Editors: Dr. Peter Brooke (Oxford/Johannesburg) and Prof. Chandrika Kaul (St Andrew’s)
The editors invite proposals for contributions to a collected volume on the history of broadcasting in the colonial world. Chapters should be 6000-8000 words in length and may address any aspect of broadcasting in Africa and/or South Asia during the colonial period, or the colonial legacy in the post-independence era. Comparative or transnational studies are particularly welcome.
The deadline for chapters will be in late 2025. Interested authors should submit a title, a 300-500 word summary of their proposed chapter and a CV by 1 November 2024.
Please send submissions to the ASC Administrator Amy Crane on events@africa.ox.ac.uk
RATIONALE FOR VOLUME
Broadcasting Colonialism will present new perspectives on the relationship between empire and mass media. It will argue that European empires were quick to adopt new media technologies in the twentieth century as part of a global public relations campaign to revitalise the popular image of colonial rule, most prominently in Africa and South Asia. However, if the late-colonial media machine was impressive in its scope and innovation, in practice it did as much to empower anti-colonial subversion as it did to tighten the grip of colonial regimes on their subject peoples.
Historians of colonialism and media have traditionally foregrounded newspapers and their elite, literate audiences. Broadcasting Colonialism will complement and problematise this history by showcasing recent research on other, non-textual forms of media in the colonial world and their much larger audiences. While colonial regimes tended to subject newspapers to tight control and censorship, the control of radio and television - used as much for entertainment as news - was more haphazard. The history of broadcasting therefore sheds new light on the degree to which contestation and subversion were tolerated, ignored or overlooked by colonial authorities in the public sphere.
The contributions to the volume will demonstrate that colonial officials were fascinated by the power of broadcasting as a tool of political control and its potential to project a high-tech vision of colonial rule as modern and permanent. Paradoxically, this often went hand-in-hand with an ethnographic impetus to salvage, promote and curate `traditional' culture, music and stories. But broadcast media proved unreliable servants of colonial rule in three ways. First, individual broadcasters managed to exercise considerable freedom and even engaged in subversion, especially in vernacular language broadcasting. Second, the colonial media machine was undermined by the cross-border flow of illicit media, most obviously in the form of anti-colonial or counter-cultural radio stations. And third, audiences proved to be unpredictable and critical consumers of mass media who were less malleable than colonial authorities had hoped. Indeed, in some localities the broadcast media served as much to undermine as to prolong empire. At independence, broadcasting became the primary medium of nation-building but decolonisation of the mass media proved to be a tricky business thanks to continuities in personnel, the entrenched influence of cultural norms established in the colonial period, and a reliance on training and equipment from former colonial powers under the auspices of development aid.
The volume will make two original interventions. First, it argues that electronic broadcast technologies shaped the late-colonial world as much as print media and in different ways. Second, the volume takes a transnational approach to a subject that is dominated by local studies and pulls together research across two global regions. It reveals that the newness of broadcast technologies led colonial broadcasters to emulate and adapt innovations across borders in a connected global moment that had a profound legacy on the post-colonial media landscape in Africa, South Asia and beyond.
