Radio Silence

Abstract Despite British colonial authorities’ intentions, Black sound technologies and technologists flourished during World War II and the years following it. News radio was a colonial project with a civilizing mission that partly functioned through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and military radio technologies, but Afro-Caribbean presenters, producers, and audio engineers found other purposes. Afro-Jamaican BBC producer Una Marson looms large with the legacy of producing the radio program Caribbean Voices from 1943 to 1958, which featured luminaries Kamau Brathwaite, Samuel Selvon, and Sylvia Wynter. Another Afro-Jamaican, Hedley Jones, who served in the Royal Air Force, became the inventor of the sound system, influenced by electrical engineering and radar training he received in the United Kingdom during World War II. Soundwaves intended to train a global Anglophone audience for the British Empire and to create networks of surveillance and colonial management were received by unexpected publics. Assessing sonic possibilities and strategies developed by colonial subjects, this article considers the consequences of dependence on imperial radio and how it can foreclose homegrown independent media. Tracing Brexit alongside the twenty-first-century decline of the BBC World Service radio, and how it once reverberated from London, sound carries temporally and spatially beyond coloniality. Neglect and abandonment of infrastructure are part of the ongoing colonial condition, but decolonizing requires such rewiring for the amplification of new sovereign political subjects. The Caribbean provides a case study for evolving dynamic sonic geographies and what it means to pick up a multiplicity of anticolonial signals.