Session I – Decolonial Studies & Sound Theory 

Guiding Questions: In what ways do decolonial and sound studies mutually inform one another? How might these different fields work productively together to produce new scholarly narratives to help us better understand the political and cultural processes of decolonization?

Elizabeth Enriquez, Coloniality and Decoloniality in Philippine Radio

Radio broadcasting was a tool of soft power in the American colonization of the Philippines in the first half of the 20th century. An analysis of the structure and content of broadcasting in the Philippines then, and even today, may indicate the success of this ideological project. To a significant extent, radio, along with other forms of popular culture, shaped the dominant knowledge and value systems of Filipinos, perhaps even more effectively and efficiently than the public school system established by the American colonial administration.

However, even then, Filipino broadcasters engaged in decolonial work by appropriating the alien culture on several fronts - culturally, politically, and economically. Because their labor was mobilized to feed a hungry medium that the Americans alone could not provide in the colony, Filipino broadcasters inserted the local in what was meant to be a Western, or universal mode of modernization.  This act included moments of resistances that may not have been self-conscious, and strategies to profit from the radio enterprise. This tension persisted even after the formal colonial tie ended and continues under the present neocolonial condition.

I propose that we can derive some lessons from the experience of the Philippines in radio broadcasting as an instrument of coloniality as well as how such a project opens up opportunities for decoloniality.

Alexander White, ‘Every time I opened my mouth, I was going to make things hot for the white man’: Black American broadcasters in a decolonising Africa, 1961-1967

By 1961, radio had emerged as a vital tool for political communication in Africa. As new nations achieved political independence, international broadcasters competed for influence over new nationalist audiences and attempted to undermine the vestiges of colonial rule. These new services, however, did not stop at Africa’s borders. As the decade progressed, anti-colonial radio broadcasts also began to focus their attention on racism in the United States, framing the struggle for civil rights as part of a global campaign against empire.

These broadcasts were made possible by a small network of radical Black American activists living in Africa – a group which included the poet Maya Angelou, the historian Sylvia Boone, the journalist David Graham Du Bois and the author Julian Mayfield. As writers and announcers for services like Radio Cairo and the Ghana Broadcasting System, these activists gave voice to a transatlantic politics of solidarity – but they also faced political discrimination, surveillance and censorship which undermined that solidarity in practice.

This paper builds on the rich personal archives of these broadcasters to shed light on the day-to-day work of radio production. Transcripts provide evidence of the role of political censorship while intelligence reports suggest how security services interpreted the threat of subversive radio services. Together, these sources provide new insight into the radical possibilities of international broadcasting in a decolonising Africa as well as its practical and political limits. 

Junko Oba, Aftermath of Rajio Taisō: the radio calisthenics and complex trajectories of decolonization in East Asia

As soon as radios became common features of American homes in the 1920s, its broad outreach attracted the attention of healthcare professionals. Throughout the early 1920s, health-related talk shows and “setting-up exercises” programs--fitness regimen practiced with music on the air--flourished in many major cities. “The Tower Health Broadcast” aired on WEAF in NYC was probably the most successful program of this sort, sponsored by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. When the idea of radio calisthenics was transplanted in Japan, however, its original purpose of promoting personal wellness was quickly dropped. Japan’s National Health Exercise Program (the precursor of Rajio Taisō) was launched in November 1928 to celebrate Emperor Hirohito’s ascension to the throne. Incorporated into the country’s national and colonial enterprise, Rajio Taisō was performed daily as a collective imperialist ritual all over Japan as well as in countries and regions colonized and occupied by Japan. It demanded a distinctive way of public listening and bodily subjugation. Although the demise of the empire in 1945 marked a historical moment of liberation, radio calisthenics outlived the Empire and the postcolonial transition of power. In some countries, e.g., China, Taiwan, and Korea, local authorities repurposed extant infrastructures, technology, and institutions of the colonial era to create their own versions of public control with different national agendas. Through examination of the post-colonial metamorphosis of rajio taisō, this paper aims to illuminate multiple layers of colonial legacy and national memories inscribed in movements, sounds, and ritual practices of post-1945 radio calisthenics, and complex trajectories of decolonization in East Asia.

Session II – Rethinking Decolonization: Infrastructure, Technology, and Governance

Guiding Questions: How can radio and sound studies help us rethink the definitions and periodizations of decolonization as a political and cultural process? How might decolonial studies complicate our understanding how radio infrastructure, technology, and governance operate during periods of political upheaval and transformation?

