The Academic Research Institute in Iraq

ruling the waves: transnational radio broadcasting in the middle east and the mediterranean from production to reception, 1920-1970

Co-sponsored by TARII, Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), Roskilde Universitet, German Historical Institute, Danish Academy, and Tor Vergata University of Rome

June 22 - 24, 2022 in Rome, Italy

Overview and Conference

One part of a larger project, this conference brought together scholars of politics, propaganda, intellectual history, media and cultural production, and technology who focus on the history of radio in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. For most of the 20th century, radio constituted the most widespread means of communications. Connecting people across the globe, it acted as a means of propaganda, a vehicle of dissidence, and a medium of popular culture all at the same time. Yet, its production, its quintessentially transnational character and especially its reception remain largely unexplored. The project re-examines the history and experience of transnational radio broadcasting by analyzing its production, its reception and its impact in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions between 1920 and 1970, the period when radio was the central medium for transnational propaganda and for the promotion of popular culture.

The project aims to fill a critical gap in Middle East and Mediterranean history as well as to challenge normative assumptions about global media, globalization, transnational public spheres, and the political and cultural agency within these fields of inquiry. In a post-colonial studies tradition, the project questions ideas about political, ideological, and cultural production in modern media as a one-way street of Western influence. By focusing on the multifaceted medium of radio and the ways in which it cut across dividing lines of language, class, entertainment, information, and intellectual engagement, this project will accentuate multidirectional and entangled radio histories. This entails paying attention to how long wave radio offered listeners across the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin a multitude of ideas and sensory experiences long before satellite television and the internet allegedly broke through the barriers of authoritarian state control and territorial boundaries. The project is designed to strengthen research networks and connections between Middle East and Mediterranean Studies in European, North American, and Middle Eastern academia by drawing on the organizers’ own international networks of interdisciplinary scholars working on radio’s multiple histories and meanings.

The conference brought together different disciplinary and geographical research milieus with the aim of creating an innovative volume of excellent new research on the political and cultural history of transnational radio broadcasting. Participants will focus on the political and cultural context of radio production and the reception and impact of programs in countries as diverse as Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, as well as Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Israel. The contributions will be disseminated both among the academic community and the wider public through a series of blog posts and podcasts via the project’s website. The most innovative papers will then be edited in an original volume spanning across the Mediterranean and the Middle East and published.

Conference Program

Panel 1: (Inter)war frequencies

Chair: Bianca Gaudenzi

Simon Potter, Infrastructures of Empire: Britain and transnational broadcasting in the Mediterranean and Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s

Sahar Bostock, Palestinian Listeners Speaking Back to the Radio, 1936–1948

Sara Farhan, Broadcasting Contagion: Censorship, Transmission, and the Radio in Wartime Iraq, 1941

Panel 2: Broadcasting popular Culture

Chair: Pelle Valentin Olsen

Emily Mellen, The Arab Music of Radio Bari

Janina S. Santer, ‘Is the radio dangerous?’ Censorship and Popular Culture in Lebanon (1940s-1950s)

Diana Abbani, al-Idhā‘a [the radio], shaping an audience and remapping Beirut’s musical scene (1940s-1950s)

Keynote: Ziad Fahmy, Egyptian Radio: Transitioning from Commercial Stations to a State Broadcasting Monopoly, 1928-1934

Panel 3: Decolonizing Radio

Chair: Arturo Marzano

Caroline Kahlenberg, The Man of the (Hebrew) Hour: Palestinian Knowledge Production and Anti-Colonial Radio in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Maria Hadjiathanasiou, ‘Militant patriots’ or ‘a bunch of gangsters’: The Greek Cypriot anti-colonial revolt through the radio (1954-1959)

Arthur Asseraf, Liquid Fears: State Broadcasting and Unruly Listeners in Algeria in the Twentieth Century

Panel 4: Increasing the wavelength: International broadcasting

Chair: Maria Chiara Rioli

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer, Orientalism on Air: The early years of the Arabic service of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep (1945-1949)

Andrea Stanton, International Regionalism: The United Nations Radio’s Middle East Service, 1947-1973

Panel 5: Middle East Calling

Chair: Jacopo Pili

Nicholas Glastonbury, ‘Kolkhozniks of meadow and earth’: Kurdish Folklore, Musical Nationalism, and the Political Aesthetics of Radio Yerevan

Randjbar-Daemi, Rebel Airwaves: The Radio Opposition to the Shah of Iran in Europe and the Middle East, 1950s-1970s

Panel 6: Transmitting the Global Cold War

Chair: Enrico Acciai

Robert Elliott, Propaganda, Patronage, and Polarization: The Communist Party of Turkey’s Bizim Radyo, 1958-1963

Sarah Lemmen, Talking to the enemy. Spanish National Radio Broadcasting across the Iron Curtain

Anandita Bajpai, ‘Tuning in’ to the Cold War: Radio Berlin International and its ‘Objects of Love’ in India