Introduction

History, as we know it, is full of uncertainties, insufficiencies, unsatisfying or partially obstructed views of the world. Scholars stretch to recover blank spaces. We strain to fill the gaps, to explain the connections. We leap into ruptures in hopes of finding new approaches, details, anecdotes, and patterns of recurrence that will make our descriptions fuller, more vivid, less deficient. And we form histories that describe the world based on the knowledge we have acquired. But, of course, our knowledge of the world is never merely descriptive. Description is never ideologically or cognitively neutral. When we describe, we classify, we generalize, we impose hierarchal values. As Aijaz Ahmad and others have pointed out, to "describe" is to specify, to contain, and to produce knowledge that is "bound by that act of descriptive construction." When we describe, we "specify a locus of meaning."¹ Media history is no different.

John Patrick Leary argues in a recent Social Text article that to understand the history of Venezuela's Catia TVe would necessitate a history of Caracas's neighborhoods (many of them unmarked on maps, many of them illegal squatters' settlements on public or private land), and their transformations since the 1950s oil boom.² Leary stretches. He increases the variables relevant for thinking about Venezuelan television, and in doing so he moves the locus of meaning from television itself and the domestic as its site, to the transgressions intrinsic to barrio expansion and to attempts to build and fortify communities. And he introduces an urban imaginary that may have no correspondence in Western European or North American cities.

Brian Larkin, studying the Muslim Hausa city of Kano in northern Nigeria, writes about the 1944 introduction of radio in colonial Kano, and how the public loudspeakers' rediffusion of the BBC broadcasts "embodied leisure time." In a culture where the rhythms of agricultural work and religious practice were the prime demarcators of time, "the colonially imposed division between work and nonwork as organizing principles of the day was new and yet to be internalized."³ By dividing the radio transmission into foreign-language service during work hours, and local vernacular service "when the workday (as defined by the Europeans) was finished," the British "materialized leisure time in sound waves . . . creating a new experiential rhythm to the day," even when the transmissions were unintelligible to a large number of the listeners who were unfamiliar with English and some of the vernacular languages. Their very unintelligibility carried a promise of the colonial ideal of progress "by suggesting that while the signal is incoherent now, the future of the individual and society as a whole is comprehension."⁴ Noise communicates. Critically engaging with and questioning Western assumptions about commercial goods and modernity, Larkin provides a different genealogy for the emergence of radio in Kano. His history of northern Nigerian media employs analytical criteria that are socially specific to suggest the epistemic uncertainty produced by new technologies and how the intentions of the British (to construct an ideal colonial subject that was progressive, mutable, and politically quiescent), the technical capacity of radio, and its social and religious context were linked and governed not by commodity relations but by the political relations of national development.⁵

These examples provoke many questions: Are the social and theoretical presuppositions implicit in the analytical tools and operations of mainstream Euro-American film/TV/radio history appropriate or relevant to all contexts? Is the way we have been writing film and media histories based on certain generally "accepted" resources, framing devices, and parameters of understanding? Are these resources, framing devices, and parameters based on the Euro-American context, and Euro-American considerations and constraints? And are these resources, framing devices, and parameters really indispensable, borrowing from Hayden White, to the process of translating knowing into telling?⁶ Perhaps different forms of understanding, different structures of time, and different notions of "place" and "community" define non-Western media histories.

What constitutes a legitimate object of analysis? Can we, for example, separate film history from neighborhood developments, from national development, from the implementation and penetration of television, or even cyberculture in some locales...