Rachel Chery, Capture the Callsign: Sonic Tourism and Short-wave Radio in Post-Occupation Haiti

This presentation explores the relationship between short-wave commercial and amateur radio operators in post-occupation Haiti between 1934 and 1957. It argues that both participated in what ethnomusicologist Michael Largey calls "sonic tourism" by fostering inter-American cultural exchange and encouraging foreign tourism to the island. Scholars often point to radio in Haiti as a means of considering diasporic exchange (Schiller et al. 1994; Largey 2014) or as a symbol of revolution (Garçon 2018). In this paper, I hope to add to scholarship that considers the medium's origins in the Caribbean while examining the ways, to borrow from Chantalle Verna, Haitians acted as "central players" in inter-American affairs via radio programming (Verna 2017). Leaning on letters from personnel of the Office of Inter-American Affairs Coordination Committee for Haiti, surviving QSL cards, remarks by amateur operators included in newspapers such as the Haiti Sun, Le Matin, and Le Nouvelliste, and interviews with surviving operators, I suggest that the interconnected relationship between Haitian radio amateurs and commercial broadcasters points to a collective impetus of service that in part shaped their transmissions. For Haitians on the air, sounding the nation with Haitian and Pan-American music and descriptions of the Haitian landscape allowed them to bring Haiti to the Americas and vice versa-challenging narratives of unilateral American imperialism and national instability.

James Brennan, “Clandestine radio and counter-revolution in East Africa: the short history of Sauti Huru ya Unguja na Pemba(“Free Voice of Zanzibar and Pemba”), 1973-1974”

This paper examines the history of a short-lived clandestine radio station broadcasting anti-Tanzanian materials from Mozambique in the final months of Portugal’s empire in Africa. It investigates the role of both state and private intelligence networks in constructing the massive transmitters that broadcast the Swahili-language program, Sauti Huru ya Unguja na Pemba, as well as the recruitment of the broadcasting team and the deeper political contexts in which these political movements originated. The paper concludes by examining the surprising immediate impacts that this clandestine radio project made on East Africa, particularly along the Swahili coastline.

Lunch + Isabel Huacuja Alonso Keynote (Community Commons)

Please get your lunch from the Community Commons dining facilities and be seated by 12:15pm. (Non-presenters welcome, if there is space available! Lunch provided to participants only.)

"To Talk is to Listen”: Radio Resonance and Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders 

In my recently published book, Radio for the Millions: Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders, I develop the concept of “radio resonance” to account for how conversation, rumor, and gossip intensified, expanded, and enriched what was broadcast, and to account for the affective bonds this “talk” around radio created. During World War II, in a population nearing four hundred million, the number of radio receivers in colonial India hardly broke two hundred thousand. Yet, as I show in the book, radio’s popularity and importance exponentially increased during the war as Axis-sponsored radio stations from Germany and Japan broadcasting in Indian languages countered British accounts of the war and trespassed print press censorship. British colonial administrators repeatedly complained about “rumors directly traceable to enemy radio broadcasts” because news first heard on the radio traveled via word-of-mouth, enabling radio’s influence to reach beyond those individuals with access to a receiver. Radio resonance, however, continued to be important even as the availability of affordable battery-operated transistors in the post-independent period ensured many more could tune in. Broadcasters such as Ameen Sayani from Radio Ceylon’s hit parade program Binaca Geetmala, encouraged listeners to talk about their radio programs. This conversation was not ancillary, but central to the medium’s reception. In this presentation, I revisit the concept of radio resonance. I show that to account for radio’s influence more thoroughly, we must focus on not merely who or how many people listened to broadcasts, but also on how radio broadcasts resonated over time, spurring a range of discussions.

Session III - Radio and Music: Music & Resistance

Guiding Questions: How did musicians from colonial societies use the airwaves to develop musical forms that challenged colonial authority? How did subaltern groups harness broadcasting and sound technologies for particular political ends? In what ways does anticolonial music from the era(s) of decolonization continue to shape discussions about race, ethnicity, and power in the 21st century?

Sophie Brady, ‘Its Anxiety is Africa:’ Music on the Radio in French West Africa at the Turn of Independence

Beginning in the 1950s, the French overseas radio began to enact a new policy of “Africanization” for its activities on the African continent. While a radio service for French colonial territories had existed since 1931, its audience was French settlers, and its programs were produced in Paris. But resistance broadcasts from Congo-Brazzaville had been essential during World War II, and as radio stoked both anticolonial sentiment in North Africa and the burgeoning Cold War, colonial administrators saw broadcasts more in tune with local populations as the key to maintaining France’s strategic position in the region. 

This paper explores changing attitudes towards music on the radio in French West Africa during the pivotal years leading up to Independence in 1960, against the backdrop of an incremental transfer of control that was as much about retaining French soft power as it was about establishing an autonomous African radio network. I argue that rather than replace European-oriented programming entirely, radio officials sought to cultivate an idealized African listener who would remain emmeshed in African culture while still aspiring to European tastes in some respects. By examining how radio was employed to negotiate between the assimilationism of the colonial period and the indigenization that would characterize the post-Independence era, we can see how modern African sensibilities were forged through sound during this transition from the late colonial state to the postcolonial nation. 

