Subversive Sound: Transnational Broadcasting and Colonial Borders in the Mediterranean, 1934–39

During the late 1930s, transnational radio broadcasting in the Mediterranean made broadcast sound into a new site for power struggles between Algerians and the French colonial state on the eve of the Second World War. Beginning in 1934-35, Germany, Italy, and Francoist Spain challenged French dominance of North Africa through Arabic-language broadcasts that proclaimed their support for pan-Arab movements in Egypt and the Levant and attacked liberal democracy and French “Muslim” policies in the Maghreb. Fearing the broadcasts would further inflame the growing Algerian nationalist movement, the French colonial state constructed a surveillance web to monitor radio sales, investigate Algerian listening habits, and assess the effects of propaganda on the “native mentality.” Drawing on the files of the French Army and colonial civil service, this paper reveals how broadcasting consistently undermined the visual surveillance mechanisms of the colonial state. The immateriality, invisibility, and temporality of transnational radio broadcasts appeared to Europeans as a dangerous technological manifestation of the indigenous gossip network (téléphone arabe), while the subjective and individualized nature of aural experience bewildered French policemen struggling to determine when listening became a subversive political act. Colonial authorities temporarily displaced their fears about radio onto Arabic phonograph records, which appeared to contain a precise script that could be analyzed and traced directly to manifestations of anti-French unrest. However, French authorities’ inability to control Algerian listeners and the airwaves over North Africa eventually compelled the French state to develop concrete counter-propaganda strategies (through broadcasting and jamming) to shore up French “borders” in the Mediterranean airwaves. While complicating our historical picture of late French imperialism, this paper exposes how modern auditory media undermined colonial borders and power structures, reminding us that imperialism must be examined through a transnational framework, rather than the conventional model of the imperial nation-state.