Overview

This work analyzes radio as both a cultural and material production, it explores radio's powerful role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early 20th century. Scholars and radio writers, producers, and critics look at the many ways radio generates multiple communities over the air - from elite to popular, dominant to resistant, canonical to transgressive. The contributors approach radio not only in its own right, but also as a set of practices - both technological and social - illuminating broader issues such as race relations, gender politics, and the construction of regional and national identities. Drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies and feminist theory, radio history, and the new field of radio studies, these essays consider the development of radio as technology: how it was modeled on the telephone, early conflicts between for-profit and public uses of radio, and amateur radio (HAMS), local programming, and low-power radio. Some pieces discuss how radio gives voice to different cultural groups, focusing on the BBC and poetry programming in the West Indies, black radio, the history of alternative radio since the 1970s, and science and contemporary arts programming. Others look at radio's influence on gender through examinations of Queen Elizabeth's wartime broadcasts, Gracie Allen's comedy, and programming geared toward women. Together the contributors demonstrate how attention to the multitudinous ways radio is utilized and understood reveals the dynamic formation and transformation of communities within the larger society.

Full Product Details

Author:   Susan Merrill Squier
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.544kg
ISBN:  

9780822330950

ISBN 10:   0822330954
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   19 June 2003
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments ix Communities of the Air: Introducing the Radio World / Susan M. Squier 1 Radio Technology across the Twentieth Century AT&T Invents Public Access Broadcasting in 1923: A Foreclosed Model for American Radio / Steven Wurtzler 39 Compromising Technologies: Government, the Radio Hobby, and the Discourse of Catastrophe in the Twentieth Century / Bruce Campbell 63 A Promise Diminished: The Politics of Low-Power Radio / Nina Huntemann 76 Radio Cultures Caribbean Voices on the Air: Radio, Poetry, and Nationalism in the Anglophone Caribbean / Laurence A. Breiner 93 The Forgotten Fifteen Million: Black Radio, Radicalism, and the Construction of the ""Negro Market"" / Kathy M. Newman 109 Packaged Alternatives: The Incorporation and Gendering of ""Alternative"" Radio / Lauren M. E. Goodlad 134 Science Literacies: The Mandate and Complicity of Popular Science on the Radio / Donald Ulin 164 Not Hearing Poetry on Public Radio / Martin Spinelli 195 Radio Ideologies In the Radio Way: Elizabeth II, the Female Voice-Over, and the Radio's Imperial Effects / Adrienne Munich 217 ""If the Country's Going Gracie, So Can You"": Gender Representation in Gracie Allen's Radio Comedy / Leah Lowe 237 ""Are You Lonesome Tonight?”: Gendered Address in The Lonesome Gal and The Continental / Mary Desjardins and Mark Williams 251 Wireless Possibilities, Posthuman Possibilities: Brain Radio, Community Radio, Radio Lazarus / Susan M. Squier 275 Contributors 305 Index 307"

Reviews

Communities of the Air covers historical periods, genres, performers, program types, and audiences not previously discussed in this still all too thin area of radio studies. -Susan Jeanne Douglas, author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination Turn up the volume! At last, we're tuned in to the right frequency for radio studies. We all listen to radio, we remember our lives through it-and now we have the tools to understand it too. -Toby Miller, author of Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and Popular Media

Turn up the volume! At last, we're tuned in to the right frequency for radio studies. We all listen to radio, we remember our lives through it-and now we have the tools to understand it too. Toby Miller, author of Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and Popular Media Communities of the Air covers historical periods, genres, performers, program types, and audiences not previously discussed in this still all too thin area of radio studies. Susan Jeanne Douglas, author of Radio and the American Imagination: From Amos 'n Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern

Author Information

Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology and coeditor of Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies, and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction and Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation.

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