18/04/2023
[Call for Papers]
‘The isle is full of noises’: Radio Culture in the Mediterranean, 1939–74
A Special Issue of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, edited by Edward Allen
Please send abstracts of approx. 250 words to Edward Allen ([email protected]) by 31 May 2023. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of June 2023, along with details of a symposium to be held in November 2023, where contributors will have the opportunity to present their work. Complete essays will be due by 1 March 2024.
Historians have made careers of chronicling the radio – Asa Briggs, Susan J. Douglas, Giorgos Hatzidakis, Franco Monteleone – and broadcasting has long been considered a fit subject for wider sociological enquiry, too, such that the names and views of early theorists have just about crystallised into orthodoxy: Rudolf Arnheim, Bertolt Brecht, Gordon Allport and Hadley Cantril, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. Each of these has made radio studies what it is today: a model for interdisciplinary labour and collaboration. In welcoming interventions right, left and centre – from psychology to semiotics, musicology to political philosophy – radio studies has come to terms with the fact that the object of enquiry is not, or not only, an object; as John Mowitt puts it, ‘radio is composed of certain techniques of listening, a diffused network of social interaction, an industrialized medium of entertainment, a corporate or state system of public communication, in short an unwieldy array of cultural institutions and practices’.
The purpose of this special issue is to bring this rich body of thought to bear on the case of Mediterranean radio culture during and after World War Two. In doing so, the special issue will seek to amplify the ways geopolitical events – occupation, liberation, civil war, coups, pacts and treaties, decolonisation, irredentism, border shifting – were not only reported by broadcasting institutions, but mediated by writers for whom radio came to seem both a dynamo and feature of regime change, as well as a vehicle for disseminating responses to the political situation in general. Of particular interest to a number of writers – and to this special issue – were various strategic bases in the Mediterranean, such as Corfu and Crete, Cyprus and Rhodes, where territorial disputes and the mechanics of decolonisation would proceed to play out conspicuously in the 1950s and ’60s. To what extent did these islands depend on radio for news and information? In what sense were listeners made to feel – in fact or fantasy – that they were suddenly connected with centres of administrative power? In what ways did writers seek to understand this charged and rapidly changing media ecology, and with what consequences for the development of literary forms?
To address some of these questions, and to raise others, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture invites essays of 6000–8000 words (excl. bibliography) on related topics which may include the following:
• Wartime radio technology
• Influence of radio on hyphenated identities (Anglo-Greek, Italo-Greek, Greco-Turkish)
• Representations of radio culture in fiction, poetry, drama, film, letters, autobiography
• Broadcasts, scripts, and adaptations for radio
• History of broadcasting outfits, their formation and administration (e.g. Cyprus Broadcasting Service in 1953, Hellenic Radio of Corfu in 1957)
• Relations between regional and national services (including the National Radio Foundation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the European Broadcasting Union)
• Radio-related publications (Radio Cyprus)
