Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ssmscaifa (The Making of Modernist Resistance, 1880-1950)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2015-09-01 al 2017-08-31
Affective devices such as the tone or inflection of speakers or layered speech and music enabled sound media producers to transform the historical and emotional context through which listeners heard these narratives. By employing sound to evoke two separate historical moments in the same frame, producers linked past attitudes of colonial dominance with contemporary attitudes toward immigrants in ways that influenced public discourse. Considering broadcasts from these periods as part of a larger continuum illustrates how programmes produced retrospectively can employ sound to account for Britain’s increasingly critical views of Empire and deploy these to promote truth and reconciliation.
During the fellowship, I disseminated my research through eleven conferences and talks. Four of these were invited, two by the King’s College English Department, one at the Cross Currents: Gender and Transnational Broadcasting Workshop at Bournemouth University, and one at the Sound Cultures Symposium at Queen Mary London University. Some of the other papers were given at conferences including the Modernist Studies Association, The Modern Language Association, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. The largest academic dissemination activity involved co-organizing an international gathering of radio researchers entitled The BBC and the World Service: Debts and Legacies Conference at King’s College London. The event was open to the general public and I subsequently wrote an entry for the King’s College English Department Blog that links radio research to our everyday engagement with broadcasts and podcasts.
The research methods I honed through the project formed the main content for the King’s English Department’s Doctoral Research Seminar which I redesigned and taught in 2016-2017. It’s success led the Director of Graduate Studies to adopt it as a template for the department. I also had opportunities to offer two sessions on applying for the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for KCL early career training workshops and participate in an information day about European Research Grants organized by the European Commission.
Given the project’s focus on sound media, my main public engagement project involves making two podcasts that present material from my research and link it to our current political climate which will be available by summer 2018. The first considers a 1943 play by Mulk Raj Anand that links the Bengal Famine to Britain’s draining of India’s resources during World War II. The second considers how radio broadcasts from the seventies and eighties historicize our understanding of anti-immigrant attitudes today.
The astonishing transformation of the global landscape due to the migrant crisis, Brexit, Trumpist post-truth politics, and rising zenophobia make this study especially timely. The inspiring resistance to the divisiveness and violence unleashed by these events through activist sound media that fuels international solidarity marches and movements like Black Lives Matter or Me Too confirms the potential for deploying narratives in transformative ways. My monograph establishes that the BBC’s strategic use of sound prompted listeners to understand how anti-immigrant attitudes had their roots in the colonial, fascist, and Nazi movements previously confronted by the Indian writer-activists I study. The podcasts I am producing establish how our current climate of xenophobia is both an extension of and divergence from the past. In turn, they make a case for reading literary accounts of colonial and immigrant resistance next to related BBC programmes to understand how sound can both distort narratives of resistance or deploy them to promote truth and reconciliation.