The Man Who Went to War: World War II, Race, and Transnational Media History

As the field of media studies has expanded and become an established discipline over the last thirty years, our understanding of the centrality of broadcasting to American cultural history has grown as well. Yet the relative ephemerality and inaccessibility of radio and television texts too often closes off their use as historical resources.  Recently, however, digital technology has had a profound effect on the nature and potential use of the media archive, especially in its ability to transcend the “national cage” of historical study to examine transnational cultural history.  This paper draws on a twenty-year project of examining British/American broadcasting history to address assess these changes, focusing on a long-thought-lost WWII radio feature written by Langston Hughes, commissioned and produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1944, never aired in the US.  Its evocation of a transnational democratic identity through the lens of race – employing an African-American cast and musical performances to imagine London under the blitz – raises questions relevant to cultural history in the digital era:  How might historians understand and interpret such audio/visual texts?  What supporting sources of evidence exist to contextualize and give meaning to them?  How can an understanding of media institutions and policies affect interpretation of historical media sources?  The story of The Man Who Went to War also illuminates the politics of racial equality during a period in which broadcast media took on exceptional political and cultural influence.