When readers finish Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference, they are likely to listen to the world differently. More than a contribution to sound and aural studies, the book proposes a Mapuche-centered methodology for unsettling the colonial soundscape. At its core is the question of how one practices allkütun (active listening) after being shaped by what the author identifies as a colonial ear. For Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, sound has both a history and a politics, for it “is a relational phenomenon entangled in webs of power” (4). By treating allkütun as both method and epistemological intervention, the study shows how sound reveals the historical conditions of Mapuche marginalization while making audible enduring forms of resistance.
The book’s interdisciplinary approach builds from a historiographical and methodological framework grounded in Mapuche intellectual production—history, linguistics, radio shows, poetry, and song lyrics—while placing these in conversation with postcolonial thought and sound studies. Rather than treating Mapuche texts and voices as objects to be interpreted through external theory alone, Cárcamo-Huechante positions Mapuche thinkers and artists as producers of analytical categories in their own right. This is particularly evident in the way the study moves across literary writing, radio archives, music, and oral expression without hierarchizing one form of knowledge over another. One of the book’s strengths lies in how carefully it guides readers through this intellectual terrain, especially when its methodological premises may initially feel unfamiliar to scholars trained primarily in textual traditions.
The chapters move readers through Chile’s colonial and postcolonial soundscape from the nineteenth century to the present, showing how different media shaped both the representation and rearticulation of Mapuche voice. The book opens with literary analysis, beginning with Mariluán (1862) by Alberto Blest Gana, whose treatment of Mapuche speech, presence, and motivation constructed an acoustic register of racial difference during national consolidation. It then turns to radio, where early programs, such as Indio Pije, exaggerated Mapuche speech, tonal register, and song into comic and animalized forms, reproducing a Spanish-dominant soundscape that marked Indigenous presence as audible but subordinate. Particularly strong are the chapters tracing how later Mapuche-produced broadcasts, like Wixage Anai (Get Up, Wake Up!), transformed radio into a space of interference by privileging Mapudungun, song, and political address through ütram (conversation), a familiar tone distinct from professional radio style. The final chapter examines why Mapuche communities embraced Mexican corridos and later US rap as forms capable of carrying shared emotion, memory, and collective experience because, as several interlocutors explain, they are music that speaks directly to the heart.
Two analytical interventions are especially striking: pewma (dreaming) and laughter. In discussing Leonel Lienlaf’s poetry, Cárcamo-Huechante explains how dreaming allows land to become a speaking historical presence. Through bilingual form and attentive listening, the poems unsettle linear conceptions of time by joining grief, memory, language, and territorial life within a single poetic space. Dreams are not merely symbolic images but reveal overlapping temporalities in which the past remains active in the present. By placing Mapudungun before Spanish and presenting the land as something that “dreams” and “shouts,” Lienlaf turns territory into an active subject rather than a passive landscape. The publication of bilingual poetry during Chile’s transition to democracy also carried political weight: Mapudungun poetry emerged as a cultural assertion of Mapuche presence and a rearticulation of kisugünewün (autonomy) during a moment of neoliberal transition. Laughter, by contrast, appears in the painful register of linguistic shame, especially when speaking Mapudungun becomes marked by embarrassment, correction, or exclusion. Notably, at gatherings in Santiago’s Parque Quinta Normal, being vocally Mapuche shifted from rejecting Mapudungun to holding cultural events in the language during the mid- to late twentieth century.
From patient explanation to sustained theoretical engagement with literature, poetry, and radio programming, the book stands apart for the way its conceptual complexity remains historically grounded. Rather than simply asking readers to adopt new terminology, it invites them to become conscious of how the colonial ear has shaped both the Mapuche experience and wingka (non-Mapuche) understandings of Indigenous presence in Chilean society.