Celeste Day Moore, Voicing America: Georges Collinet, Leo Sarkisian, and the Sounds of the US State

In this proposed paper, I will consider the careers of two Voice of America (VOA) presenters: Leo Sarkisian, the child of Armenian immigrants, ethnomusicologist, and longtime host of “Music Time in Africa,” as well as Cameroon-born producer and host Georges Collinet, who modeled his on-air personality in the popular Francophone radio program “Bonjour L’Afrique” on Black DJs he heard in Washington, DC in the 1960s. Examined together, the voices and programs of these distinct hosts offer an important space in which to investigate the impact of the Cold War on radio programming, but also to thoroughly consider how the Cold War sounded in the context of decolonization. While their early careers were distinct–and defined in no small part by their different yet marked racial identities–both Collinet and Sarkisian were enormously popular in Africa, where listeners tuned into their radio programs on a regular basis. It was through their relationships with listeners, forged in letters and in official state-sanctioned visits, that both men became increasingly interested in hearing and recording African and concerned about the loss of these musical traditions in the face of globalization. This paper will draw on archival research in Sarkisian’s own archives held at the University of Michigan, an oral history interview conducted with Collinet, as well as material found in the US National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), all of which will provide unique vantage point to consider the relationship these men’s careers (and their distinct voices) had to the mechanisms of Cold War administration, public diplomacy efforts during decolonization, and their reception overseas during a period of enormous geopolitical change.

Ronit Ghosh, Decolonizing the Ear: Radio Pedagogies in Postcolonial Bengal and the Emergence of Modern Bengali Song

This presentation primarily explores the ways in which radio as a creative industry and radio-phony as a pedagogic tool are instrumental in forging a middle-class, upper-class, Hindu Bengali musical identity in postcolonial Bengal. Using historical ethnography and media-archaeology, I show how the radio studio in Calcutta (now Kolkata) during the post-independence decade becomes a critical interface between public cultures of listening in colonial Calcutta and an emerging set of decolonial musical utterances in studio-music culminating in the modern Bengali song. With the help of memoirs, interviews, and archival documents, I turn away from programmatic notions of decolonial musicking and, instead, pay close attention to modes of musical transculturation, translation, and transfer that take root in the studios of the Calcutta Radio Station (renamed Akashbani). I argue that a mediatized form of pedagogy in the form of radio programs such as Anurodher Ashor as well as a more situated and subtle form of aural pedagogy in and through radio-produced song mark moments of negotiation, boundary-making, and care that animate the decolonial soundscape of post-independence commercial Bengali musicmaking.

Video Recording Session & Informal Conversation (Sturm 433)

Conference presenters only. Presenters will record short videos discussing the primary sources and material objects that inform their research. 

Session IV – Sound, Performance, Alterity

Guiding Questions: How might radio histories help us move beyond received notions of race, faith, ethnicity, and culture? 

Diego Cortes, HCJB: Between Evangelical Heathenism and Ecuadorian Indigenismo

This paper examines the role played by the Heralding Christ Jesus' Blessings (HCJB), the world's first evangelical missionary radio station, in incorporating indigenous people into modern Ecuadorian citizenship. Founded in Quito in 1931 by American missionaries, HCJB strategically leveraged the divergent interests of American Christian fundamentalists and Ecuadorian Liberals regarding the "indigenous question" to establish and expand its media and social services.

The text argues that HCJB adopted a dual identity, presenting itself as a modernizing force aligned with Liberal indigenismo policies to Ecuadorian authorities while exploiting heathenish imaginaries of indigenous "savageness" to attract funding from conservative Christian donors in the United States. This symbiotic relationship propelled HCJB's growth from the 1930s to the 1990s, coinciding with the peak of the indigenista movement.

The paper analyzes how HCJB's media campaigns, particularly surrounding the 1956 killing of five American missionaries by the Huaorani people, fueled financial support and popularity for missionary efforts. It also examines HCJB's pioneering work in indigenous language broadcasting, healthcare provision, and its role in the massive conversion of indigenous Ecuadorians to evangelical Christianity following the 1964 Agrarian Reform. The text positions HCJB as a critical actor in the cultural transformation and modernization of Ecuador's indigenous populations through media, social services, and religious outreach.

Gloria Khamkar, Researching Radio History: Challenges and Solutions: A Case Study of Research on the Evolution of British Asian Radio in England

This historical research mainly concentrates on the need and relevance of independent British Asian radio broadcasting in England (UK). It analyses the social and cultural dimensions of this period to understand the dynamics of migration and thus integration as a whole. As this is a historical research, it aims to examine various elements of history and refers theoretically to events of the past. However, accessing those various elements of history was a huge challenge while carrying out this research.

While using archives as a research method, there were limitations of availability, access, accuracy, objectivity, genuineness and authenticity of the source material. Similarly, while using in-depth semi-structured interviews as a research method, there were limitations of interviewee’s memory, understanding, bias/objectivity, interviewer’s interpersonal skills, rapport-building, listening skills, confidentiality and trust.

