How to Build a Sound Empire: The Contested Techno-Aesthetics of Pre-World War II U.S.-French Broadcasting

During the early decades of the twentieth century, the rise of intercontinental shortwave shortwave broadcasting altered radio's place in the world. The live medium could now instantly and directly connect enormous audiences at a remove of thousands of miles. However, to bear fruit, live shortwave broadcasts across national borders required technicians and engineers, expatriate go-betweens, and soothsayer 'radio people' who coordinated and carried out the emerging art and science of live, electro-acoustical radio production. While ostensibly "national" by virtue of their professional affiliations and mindful of international regulatory law, these individuals also operated in a transnational milieu structured by an array of fluid technical, cultural, and political expectations. Starting in the 1920s, U.S.-French experiments in shortwave broadcasting opened up a new space in which the universal assumptions what Emily Thompson has famously called the "soundscape of modernity" were assayed in a crucible of mediated interaction between two allied, but quite different societies, with correspondingly unique communications cultures and infrastructures.

This paper builds on cultural historical, sound studies, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine the significance of the pre-World War II era of experimental U.S.-French broadcasting. It will explore the quasi-imperial discursive and technologized principles of the universalizing 'soundscape of modernity' in relation to U.S. and French geo-political and economic expansionism. I argue that scrutinizing the interwar U.S.-French co-shaping of broadcasting and aural cultural regimens can illuminate larger problems in the history of global processes of mediated communication and empire building and maintenance. In keeping with the AHA meeting’s emphasis on locating history "in its relationship to other disciplines" this paper illustrates how archive-based research—the historian’s bread and butter—combined with modern cultural history and theory can strengthen productive working and epistemological connection with neighboring humanistic subfields of critical cultural/aesthetic theory; sound studies; and science and technology studies.