Old Media / New Futures: Revolutionary Reverberations of Fanon's Radio

Abstract

In 1959, in the midst of the liberation struggle in Algeria, Frantz Fanon published L'an v de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism), which contained a chapter dedicated to the role of radio in anticolonial resistance. The chapter, “Ici la voix de l'Algérie” (“This Is the Voice of Algeria”), describes how the radio changed from mouthpiece of the French occupation to voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily between 1954 and 1956. Before the liberation struggle, Fanon tells us, over ninety-five percent of radio receivers belonged to Europeans, for whom the radio was a link to Radio-Alger—or, simply, “Des Français parlent aux Français” (“Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen” [“Ici” 309; Dying Colonialism 74]). The station was a “réédition ou écho de la Radiodiffusion française nationale installée á Paris” (“re-edition or an echo of the French National Broadcasting System operating from Paris”) and “exprime avant tout la société coloniale et ses valeurs” (“is essentially the instrument of colonial society and its values” [305; 69]).