As a direct consequence of these two methods, the study encountered a number of limitations, which needed to be considered. I tried to consider these elements carefully at the time of selecting archives, reviewing archives, selecting interviewees and conducting interviews. I have tried to bring in a balance by selecting a wide range of archives and interviewees to cover various significant aspects associated with British Asian radio broadcasting in England.

This paper aims to discuss these challenges and solutions at length; the idea is to encourage a comprehensive approach to consider and respect these practical methodological solutions that are generated by radio history researchers like me.

Julie Cyzewski, "Teaching You to Dance": European Dance in Radio Talks and Fiction on the BBC's Calling West Africa (1948-1957)

The BBC's English language radio broadcasts to West Africa represent European dances such as the waltz as an important part of cultural education. Instructional programs teaching listeners these dances aired alongside other programs about European culture and institutions, all directed for West African listeners who may study in the U.K. or for whom aspects of European culture were part of elite colonial life. Representations of "balls" and "monthly dances" in broadcasts of Nigerian fiction also include dancing as an important part of social life in West Africa and England.Calling West Africa was launched in 1941 for an intended audience of elite West

Africans. As Caroline Ritter shows in Imperial Encore (2021), BBC employees and British government officials argued for the importance of broadcasting to colonial African audiences for purposes of social development, education, and to foster broader connections between Britain and Africa. Many of the programs on Calling West Africa address West African women specifically, or are focused on "women's issues." Talks provide information about British dress, make-up and social institutions, communicating the message that elite West African women will support their husbands', and by extension the nation's, success by mastering these conventions. In this paper, I examine the instructional radio series, "Teaching You to Dance" (1948), alongside fictional representations of dances also aired on Calling West Africa. These programs illustrate the gendered expectations around learning European dances within colonial spaces.Two short stories by little-known Nigerian writers ("Saturday Night," G.E. Adoki [1951] and "A Matter of Self-Confidence," Lloyd Ukeni [1956]) represent characters' experiences attending dances in West Africa and attending dances in England. The fictional representations show dancing's social meanings and hybrid embodied forms within specific local contexts.

Session V– Radio in and on Literature

Guiding Questions: How did literature voiced over the airwaves during the era of decolonization challenge late colonial societies’ cultural, linguistic, and social norms? How might the literature broadcast by colonial societies’ intellectual elites expand our concepts of colonial resistance?

Laura Wagner, Your words sound like the truth—but the truth’s probably a sin”: Radio Haïti-Inter’s Creole-Language Production of Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée

In 1944, the classic Haitian novel Gouverneurs de la Rosée, known in English as Masters of the Dew, was published just months after the untimely death of its author, the writer and anti-occupation activist Jacques Roumain. The novel tells the story of Manuel, a poor farmer from the Haitian countryside who returns from several years in Cuba to find his community suffering from severe drought. Using the Communist principles he learned in Cuba and Haitian traditions of collective labor, Manuel organizes his compatriots and saves his village, only to lose his life in a senseless act of violence. Almost thirty years after Gouverneurs de la Rosée’s publication, famed Haitian radio broadcaster Jean Dominique and his sister, the literary writer Madeleine Paillère, translated the novel’s dialogue from French into Haitian Creole and produced it as a radio play on Dominique’s newly-inaugurated station, Radio Haïti-Inter. In this paper, I draw on archival materials from Radio Haiti’s archive and my interviews with some of the station’s journalists to explore the circumstances of radio play’s creation, as well as the political and social significance of transforming a French text into Creole, and a written novel into an audio medium.

Sam Carter, Sensing Solidarity in Nicolás Jaar's Archivos de Radio Piedras

Completed in December 2023, Nicolás Jaar's Archivos de Radio Piedras is a 17-part radio play set in the near future at a Chilean radio station where two announcers honor a friend who disappeared in 2022. They also retransmit statements from an activist collective that sabotaged telecommunications networks to produce a worldwide digital outage. Radio is thus the sole site of exchange across the plot of this 3.5-hour mix of music and narrative, and the New York-born Chilean composer and performer has elsewhere explored the specificity of this medium by approaching it through others such as a website and book. This attention to radio has also coincided with a political turn in his work, and Archivos de Radio Piedras establishes links between Wallmapu, which is the territory of the Mapuche that spans Argentina and Chile, and Palestine, much as Jaar himself has when promoting Palestinian causes as one of the nearly 500,000 Chileans of Palestinian descent. Sensing those intercontinental solidarities, however, requires listening through the play's extensive use of artificial static and other forms of interference intended to recreate tuning in radio signals. Although a few segments were broadcast, the full project was actually first distributed over 15 months via the messaging application Telegram. Jaar thus recognizes radio's potential even while employing other technologies, and I read these striking production and distribution choices alongside the narrative's representation of the medium in order to draw out how the play ultimately suggests the need for resistant aural techniques rooted in radio listening.

