Sound, Technology, and Culture in French Indochina

Abstract

In the 1920s, European radio enthusiasts organized clubs in Hanoi, Saigon, Hai Phong, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh. Periodicals and letters from the time provide insights on this burgeoning amateur radio culture. Members shared experiences, debated the potential of the technology, and used radio to broadcast records of music, story-telling, and other forms of light entertainment. Chapter 1 examines how these radio clubs were established in the urban centers of French Indochina and how they impacted cultural life in the colonial territories. The chapter begins with a consideration of cultural colonialism, broadcasting technology, and music in the French Empire. Archival sources provide evidence on the styles of music and recording technologies in circulation in early twentieth-century mainland Southeast Asia, when telegraphy, phonograph recordings and radio broadcasts informed the social construction of state and empire. Exclusive membership regulations of the Indochinese radio clubs, which restricted most of the indigenous population, were undermined during the Japanese occupation (1940–45). And the Japanese promotion of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōeiken) followed by a famine in 1944–45 fomented unrest among the indigenous population. During the August Revolution of 1945, the Viet Minh and other insurrectionaries commandeered these sound reproduction technologies to broadcast news of their uprising.