Distant listening—a practice born with radio amateurism, known as DXing among American radio enthusiasts—was the term used to designate an essential dimension of radio during the interwar period: the capacity to listen to radio stations far away. What this involved was not just the fine-tuning of a wireless set, but educated guesses about foreign identification signals, languages and speech patterns, and frequent battles against unwanted noise and distortions. As the British radio pioneer Peter Eckersley recalled in his memoirs, for the fleeting thrill of capturing a foreign broadcast one had to endure, in the early years at least, “long periods of virtual rigor mortis waiting for [an] identification signal” and much parasitic noise: “the wailing and the grunting, the shrieking and the crying,” the “bangs, crackles, hums, whistles,” and “the portentous booming” and “howling noise” carried by the airwaves. As Simon Potter observes, when we speak about radio, we assume a good degree of intelligibility, but the reality of distant listening consistently involved large amounts of “unwanted, excessive, aberrant” noise and incomprehensible content. What could be heard from distant locations largely depended on atmospheric conditions and other uncontrollable factors. Interferences between transmitters, between the frequencies used by radio stations, and between wireless sets and nearby machines as innocuous as trams, neon signs, or refrigerators remained common (Potter, Wireless Internationalism, 65). More is known about distant listening in relation to British broadcasting than in other contexts thanks to Potter’s work on the “wireless internationalism” that emerged within and around the BBC during the 1920s and 1930s. Through the BBC magazine World-Radio (whose longest-standing columns discussed tuning strategies and specialized in providing assistance to listeners wanting to identify distant radio stations), Potter traces the emergence of a particular kind of internationalism—elastic, sometimes unsteady, often wary, always tinged with hope. Distant listening, Potter shows, shaped the emergence of powerful worldviews around peacekeeping, the threat of another world war, and the preservation of empires, which manifested themselves in different arenas, including the BBC’s development of Empire broadcasting and initiatives taken by the International Broadcasting Union and the League of Nations.

If literary radio studies, in its first couple of decades, anointed a hero, it was probably Hilda Matheson. The first Head of Talks at the BBC, not only an accomplished bureaucrat but a practical theorist who developed the style of “intimate address” by which the broadcaster artificially produced the impression of naturalness, Matheson was a perfect candidate for celebration: lover of Vita Sackville-West, booster of literary broadcasting, martyr (or so the story goes) to the patriarchy, as represented by Director-General Sir John Reith,