Jina Kim, Airing it Out: Women's Literature, Radio Broadcast, and Decolonization in Postwar South Korea

I investigate Chang Tŏkjo's (1914-2003) radio novels to show how the specificities of the radio medium, where sound and voice are just as paramount to the conveyance of the message and theme, complicate mid-century Korean women's literature and their participation in the decolonization process. More specifically, I argue that Chang’s long-running, radio novel Changmi nŭn sŭlp’ŭda (A Sad Rose, Dec. 1, 1956-Jan. 26, 1957) grappled with constructing a new form and style befitting radio broadcast to engage with social conflicts and cultural expectations centered on gender politics during the early postwar years when US military occupation and nationalist postwar recovery were at their height. By innovating older forms of the popular, serialized fiction form for the radio, Chang found ways to situate women's voices in private and public spaces. This presentation aims to demonstrate the intimate link between gendered voice, sonic modernity, and radio during the chaotic twenty years that bridged the Japanese colonial period and the early Cold War era, roughly from 1940 to 1960.

Cheryl Higashida, “U.S. Third World Left Radio Drama: Metafictions of Decolonization” 

Radio drama was a small yet significant part of the cultural work through which Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American radicals in the U.S. pursued decolonization in the late twentieth century.  Radio drama emerging from KPFA’s Third World News Bureau and its nonprofit Community Information Network exemplifies the U.S. Third World Left’s political aesthetics of mobilizing “the interconnections between U.S. minorities and Third World majorities in a moment of global decolonization” (Cynthia Young).  Focusing on plays by the Filipino radio journalist, dramatist, and activist Norman Jayo, I show how U.S. Third World Left radio drama sought to decolonize its conditions of production and thereby challenge interrelated modes of coloniality.  Through examining the institutional histories and radiogenic aesthetics of Jayo’s plays Quiet Thunder and The Last Game Show, I disclose their metafictional dramatizations of historical and contemporaneous struggles to decolonize media.  I then show how these metafictional dramas challenge neoliberal forms of media, environmental, racial, and economic justice, and insist on their interconnections.  I conclude with some implications of U.S. Third World Left radio drama for U.S. ethnic, postcolonial, and literary radio studies. 

Lunch + Lonán Ó’Briain Keynote (Community Commons)

Please get your lunch from the Community Commons dining facilities and be seated by 12:15pm. (Non-presenters welcome, if there is space available! Lunch provided to participants only.)

Technologies of Decolonization? From Ruins of Empire to National Radio in Mainland Southeast Asia 

In the 1930s and 1940s, colonial entrepreneurs developed a wireless communications and broadcasting network throughout French Indochina. Local stations rebroadcast updates from the metropole and produced their own news, entertainment and educational content in several regional and European languages. As resistance to occupation intensified during the First Indochina War (1946-54), nationalists fighting for independence seized these colonial-era broadcasting institutions and technologies. The Geneva Accords of 1954, which brought an end to French rule in the region, divided Indochina into four nation-states. This paper examines how broadcasters in each of these states used radio, a form of “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008), to propagate new national imaginaries through sound. When these countries sought to decouple their media and cultural institutions from colonial influence, they turned to pre-recorded and live music, folklore, poetry and other forms of sonic art to articulate their place in the world. I investigate how the subjective knowledge, understanding and experience of individual broadcasters reshaped the cultural landscape during this fractious transfer of power. In the 1950s and 1960s, radio could have been a platform for new Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian cultural industries to prosper. Instead, its decolonial potential was side-lined and the technology became an even more prominent feature in the cultural battleground for the future of mainland Southeast Asia.

Session VI – Resistance

Guiding Questions: How might methodological approaches based in the study of sound challenge the dominance of the visual in historical, literary, and anthropological studies of imperialism and decolonization? How might sound studies generate new narratives in decolonial studies, and what are its potential limitations?

Megjan Massoumi, Subverting the Censors: Radio and Resistance in Modern Afghanistan

 In the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan experienced a profound expansion of radio broadcasting, extending far beyond the confines of its capital, Kabul, to embrace transnational audiences. While governmental oversight sought to assert control over the airwaves, the agency of radio producers and musicians circumvented censorship, heralding alternative narratives and discourses. This scholarly inquiry investigates the pivotal roles played by eminent figures such as Farīda Usmān Anwarī, a luminary in radio announcing, production, and journalism, alongside the icons Aḥmad Ẓāhir and Ustād Maḥwash, whose musical contributions resonated widely across Afghanistan and beyond. Their endeavors serve as exemplars of how the rich tapestry of Persianate literature served as a catalyst for dissent amidst the evolving socio-political milieu of the time. 

