1 - Entangled Wavelengths: International Radio Broadcasters & their Afro-Asian Listening Publics

This paper zooms into media entanglements across the Asian and African continents, which were enabled by international radio broadcasting in the Cold War years. Moving beyond a focus on the broadcasting/host countries of the stations (usually based in Euro-America or the Soviet Union), the key research 'sites' are places where the stations were heard. Although not intended as such by the stations, international broadcasting programmes enabled 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. Based on archival and field work research leads the paper zooms into two specific directions:

(1) Tracing the Afro-Asian listeners' networks made possible for Indian listeners by international broadcasting stations: Indian listeners’ solidarity with anti-colonial, nationalist movements in African countries and radio journals’ as a resource for  enabling  networks of epistolary exchanges between listeners from India and 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 radio stations report on the expulsion? How were listening publics explained the same in different geopolitical contexts?