Call for Content: Crafted Audio, Narrative Podcasting and the Global South

We’re seeking contributions for a special edition of RadioDoc Review on audio documentary, narrative podcasting or crafted audio in the Global South

Empire’s end? Writers, decolonisation and mid-century BBC home radio

This thesis offers a reassessment of British colonial legacy as culture by interrogating the uses and limitations of cultural broadcasting, especially the role played by writers, in the critical period of empire’s official end in the mid-twentieth century. In conjunction with BBC personnel, writers carried significant (though not uncomplicated) agency in imagining and circulating imperial endings, as they unfolded, to those ‘at home’ in Britain through the mass medium of the era, radio. Scrutinising written and sound archives, on-air output and never-broadcast programme ideas, this study examines the varied and at times contradictory ways in which imperial legacy imprinted itself on the cultural shape of Britain through the BBC Home Radio contexts of six major writers. These contexts are situated in the post-war momentum of political decolonisation, from the mid- to late-forties until the mid-sixties, and range across three core regions of British colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. The conjunctures of writer, culture, (de)coloniality and the BBC are explored via three sets of pairings: E.M. Forster and Louis MacNeice on friendship and neutrality in relation to the independence of India; Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark on gendered anti-colonial challenges to white settlerdom in Southern Rhodesia; George Lamming and Stuart Hall on the federation of the West Indies and the positionality of Caribbean media intellectuals in a new, emergent black Britain. Empire’s End? argues that literary-cultural broadcasting mediated the transition from imperial rule to the Commonwealth imaginary through a careful modulation of rhetoric and of radio form, one that questioned but ultimately validated Britain’s self-image as a ‘moral empire’. Further, it illustrates the unresolved end of empire through the entanglements between colonial ideology and progressive British culture – of its networks of intermediaries and its institutionalisation through the BBC–revealing links to today’s tussles over imperial heritage, cultural politics and the imperative to ‘decolonise’

Introduction: Audio Storytelling and the Global South

An introduction to a 10th anniversary special edition of the journal, dedicated to listening to the Global South, and reflecting on the changes in the landscape of audio documentary studies in that last decade

'Countries in the Air': Travel and Geomodernism in Louis MacNeice's BBC Features

In the middle stretch of his twenty-two-year BBC career, the poet and producer Louis MacNeice earned a reputation as one of the ‘undisputed masters of creative sound broadcasting’, a reputation derived, in part, from a huge range of radio features that were founded upon his journeys abroad. Through close examination of some of his most significant overseas soundscapes – including Portrait of Rome (1947) and Portrait of Delhi (1948) – this article will consider the role and function of travel in shaping MacNeice’s engagement with the radio feature as a modernist form at a particular transcultural moment when Britain moved through the end of the Second World War and the eventual disintegration of its empire