Session Abstract

History’s transnational turn is visible in a wide range of moments and methodologies, whether in the movement of people, the transmission of ideas, or the exchange of goods. However, while historians have demonstrated the importance of these people, goods, and ideas to thinking beyond the national framework, recent work in music, sound studies, and science and technology studies (STS) has suggested that these visible markers of transnationalism were accompanied, and in some cases even preceded, by aural transfers and sound diffusion. This is particularly evident in the history of radio production, transmission, and reception, which has made clear that sounds could not be contained by national or linguistic borders.

Reflecting on the importance of radio in transcending national histories, this panel focuses on the transnational history of radio in France and its overseas empire before and after World War II. Each paper investigates the different ways in which radio resisted national and imperial boundaries, whether by tracing its networks of diffusion, looking closely at the mechanisms of production, or by analyzing the programs themselves. In the first paper, Rebecca Scales considers the broadcast and reception of new genres of culturally hybrid radio programs in French colonial Algeria in the 1930s, a moment in which new articulations of racial and national identity threatened to destabilize colonial constructs. In the second paper, Derek Vaillant examines the history of experimental US-French radio broadcasting, which he situates within competing national claims to universality, modernity, and empire in the interwar period. Finally, Celeste Day Moore examines the US military’s re-introduction of jazz and "Negro spirituals" through new radio technologies and networks in liberation-era France, where they became embedded in the formation of new national and imperial radio networks after the war.

While rooted in the particular social, political, and cultural conditions present in France, this panel asks how the study of radio could not only instantiate the transnational but also refine its meaning and better define its parameters. It queries the particular conditions in France as compared to the United States and Great Britain, thus putting into relief the impact of geography, language, and empire on radio transmission. Moreover, while each paper builds on archive-based research, all are embedded in broader debates about sound that have emerged from other humanistic disciplines and subfields, including music, media studies, and sound studies. Each asks how we might use sound to not only investigate the formation of national identities and cultures but also how it may have been a site in which new transnational, imperial, and Atlantic cultures were imagined and understood. Taken together, these papers pose new and provocative questions for the study of transnational history: how did new technologies in radio production and diffusion challenge the borders of the nation? How did they facilitate new kinds of transnational encounters, debates, and identities? Finally, can the study of radio, sound, and aurality refine and ultimately transform our approach to transnational histories?