Central to this narrative is the notion that radio, far from being a mere tool of state propaganda, emerged as a space where dissent found resonance and expression. By deftly navigating the contours of censorship, Anwarī, Ẓāhir, Maḥwash and their contemporaries carved out an alternative sphere of discourse, challenging official representations and fostering critical engagement among listeners. Moreover, their strategic manipulation of radio technology facilitated the formation of transnational sonic solidarities, bridging diverse communities across the Persian-speaking world and beyond. 

This interdisciplinary exploration underscores the transformative potential of radio as a medium of cultural resistance and connectivity. Through an in-depth analysis of archival materials, interviews, and critical literature, this study illuminates the intricate interplay between radio, Persianate literature, and decolonial discourse in Afghanistan during a pivotal period of socio-political upheaval. In doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted dynamics of media, culture, and dissent in the context of decolonization and global communication networks. 

Abdullahi Tasiu Abubakar, In tune with changing times: Radio and (de) colonization in British West Africa, 1935-1960

Introduced in West Africa by Europeans as an instrument of colonial control and Western-modelled modernisation, radio later became a tool of decolonisation—but also of subversion and surveillance. When British Colonial Secretary James Thomas was inaugurating the first radio broadcasting service in Nigeria (Britain’s biggest colony in West Africa) in December 1935, he highlighted its role in providing ‘entertainment and pleasure’.1 He didn’t mention the real objective of advancing Britain’s imperial interests. Nor had he envisaged that a decade later Britain would be forced to begin a process of decolonisation and resort to using the same instrument to control it. And lurking around were Communist Soviet Union and rising regional power Egypt wielding the same tool to advance their causes. Amidst this, were West African nationalist politicians, demanding control of radio to pursue their own version of decolonisation, and the colonial subjects whose hearts and minds all the contending forces were battling to win. While scholarship has dealt extensively with radio and its use and misuse across the world, it does little on the intricacies of colonial radio in West Africa.

This paper attempts to address the gap by examining the political side of radio broadcasting in British West Africa, focusing primarily on Nigeria but also touching on the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Sierra Leone. It draws on original archival research2 to unpick the multifaceted functions of radio in colonisation and decolonisation processes, the struggle for its control, and the limits of its performance. It traces the convoluted journey of radio broadcasting and reception in the region from wired to wireless broadcasting, and from communal listening via loudspeakers installed in public places to private reception on portable transistor radios. The paper also looks at the decolonisation of radio broadcasting itself unpacking the changes witnessed in orientation, training, staffing and programming.

Christine Ehrick, Rethinking the Boundaries of the Cold War: Radio Resistance and Surveillance in South America, 1970s-80s

Following the June 1973 military coup in Uruguay and the brutal repression against the Left that followed, a number of leading Uruguayan Communists eventually ended up in the Soviet Union and on the airwaves of Radio Moscow. The broadcaster was host to several Spanish-language exile programs (broadcast via shortwave), including “15 Minutes with Uruguay,” which offered vital information and moral support to Uruguayan audiences both in-country and around the world. Broadcasts reported on deaths, liberations, and detentions, but also on the activities of human rights activists in Europe and the Americas denouncing the Uruguayan regime. 

The Uruguayan government, for its part, considered “15 Minutes with Uruguay” part of the “psychological activities of the enemy” and launched “Operation Listen,” in which government operatives recorded and transcribed this and other similar programs (exiles spoke on East German and Czech radio as well) from as early as 1975. This level of surveillance is a boon to scholars, for it means that many transcribed programs are part of the sprawling “Uruguayan Archives of Terror” hosted by archive.org. While its role in Chilean exile broadcasting has been somewhat better documented, Radio Moscow’s Uruguayan exile programming is less well-known. This paper places the story of “15 Minutes” and related programming within the larger narrative about the role of East Bloc shortwave hosting Latin American exile voices during these years. More broadly, this history adds to our understanding of borders, empire, and broadcasting in late Cold War Latin America.

Sylvia Ryerson, Listening Past Carceral Power: Public Airwaves as Abolitionist Praxis

Every Monday night at 9 PM sharp, familial messages of love fill the airwaves of WMMT-FM 88.7 Mountain Community Radio. Broadcasting from the tiny town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, (population 1,200) in the heart of the Central Appalachian coalfields, for over twenty years the weekly program has been sending messages and music dedications over the airwaves to reach those incarcerated in the region’s vast prison system. Eight prisons fall within the station’s local broadcast area. The longstanding 3-hour weekly program, now called Hip Hop from The Hill Top & Calls from Home, offers a toll-free phone line for families to call into from across the country. First started to circumvent extortionist rates for prison phone calls, it has become a critical space for forging and building community across prison walls. I co-directed and served as a DJ for the show for four years and participated in many collaborations that grew from it. Reflecting on these experiences, this paper focuses on the liberatory impulses and possibilities of sonic disruption in spaces of incarceration in the contemporary United States and offers frameworks for how we might understand the potential of community radio as a core site of abolitionist praxis.

