Entangled Wavelengths: International Radio Broadcasters & their Afro-Asian Listening Publics
Research project of Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War (CRAFTE)
This sub-project zooms into media entanglements across the Asian and African continents, which were enabled by international radio broadcasting in the Cold War years. Instead of focussing on the broadcasting or host countries of the stations (usually based in Euro-America or the Soviet Union), the key research 'sites' of the project are the places where the stations were heard. Although not intended as such by the stations, international broadcasting programmes enabled several listeners from Asian and African contexts to be informed of, engage, build networks, and initiate epistolary exchanges with each other. Following traces in radio archives, listeners' private collections and their oral testimonies, the project explores the nature of such entanglements and the possibilities listeners imagined them to offer.
This research emerges from a Habilitation project (thesis for qualifying as lecturer in Germany), which traces the affective trajectories of international radio broadcasters and their listening publics in India during the Cold War years. It explores radio’s material legacies by exclusively focussing on the social lives of radio-objects, which travelled between foreign broadcasting stations and their Indian listeners during the Cold War years. The presence of objects such as gifts, souvenirs, letters, photographs, radio journals, and a variety of radio-memorabilia in listeners’ homesteads/private collections even today and their affective relationship(s) to them can enable us to examine how radio materially permeated the larger social fabric of listeners’ everyday lives, not just through sound but also a plethora of things. In other words, I follow the trajectories of radio-objects to explore what a material history of radio could look like, how things unravel radio-pasts as sites of South-South entanglements and how radio-objects become windows to keepers’ biographies.
Field work for this project has been conducted in several towns, villages and medium-sized cities in the Indian states of Bihar (2018-19), Rajasthan (2022), Uttar Pradesh (2022, 2024), Haryana (2024) and Chattisgarh (2024).
Based on leads from this research, the sub-project within CRAFTE advances in two directions:
1. Tracing the Afro-Asian listeners' networks which were made possible by international broadcasting stations. This part of the research relies on Indian listeners as its nodal point of South-South networks. In focus is (a) how Indian listeners' expressed solidarity with anti-colonial, nationalist movements in African countries, or opposed the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and US interventions in Vietnam via radio and (b) how radio journals opened new networks of epistolary exchanges between Indian listeners and listeners from Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mauritius, South Africa, Uganda etc.
2. Exploring the limits of Afro-Asian solidarities in moments of crisis: This part will focus on the expulsion of Ugandan Asians from the country in 1972. How did different radio stations report on the expulsion? How were listening publics explained the same in different geopolitical contexts?