Scripting Empire: Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic

Summary

Scripting Empire recovers the literary and cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical mid-century decades of shrinking British sovereignty, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became producers, editors, and freelancers at the corporation. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of African Caribbean writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of the aesthetic, formal, and political fallout of decolonization between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence.

Scripting Empire works comparatively across dozens of different programs spanning the General Overseas Service, Home Service, Light Program, and Third Program. Drawing upon a transnational archive of materials, including scripts, correspondence, periodicals, visual records, and sound recordings, it seeks to reposition the cultural contribution of West Indians and West Africans within a more pervasive and porous account of radio transmission, the legacy of which extends well beyond broadcasting.