Session VII - Decolonizing Radio Archives: Preservation and Contestation 

Guiding Questions: To what extent have print and sound archives reinscribed imperial power structures and racial, ethnic, gender,  religious, and class hierarchies? How might scholars navigate the restrictions of these “colonial” archives to uncover voices of resistance and contestation? How might an embrace of non-traditional sources outside of formal archives help us tell new stories about decolonization?

Carolyn Birdsall, Revisiting the Imperial Nexus: Radio, Archival Legacies and Axis Decolonization after 1945

Recent historical scholarship has established a more interconnected view on fascist imperialism, seeking to observe patterns in the transimperial relations enacted between the ‘Axis’ powers (Japan, Italy, Germany) and in that of decolonization after 1945. Thus far, this scholarly attention to this ‘imperial nexus’ (Hedinger 2018) has not had a strong attention to media history. While some work on bilateral agreements between Axis powers has examined film production and distribution prior to 1945, there has not yet been an equivalent attention to the (un)making of Axis ambitions for global radio domination (Birdsall and Dotto forthcoming).

Rui Vilela, Rádio Libertação: anticolonial broadcastings and archival resonances

Upon re-listening to these archival recordings there is a simultaneous opportunity to delve into anticolonialism in practice, and to explore the distinct sonic elements of the armed struggle. The essence of re-listening to the anticolonial sound archive lies in conceiving of sounding and listening routines as acts of resistance against imperialism, neocolonialism, racism, and exploitation.

Monica de la Torre, Feminista Frequencies: Creating an Archive of Chicana and Mexicana Radio Broadcasters

In the 1950s, the voices of two trailblazing Mexican American women could be heard on commercial radio stations in two distinct locations in the United States: Sunnyside, Washington and Phoenix, Arizona. Herminia Mendez and Graciela Gil Olivarez hosted popular Spanish language radio programs on commercial FM stations. At KREW in Sunnyside, Herminia Mendez, an entrepreneurial cultural powerhouse who owned and operated dance halls, a record store, and restaurant in the Yakima Valley, hosted a musical radio show showcasing Mexican and Tejano musical acts. And in Phoenix, Graciela Olivarez hosted radio and cultural programming produced specifically for Chicana and Mexicana working class audiences on stations KIFN, KPHO, and KOOL. The online archive, Feminista Frequencies, is dedicated to showcasing Chicana radio broadcasters like Mendez and Olivarez, in addition to Chicana radio producers whose programming altered community radio airwaves starting in the 1970s. Digital archival practices, in particular, have opened up the realm of possibility for more diverse voices to be included in the archival record, particularly within radio production histories in the United States. In this paper, I ground my analysis in the excavation of the decolonial possibilities of radio and archives guided by the following questions: Is radio a decolonial act? Is creating an archive a decolonial act? In order to begin answering these questions, I center scholarship by Black, Chicana, and Indigenous feminist scholars who have advanced our understanding of De/Coloniality.

Session VIII. Decolonizing 21st Century Media, from News Platforms to Social Media Networks

Guiding Questions: How might decolonial approaches to sound studies or studies of radio and sound in the era of decolonization inform contemporary scholarship on twenty-first century media, from news platforms to social media networks?

Polly Lauer, Indigenous Radio on Social Media: Digital Tools of Resistance

This paper considers the evolving technologies used by Nawal Estéreo, the oldest Maya K’iche’ radio station in Guatemala. Several times a week, the team of K’iche’ broadcasters film events in and around their municipality to be broadcast over Facebook Live. While the station’s traditional frequency transmissions are heard only in the surrounding area, the videos are also received by an audience of migrants living in the US. This paper analyzes the expansion of radio technologies from the auditory to the audio-visual in the context of Native-language media production. While older Nawal Estéreo broadcasters worry that visual social media may erase the hard-fought history of gaining rights to an FM frequency, their younger counterparts celebrate social media’s audio-visual promises. These transformations have given new life to the concept of “radio” and expanded its decolonial potential. Digital technology presents Native broadcasters an avenue to circumvent and resist racist legal systems—specifically exclusionary telecommunications legislation—that overlook, penalize, and threaten Indigenous producers and their work. It moreover allows broadcasters to move beyond the limits of FM frequencies, no longer constrained by problematic spectrum allocation or by distance and national borders. For audiences abroad, videos extend the local to the transnational, maintaining ties to home, language, and culture, while also sharing crucial resources and information in Native languages. Posing cameras, smart phones, and online platforms as a rupture to prejudicial legal and physical landscapes that have limited the promises of radio, the paper weighs what digital technologies represent for Native radio broadcasters.

David Goren, Transgressive Signals/Cultural Beacons: The emergence of West Indian Pirate Radio in Brooklyn and New York City.

