording endeavours was set against what Malcolm X called a “tidal wave of colour” from the end of the war to the late 1950s (Kelley Reference Kelley2000: 8). From this footing, post-war sound archiving fits with what Stuart Hall describes as the effort to recover a “set of cultural origins not contaminated by the colonising experience” (Reference Hall, Chambers and Curti1996:246). Instead, recording and archiving sat within the “national order of things” (Malkki Reference Malkki1992): a way of making sense of the world that naturalises links between peoples, cultures, and places through a set of botanical metaphors. Cultures become rooted in soils; national identity is territorialised; migration is seen as being “uprooted” and the disorderly counterpart to sedentarism and geographical stasis.

Yet these movements were not the first time that colonialism and its consequences became part of European societies. Rather, colonisation was always “inscribed deeply” (Hall Reference Hall, Chambers and Curti1996:246) within the societies of imperial centres. Keeping colonial history separate from national and European heritage was part of the logic of mid-century sound archiving, and in turn became part of the organisational structure of archives themselves. As Alec Badenoch (Reference Badenoch, Föllmer and Badenoch2018:216) writes in relation to the “national” and “colonial” archives of Radio Netherlands Worldwide, “this separation makes an interpretation, and even narrative…a ‘them’ rather than an ‘us’.”. This is a European version of what Jennifer Stoever (Reference Stoever2016) calls the sonic colour line, wherein sounds become segregated, indexed to certain people and ethnicities; wherein certain histories are routinely erased. Some voices and bodies are transposed into national musics. Others get sucked into the forgetting machine.

Recordings made during this period take up considerable sonic space in online archives, which are tethered to histories of national phonography. The Europeana Sounds project—active from 2014 to 2017—aggregated over 600,000 audio items from across the continent, now gathered together on a single online platform (www.europeana.eu). Yet this monumental effort at unifying the sounding continent is the result of twenty-four, mostly national, institutions contributing and aggregating recordings and metadata. Sound files on the Europeana portal are listed by “providing country.” So while the Europeana site is permeated with ideas of transnationalism and archiving without borders, it remains a collaboration between past and present, bound to the logics of earlier archival practices. As Nanna Bonde Thylstrup (Reference Thylstrup, Nanna, Föllmer and Badenoch2018:189) puts it, “while digitisation often gives rise to new forms of ‘aerial fantasies’ that might provide transnational access, these fantasies are again reined in by territorial realities…digitisation has not done away with temporal and spatial regimes.”

Exceptions exist, of course. The Europeana site contains a migration collection (www.europeana.eu/portal/en/collections/migration), developed through 2018 as part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage. This online showcase is an example of what Badenoch terms “re-collection” (Reference Badenoch, Föllmer and Badenoch2018:211), linking different archival materials to tell new stories. The migration collection hosts just over 1,000 sound recordings. But 1,000 recordings gathered around the theme of migration compared to 600,000 in the grand sweep of “European heritage” is a faint resonance. Despite commendable efforts to include migration in the European story, it remains firmly at the peripheries.

All of which raises a question: how should we hear these recordings in the current political moment? Or, what does it mean that online sound archives have brought “heritage” recordings back into the aural public sphere at exactly the same moment that Europe has lurched back into populism? In a Europe of border closures and banlieus, of Frontex and Farage, does this whitewashed audio heritage risk feeding the erasure of migration from European history? In their discussion of a related question—who sings the nation-state?—Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Reference Butler and Spivak2010:32) argue that the production of nations relies upon purifying them of their heterogeneity, or using a restricted pluralism to reproduce their homogeneity.

This holds true when listening to the contents of these sound archives of European traditional music. The holdings are certainly diverse, but they are largely the work of heritage institutions rather than community archiving (Birdsall Reference Birdsall, Papenburg and Schulze2016; Franzen Reference Franzen2016:105). They reproduce an authorised version of Europeanness. What Arjun Appadurai (Reference Appadurai and Brouwer2003) calls the migrant archive, those collections produced by communities out of national phonography’s earshot, remains largely unheard on these platforms. The result is that heritage excludes most diasporic musics, as though these musics exist in a separate history, or have no history at all. Diaspora communities, as Gurdeep Khabra (Reference Khabra2013) highlights, do not see themselves reflected in mainstream European museums and archives, and have instead created “informal community networks” to separately document and express articulations of heritage. A shared sense of heritage is thus denied. Again, colonial histories are excluded from European history. Again, Europe is fabricated as a culturally discrete entity. A critical hearing of these archives is like listening to “Fortress Europe”—a big sonic border wall erected around Europe’s “heritage.”

In a recent piece for The New York Times, Teju Cole (Reference Cole2019) wrote of how the camera was—and is—a tool of imperialism. He writes of technological inequality of photography: an “unbridgeable gap and never-to-be-toppled hierarchy” of who had the power to take pictures and who remain their subjects, which has hardly changed in the decades since empire. Without confronting this misconstrual of history, he argues, “photography will continue to describe itself as one thing (a force for liberation) while obdurately remaining another (an obedient appendage of state power).” Listening to online archives prompts the same questions of the microphone and the portable recording machine.

Not only were ethnographic recordings bound up in histories of settler colonialism (Kheshti Reference Kheshti2015), but both Césaire (“It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that for those who go in for exoticism” [Reference Césaire2000:52]) and Frantz Fanon (“The colonialist specialists do not recognise these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the Indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style” [Reference Fanon1967:195–196]) draw a connection between salvage, preservation, and imperial rule. On the European continent, the decision to keep any traces of empire separate from notions of traditional music is the flipside of this logic.

In other words, and to return to where I started, the European refusal to acknowledge other civilisations, and the erasure of others within Europe’s borders, mean that the forgetting machine is running smoothly. Borders are technologies, and technologies produce borders. Archives have long produced both memory and forgetting at the same time (Derrida Reference Derrida and Hamilton2002; Sterne Reference Sterne, Bijsterveld and van Dijck2009). Digitisation, in Bonde Thylstrup’s words, “doesn’t only produce new modes of cultural memory; it produces new modes of cultural forgetting” (Reference Thylstrup, Nanna, Föllmer and Badenoch2018:187). The Europeana Sounds page speaks of its pride to “promote European culture,” while the main Europeana site declares its mission to “transform the world with culture!” Start the forgetting machine!