When in the 1930s Mikhail Bakhtin theorized the stylistic uniqueness of the novel, he declared, “[the] human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking human being” (332). On the other side of media studies, Bakhtin's modernist insight into polyphony strikes contemporary readers as being premised on the separability of a voice from a speaker and its travel in time and space. It is a phonographic, if not also radiophonic insight, Bakhtin writing against a new backdrop of sound technology. But where the phonograph has tended to garner more scholarly attention—“literary studies has a gramophone problem,” writes Paul Saint-Amour (15)—the radio has been understudied, in part because the novel appears to be a less natural companion to the genre. Nevertheless, the acousmatic bodies of radio have been the novel's constant companion, in both fact and imagination. One thinks of Joseph Conrad's Marlow, who dissolves into the deepening dusk while telling his story, and the author's somewhat ludicrous quip in his note to Lord Jim, after critics had complained that no one could be expected to listen so long to Marlow: “As to the mere physical possibility we all know that some speeches in Parliament have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that part of the book which is Marlow's narrative can be read through aloud, I should say, in less than three hours.” It's as if Conrad, in 1903, was already imagining radio drama.In Radio Empire, Daniel Morse thinks through the formal transmutation of the voices of the novel by radio. For Morse, polyphony in the modernist novel demands an attunement to the history of radio, which determines the possibility of the global Anglophone novel as such. For the writers of Morse's study—James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, and Venu Chitale—modernist and midcentury polyphony is a linguistic and cultural fact of imperialism as a technology of sound. Within transmedia studies, several admirable projects have taken up the British Broadcasting Corporation from the perspective of literature, including Todd Avery's Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC, 1922–1938 (2016) and Ian Whittington's Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics, and the BBC, 1939–1945 (2018). Recently collected volumes include Broadcasting Modernism (2016), edited by Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane A. Lewty; Sounding Modernism (2017), edited by Penelope Hone, Helen Groth, and Julian Murphet (Murphet also contributed a monograph, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde [2009]); and Sound and Literature (2020), edited by Anna Snaith. It is no secret that modernism coincides with the machine age, making new modernism studies' attention to technology a persistent one. Morse's study is the first not only to focus on the relationship between the BBC and the novel but also to claim (as the book's subtitle indicates) that we cannot understand the emergence of the global Anglophone novel without listening to the BBC Eastern Service.“The Eastern Service began humbly” on May 11, 1940, by broadcasting ten-minute daily news updates in Hindustani, supplementing the English-language Empire Service aimed at English speakers across the British Empire (11). Morse studies the shift in focus during the Empire Service's interwar years and the emergence of the Eastern Service during World War II, when radio was increasingly aimed at defeating fascism. In essence, the Eastern Service was established to counter Berlin-based Azad Hind radio, broadcasting its anti-British message into British territory. Morse's archive reveals the extent to which Anglophone literature and culture were enlisted by the British into that project. Morse doesn't mince words: “The literary work broadcast by the Eastern Service was . . . propaganda” (15). Flouting the Frankfurt School tradition of arguing for the radio medium's essential “hostility to literature and rational public debate” (110), Morse leads us through a series of Anglophone literary texts that lived other kinds of lives on air, in book reviews and readings, but also in talk radio or the magazine format for which we still know radio today: a transmedial event of people gathering around a microphone to discuss works of literature in tandem with events of the day.Morse traces the impact of these radio discussions on the formal qualities of global Anglophone literature, writers working out their relationship to literature and the English language on air. The Eastern Service proves to be a transmedia extension of Edward Said's theory of contrapuntal reading that “must take account of both . . . imperialism and . . . resistance to it” (Said 66). For Morse, radio literalizes that counterpoint in its multivocality, an important tool in the global Anglophone novel's aesthetic expression of anti-imperialist politics. These relationships necessarily involve Morse as a critic in a field of ambivalence. On the one hand, British programmers had to cede ground, allowing for the anti-imperialist among British and Indian writers so as to assert the anti-fascist; on the other hand, Indian nationalist writers countered the Luddite registers of Gandhi's independence movement through an embrace of technology. Reading the archive, Morse positions the Eastern Service less as a philosophical or existential artifact of what Said calls “insecurity of possession” (63) than as a site of propaganda and counterpropaganda mediated by the literary.Geography and territoriality are irreducible determinants of the European novel's form and what Said