Sounds Subversive: Cultural Mixture and Colonial Politics on the Airwaves

This paper examines how transnational flows of music and language across the Mediterranean during the 1930s produced new genres of culturally hybrid radio programs in French colonial Algeria that threatened to destabilize colonial society. When European businessmen persuaded the state to construct Radio-Algiers as the French empire’s first radio station in 1930, they hoped it would reinforce Algeria’s ties to France while combatting the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and ethno-racial religious violence in the colony. Yet Radio-Algiers’ most popular broadcasts turned out not to be the state-approved and “culturally appropriate” programs designated for consumption by European (in French) or Arab-Algerians (in Arabic), but rather culturally hybrid programs that attracted a multi-ethnic audience. I consider the production and reception of these programs, which reflected Algeria’s history as the cosmopolitan crossroads of European, North African, and Middle Eastern cultures as well as new forms of cross-cultural exchange facilitated by broadcasting and the global trade in recordings. In the first, a comedy sketch titled La Chronique du cireur (The Shoe-Shiner’s Column), a European comedian christened “Jeannot” played an Arab-Algerian shoe shiner while bantering in a Franco-Arabic sabir. In the “oriental concerts,” Algerian musicians performed Western-style musical numbers while singing in Arabic and sabir. If enormously popular, these culturally hybrid broadcasts quickly attracted the ire of colonial officials as well as European and Algerian audiences, who feared that listeners would be unable to discern the racial and ethnic origins of the “invisible” radio performers. While exploring the methodological challenges of gauging reception to broadcasting in a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic society, this paper demonstrates how transnational currents of sound disrupted the ethnic and cultural boundaries undergirding colonial society, exposing the vulnerabilities of the imperial power structure at the precise moment when nationalist movements began challenging the legitimacy of European rule.