This panel explores the sonic history of war in the late twentieth century, showing how critical analysis of wartime soundscapes can yield new insights into the dynamics of state power. Where sounds come from, how they circulate, and to what effect are consequential matters, these presentations demonstrate. Focusing specifically on music broadcast over radio airwaves, the panelists will attend to ways that sounds and silences can, by turns, strengthen, destabilize, and challenge centralized government authority. In so doing, these innovative scholars bring together elements of political histories of the state, sensory history, media history, sound studies, and critical music studies. The result is four fresh approaches to the study of war and society, establishing how sounding (and silencing) practices do more than reflect wartime power relations. They mediate and shape them.

In different ways and in different historical contexts, each presentation interprets how music broadcast over the radio made audible complex social forces at play in conditions of war. First, Celeste Day Moore offers a new approach to the Cold War through an analysis of two influential presenters of African music on Voice of America: Leo Sarkesian, a child of Armenian immigrants, and the Cameroon-born Georges Collinet, who modeled his on-air persona on Black DJs he heard in the United States in the 1960s. She argues that a study of their relationship with listeners offers a critical space in which to investigate how the Cold War sounded. Second, David Suisman proposes a revisionist interpretation of the musical soundscape of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Focusing on the nearly ubiquitous presence of armed forces radio, Suisman demythologizes the “rock and roll war,” arguing that pop, easy listening, and country music programs on armed forces radio were an important factor in keeping the American war machine running smoothly. Although rock music was a presence, Suisman contends that the military’s more anodyne radio programming loomed large in soldiers’ pursuit of distraction and emotional engagement with stateside popular culture. Third, the paper by Iván Andrés Espinosa-Orozco complements the two previous presentations by confronting the soundscape of the state from the perspective of political dissidents. His project uncovers the political work done by Radio Venceremos, an underground radio station established by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in the Salvadoran Civil War. Espinosa-Orozco argues that Radio Venceremos democratized the Salvadoran airwaves through the dissemination of popular folk music and the distribution of new songs created by Venceremos’s listening community. Through this work, it contested dominant political narratives and boosted rural opposition to U.S.-backed urban elites. Fourth, Ayanna Legros will discuss the origins of Haitian-Creole radio program, The Haitian Hour, which ran for thirty-two-year at Columbia University WKCR 89.9FM radio station. Her paper discusses the inception of the program in November 1969 one-year after the 1968 student riots. The program’s transition from a “musical postcard” into a leftist program that critiqued US imperialism, militarism, and suppression encouraged a unified struggle that shattered nation-state borders across the hemisphere.