famously calls its “consolidated vision.” Morse's book is not addressed to readers seeking to understand the sound of the existential quandary of the metropole over the airwaves—or what I call in The Fact of Resonance (2020) a “consolidated voice”—but is rather addressed to readers interested in the historical rise of the Eastern Service and the voices of British and Indian authors, novelists in particular, as they move contrapuntally between the page and the air. For Morse, the acts of speaking and listening on the BBC and Eastern Service were “world-making,” his study being a welcome archival counterpart to works by Eric Hayot, Pheng Cheah, and Emily Apter. For Morse, the world-making quality of the Eastern Service owes itself not only to the formal feature of its polyphony but also to the radio's irreducible materiality: the airwaves defy borders, and the acoustics of the ribbon microphone enabled an egalitarian sound between multiple speakers. In other words, radio waves themselves got out from under British control, subverting imperialist aims and creating other auditory spaces through the intimacy of at-home listening, where elite and educated Indians could be addressed not as subjects, but as individuals. At the same time, in a Frankfurtian register of Morse's findings, Indian nationalist and humanistic dissent was often woven back into imperial consolidation. English broadcast into India “disregarded terrestrial borders even as it cemented cultural ones” (48).Though Morse does not explicitly engage Wai Chee Dimock's “A Theory of Resonance” (1997) or Jahan Ramazani's Transnational Poetics (2015), one hears a consonance with these projects, particularly in his reading of Anand's contributions to the on-air BBC Eastern Service radio magazine Voice. In one broadcast, George Orwell and Anand trade oral readings of T. E. Lawrence and Lord Byron. For Morse, this kind of trading of voices becomes a site of anti-imperial counterpropaganda where it becomes possible to assert—through the very fact of talk—what is otherwise unsayable. When Orwell reads from Byron's “The Isles of Greece” (which depicts the 1820s Greek uprisings against the Turks), Anand's reply to Orwell obliquely registers an India waiting for independence, Anand hearing, in the continued resonance of the poem, “lines of continuity between wars” (125). The Indian independence movement is written anachronically into British literature through its remediation over the Eastern Service. At the same time, Anand heard World War II as being an inextricable part of Indian history in its long durée.Anand took these experiences on air with Voice not only back to the novel but also to experimental playwriting in India Speaks, written in response to the 1943–44 famine in West Bengal. Anand adapts the stage to the radio such that India and England occupy the same space-time in what Morse calls, after anthropologist Johannes Fabian, the “coevalness” of culture (also a crucial touchstone for Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past [2003]). Morse describes how the history of the production of the play shows Anand engaging with the general strike in England, while he was also obliquely crossing paths with Bertolt Brecht and Paul Robeson, the radiophonic therefore involving him and Indian struggle in a global worker's movement. It is in this matrix—perhaps in the literal sense, because by the end of the book, as I will return to, it proves to be a gendered one—that the global Anglophone novel for Morse emerges.In Morse's study, the contrapuntal movement is not unidirectional, where the metropole exerts cultural influence over the air into the peripheries. On the face of things, the book moves from metropole to periphery, the first two chapters engaging Joyce and Forster, respectively, while chapters 3 and 4 turn to Anand, Hosain, and Chitale. Beginning with Joyce is, in part, a chronological choice for a largely historicist study that moves from the interwar years into the midcentury. Yet, this beginning in time is by no means a stable point in geographic space. It presents a Joyce who is unlocatable through the heretofore critically neglected entanglements between the BBC and Finnegans Wake, composed in the same year that the BBC began regular broadcasting (48). Its polyphony, as well as the “wandering signals” (55), where listeners might inadvertently hear multiple languages, is captured in Joyce's notebooks and the novel's earliest published installment that also engages the telephone and other technologies of distance. Living in exile, Joyce never saw an independent Ireland but remained attached to it daily by radio and by what he called its “umbilical cord.” In a prelude to the Eastern Service, BBC radio became for Joyce “a crucial means to working through and performing the role of an ambivalent exile” (48). Radio within the geopolitics of the interwar years is crucial to becoming attuned to “the Wake's critique of British Empire and the new Irish state,” radio being not simply a metaphor but also a literal apparatus for the radiation of culture and texts. Of particular interest is the fact that discussion of Joyce was largely banned on the BBC. If Joyce's Ulysses was enjoying success on the Continent, then the “radio afterlife” of the Wake was particularly significant in radio discussions broadcast into India, such as T. S. Eliot's talk about the unstable meaning of Joyce's Irishness (68). It is in part through listening in India that Joyce joins the canon, such that the Wake itself is not only a spiritual precursor to the global Anglophone novel but also one