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But the beat must go on —Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter When I switch on my radio and hear that black men are being lynched in America, I say they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. And finally when I switch on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been introduced and legalized, I say that truly they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. —Aimé Césaire, Discours politiques Léona Gabriel’s radio show career and the speakerine’s position as narrator of a certain musical family history in the filmBiguine offer case studies of the ways in which French West Indian cultural agents took to the soundwaves to stage their own versions of New World colonial history and contemporary diasporic relations . Like the other soundposts critically listened to in this book (i.e., the doudou ’s signature song, the biguine, the tam-tam, the black scream), radio technologies discursively and materially position self/other within a field of relations in space and time that is saturated with problems of race, gender, and colonial discourse. “In the force field of sonic Afro-modernity,” as Alexander Weheliye writes, “sound technologies, as opposed to being exclusively determined or determining, form a relay point in the orbit between the apparatus and a plethora of cultural, economic, and political discourses” (48). Le Poste Colonial, France’s first official colonial radio station, functions as just such a relay point, a literal and conceptual site where a range of ideas about French imperialism and black diasporic relations were debated, transferred, and translated. At the same time as le Poste Colonial attempted to sonically inscribe a French imperial order on the world, black radical writers theorized the ways technologies of sound might impact community formation and offer new modes of diafive Le Poste Colonial Short-Wave Colonial Radio and Negritude’s Poetic Technologies 124 black soundscapes white stages sporic intimacy and resistance against imperial hegemony. Césaire’s comments in the epigraph above, and Fanon’s relay of them in Black Skin, White Masks, serves as a critical example of the way the radio functioned as a critical relay point for negritude’s critiques of colonial truth and racial ideology. Fanon’s well-known account of transistor radio use during the Algerian revolution, in the essay “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” is the classic, but not the only, example of how negritude thinkers explored the ways cultural agents might adopt and transform the imperial technological apparatus for and through anticolonial and national practices. Less attention has been paid to the poetic engagements and experiments with technology in negritude discourse. This chapter asks how le Poste Colonial reworked the conditions of possibility for colonially or anticolonially speaking and hearing the world. It then asks how negritude discourse tapped into ideas about technology in its poetic experiments and theories about blackness and diasporic relations. Juxtaposing the discourse surrounding le Poste Colonial to representations of technology in Aimé Césaire’s essays and poetry, especially focusing on his poem “Cristal automatique” (Automatic Crystal), the discussion below considers how sound technology mediates an imperial struggle over soundscapes but also enables a new poetics of transnational and diasporic relating. le poste colonial Launched during the Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris, le Poste Colonial officially began in France on April 30, 1931.1 The “poste” in France’s Poste Colonial, refers to the machine itself, the poste is the physical apparatus. But Le Poste Colonial evokes also the meaning of poste as a relay point, a strategic if peripheral position in space. This latter definition makes sense especially considering the emergence of radio technology as a tool for locating geographic positions . Projecting to the world and beyond a sonic image of the French empire but also the “authentic” voice of France, le Poste Colonial marked the opening of a new discursive era of global relations. Just as the radio served as a “precious tool” during the First World War because “[s]hort wave radio relayed the trenches and the command posts, and the Eiffel Tower sent messages to ships through long wave radio” (Sudre 21), backers of le Poste called it an essential tool in France’s strategic positioning within global relations of power and influence. Supported by colonial...

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