On June 1, 1963, J. P. Clark’s poem “Agbor Dancer” was recorded for the London-based Transcription Centre’s program Africa Abroad, an English-language radio magazine program distributed for broadcast on multiple African stations. Africa Abroad producer Lewis Nkosi praised the poem and recorded it in its entirety in his review of the anthology Poems from Black Africa, edited by Langston Hughes. In “Agbor Dancer,” the speaker watches a woman dance to drums and juxtaposes the dancer’s connection to “communal” identity through music and dance with the isolating effects of language and print. The poem, first published in print and then broadcast, describes West African aural and kinetic traditions while also using and referencing European literary traditions. What does it mean to take this poem, often read as a reflection on the alienating effects of print culture, and record it for radio broadcast instead of distributing it through print? Christopher Okigbo’s poem “Lament of the Drums,” which Okigbo read selections from and discussed on Africa Abroad in 1965, also explores the relationship between oral and print cultures. These two Anglophone Nigerian poets’ engagements with orality and print are productive sites from which to explore the role of radio in mid-century African literary cultures more broadly. In the case of “Agbor Dancer,” the radio broadcast remediates the written description of music and dance and accentuates the poem’s existing aural elements, including meter, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. Okigbo’s account of composing “Lament of the Drums” emphasizes his work’s synthesis of aurality and print and challenges cultural narratives that describe incommensurable differences between sound and print forms. Clark’s and Okigbo’s verse, read within the context of the Transcription Centre’s intermedial project of producing African literary programming, challenges media studies’ teleological account of a transition between the “primitive” and “typographic” that draws strict distinctions between orality and literacy. Drums, a common reference in postcolonial African verse, appear in each poem as a motif of indigenous cultural expression and communication through which Clark and Okigbo trace Africa’s changing mediascape in the mid-twentieth century. Radio technology, particularly in Africa, has been often compared to the drum, as both are used to communicate aurally across distance. The increasing affordability of radio sets in the mid-twentieth-century, the perception of Africa as “the oral continent par excellence,” and the development of programming from national, commercial, and overseas sources all contributed to the “overwhelming dominance” of radio as a medium. Radio broadcasting was established in Africa during the colonial period; by the 1960s, there was much interest within and outside of Africa in expanding radio access and programming in what Donald Browne terms a “postcolonial scramble for the ether.” Much of this programming was didactic and included political propaganda, religious proselytization, education, social reform, and anti-communism, but “radio was always far more multifaceted and slippery than was intended by the colonial powers.” Radio was taken up as an exciting tool to facilitate the distribution and discussion of literature in programs such as the BBC’s West African Voices and the Transcription Centre’s Africa Abroad; postcolonial writers’ voices were frequently on air through their literary pieces, interviews, and critical commentary. If, as Brian Larkin argues in Signal and Noise, “media technologies” such as radio played a key “role in producing what we call urban Africa,” radio also helped produce what we know as literary Africa. Clark’s and Okigbo’s poems draw from specific drum traditions (and in Okigbo’s case synthesize materials from multiple West African traditions); Africa Abroad programs, however, often return to the question of “the coherence and diversity of African identity.” In using Anglophone Nigerian poems to think about African literature and media studies, the goal of this paper is not to overgeneralize from these poets’ work, but instead to demonstrate how locally contextualized examples challenge certain mid-century claims about drums and orality while also acknowledging what oral literature scholars such as Isidore Okpewho have identified as “common features and customs” across the African continent. Clark’s and Okigbo’s poems do not directly theorize the role of radio in Africa, but “Agbor Dancer” and “Lament of the Drums” present the drum as a unique cultural form and sound communication technology with roots in the precolonial oral and musical traditions of West Africa. The poems and the paratextual material of the radio programs engage key questions of mid-century media studies while also resisting the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning the field’s cultural development narratives.

Foreign-language broadcasting projects in the United Kingdom and the United States faced momentous challenges during World War II, a time when totalitarian regimes had successfully appropriated wireless technology for propaganda purposes. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would argue, countries such as Nazi Germany had turned radio into an agent of political repression by creating passively receptive audiences who uncritically absorbed fascist doctrines. When war broke out in Europe, Hitler’s party had already colonized the airwaves at home to leave dissenters no opportunities to make their voices heard on the radio. But as the case of “Lord Haw-Haw’s” “Germany Calling” program demonstrates, the Nazis had also set up a range of foreign-language services, hoping to conquer the European continent (and the rest of the globe) through the calculated use of sound. Technological progress had not improved international relations. On the contrary, such transnational broadcasting initiatives as the ones pursued by the Nazis evidenced how easily new communication systems could be exploited to support expansionist claims made by political aggressors. How, then, could the Allies develop their own foreign-language programs if transnational broadcasting had become stigmatized as Nazi Germany’s propaganda tool? Few doubted that the dissemination of counterpropaganda over the wireless was an essential aspect of Allied warfare because these transnational broadcasts would allow communication with listeners in Germany who could be encouraged to overthrow their totalitarian leaders. But what kind of programs would be most effective in converting listeners—who had been living, willingly or unwillingly, with Nazi propaganda for almost a decade—into allies? And who were the individuals best suited to gain influence with these listeners?

Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-twirling shortwave enthusiast, stationed in (perhaps) Cork, and tuning in to transmissions Irish in affiliation but emanating from Dublin, Addis Ababa, New York City, Belfast, Geneva, London, and Berlin—transmissions that dazzle by their variety and that impart an awareness of their connectedness in dispersal.