This paper has five sections: 

1: Tracing Neighborhoods (2024) At the end of each workday in Flatbush, Brooklyn, over two dozen stations come on the air and broadcast to Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians and other West Indian nationalities. What are they broadcasting, how do they operate and what is their relationship with the community? 2: Access to the Airwaves/Free Radio (1969-1989) The roots of pirate activity in New York City go back to the Free Radio days of the late 1960s when young white male hippies, political activists, hackers, and “kids playing radio,” took to the air. How did they create space for illegal broadcasting and fend off intervention from the FCC? When their scene deteriorated in the late 1980s, how did that create an opening for more diverse stations?  3: Yo Yo Mon Brooklyn! (1990-98) Unlicensed Kreyol language stations began broadcasting to Haitian immigrants in East Flatbush, Brooklyn in the early 1990s.  Stations serving other West Indian demographics followed. How did historic experience with radio in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship, restricted routes to legal access of the airwaves in New York City and a need for information from Haiti during a time of transition influence their programmers to begin broadcasting illegally?

4: Persistence of Transmission: Managing Risk (1998-2020)  In answer to a nationwide pirate radio civil disobedience, the FCC introduced a new class of low power license in 2000, but the media industry lobby hobbled the spread of low power community stations in urban areas. During more than two decades of serving their communities with music, news and spiritual counsel, how did the Brooklyn pirate stations negotiate the risk of financial penalties and shutdowns by the government as well as competition and sabotage from rivals? 5: Waves to Streams: Future strategies in the face of the PIRATE act (2020-present) New legislation passed in 2020 increased penalties to a maximum of two million dollars with similar fines for landlords hosting stations. To date, pirate activity has declined only slightly. Station operators continue broadcasting on air to serve older listeners, the economically marginalized, the homeless, the hospitalized and shut-ins in their communities. As stations shift to an expanding use of digital streams on a number of social media platforms, how will they reach the less connected members of their audience that they risk exposure to serve?

Tom Miller, Floating Waves on the Zambezi: Sonic Anthropology of Zambian Radio from Colonial to Community

This paper analyzes historical and contemporary radio programming content in the Zambezi River Valley of southern Africa. Colonial radio in Northern Rhodesia amplified economic development, social change and new musical styles as a rising middle class of Copper Belt workers tuned in to the British-run service on affordable 'Saucepan Special' receivers. After Zambia's independence, Zamrock bands became hugely popular; when the government passed a law requiring more African content on the radio, they shifted from playing western-style pop to writing powerful protest anthems in support of the struggles for national liberation in neighboring countries. We hear audio signals and messages from spectral wars, waged on short-wave in the military conflict zones between official white minority governments and clandestine opposing forces. Zambian national broadcasting became centralized with the establishment of the ZNBC network; local independent community radio stations were licensed in the 1990s, with religious broadcasters favored. In the 2020s governments in Zambia and Zimbabwe are supporting new community radio startups in the Zambezi Valley, especially in areas where Internet and cellular access are frequently unavailable. The present study draws on social media posts from community stations in the region, audio letters exchanged with producers at Zongwe FM community radio station, and a research database of more than 200 hours of online listening logged by anthropology students. Radio can now be hyperlocal and global at the same time; as scholars and producers, how might we collaborate with local artists, activists, DJs and others playing a role in the decolonization of media?

 12:15-1:30pm Lunch + Mhoze Chikowero Keynote (Community Commons)Please get your lunch from the Community Commons dining facilities and be seated by 12:15pm. (Non-presenters welcome, if there is space available! Lunch provided to participants only.)

“We Are Everywhere!” Guerrilla Radio in the Wars for Southern and Central Africa

To colonize is to invade, subjugate, control, dominate, and exploit—both physically and cognitively. That is the story of Europe in Africa since Berlin (1884-85). One of the most crucial tools for sustaining colonialism was radio, a technology that purveyed the European fantasy of the civilizing mission. Africanist historiography has sustained this fantasy, framing colonial radio broadcasting as a story of modernization and the triumph of European science and technology over primitive Africa. This epistemological reinforcement of the colonizers’ design suppresses—but unsuccessfully now—the African triumph: destruction, wresting, and repurposing of the colonial gadgetry into a technology of self-liberation. This paper centers this guerrilla broadcasting, seen in Africans destroying the lying British WWII colonial press and radio in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, through the 1950s when they attacked field recording and broadcasting vans and studios, engineering a different future right in the colonial studios, to the 1970s’ exile radio that reinforced the AK-47 gun at the frontline of the wars that fell the colonial state. Grounded in their own cosmologies of knowledge and information management and dissemination, Africans always interrogated and challenged power and its instruments: in this case, whose power it was that radio projected.

Closing Conversation. Teaching and Researching  Sound through Material & Sonic Artifacts (Sturm Hall 451) 

Guiding Questions: How do we tune undergraduate and graduate students’ ears to the pivotal role played by sound technologies in imperialism and anti-colonial movements? What strategies might we employ for analyzing and working with sound artifacts in the classroom? How can we make sound studies more central to our scholarly and pedagogical praxis?