of its earliest examples.That radio afterlife gives rise to a methodological dilemma, because BBC broadcasts went largely unrecorded. Where some studies, such as Judith Pascoe's Sara Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (2011), turn to literature to retrieve indexes of pre-phonographic voices, Morse confronts a medium that has always been tenuously archived, terrestrial radio intended to disappear as quickly as it appears. Morse retrieves the scripts and correspondence that broadcast left behind, making his project a reparative one. Morse combs through this compelling archive to find censorship directives and gag orders that limited discussion of such crises as the Bengal famine (“The Eastern Service was told the famine did not exist” [129]). Such censorship leads to fascinating intermedial insights, where Morse pairs stage plays, radio magazines, and novels as examples of “media convergence.” The extant script of Anand's play India Speaks goes so far as to depict an editorial board meeting for a print publication, but the formal features of the play are an adaptation of radio work that Anand had done for Voice, making India Speaks something between a stage play, a print magazine, a radio talk, and a novel. “An intermedial irony is at work here,” Morse writes: “if the Eastern Service was used to reinforce the narrative of a global present tense, this is clear only in retrospect because of the mediating force of print” (17). As a reader, I wondered how the preservation of documents both within and without the BBC works in tandem with colonial archive fever more generally and the control of memory as it canonizes and, in so doing, helps construct the object of study known as the global Anglophone novel. The loss of the sonic artifact is, nevertheless, a boon for novel studies because it opens up for Morse the possibility of “reading” radio when “the supposed immateriality of radio has stalled the necessary conversation between radio studies and book history” (11).The authors Morse studies were working through their novelistic projects on air, making the broadcasts paratextual companions. For example, in the book's important last chapter on social feminism in India, Morse uncovers how Hosain addressed the question of dialect in Sunlight, where rather than including a glossary in her novels to explain to British readers untranslatables, she used radio as a place to reflect on Punjab words related to the cultural politics of marriage and femininity. With Hosain and Chitale, then, there is a gendering of “talk” that reaches listeners in the already feminized space of the home (perhaps doubly feminized in “Mother India”). If Forster (on the air) imbued talk with the highest ethical value, then talk becomes in Indian women's radio “chitchat, gossip, and the heart-to-heart” but is understood as a supplement to reading (Kate Lacey qtd. in Morse 158). Here, an engagement with postcolonial feminism—and the as-yet-unanswered question “can the subaltern speak?”—would have deepened the discussion of what Morse calls “radio's role in mediating gender around the globe” (158).What is most interesting to me about the cases Morse explores, however, is a formal potential within media convergence whereby both the novel and radio are continually leading paratextually away from themselves, such that it becomes increasingly difficult to say where one form ends and the other begins. For example, learning of the importance of radio for Forster rewrote in my mind the Marabar caves sequence of A Passage to India, which involves a sudden intrusion of an intensified acousmatic experience for which, like the radio, the source of the sound cannot be seen. On the heels of Morse's discussion of how queer censorship turned Forster away from the novel and toward the Eastern Service, I wondered after the extent to which transnational bonds—or what Morse calls “intimacy”—are an arena for queer desire, such that to “queer” English might also be to globalize it. The extent to which Forster was “pushing the boundaries of what was representable in fiction . . . has been overlooked because he did so from without the novel rather than from within” (93).Toward the end of the book, which concludes with an epilogue on decolonization, I was left wondering how the English language on the air in India might in fact be the central historical determinant of the formal dehiscence of the novel that we associate with the midcentury. If this is the case, then what Hosain calls “the silent gap” between English and Punjab (a gap Morse convincingly argues is to be mediated by radio) is part and parcel of the novel's midcentury form. For Hosain, the silent gap was gendered, related to what could and could not be translated about Indian women. The notion that “Anand was forced to address the [famine] crisis elsewhere”—not on the radio but in his novel and stage works that draw from radio—also starts to sound a bit like the transcendental homelessness that György Lukács so deeply associates with the historical and existential possibility of the novel. Lukács is one touchstone for Morse's study of what it meant for Hosain and Chitale to write feminist historical novels in a not-yet-independent India. In one incredible anecdote, Joyce listens to his own son sing across the Atlantic from the United States. These intimacies and longings of the domestic, both as nation and family, are inscribed in the global Anglophone novel via radio. The maternal registers of Joyce's figure of the radio attaching him to not-yet-independent Ireland as an “umbilical cord” echo into Hosain's and Chitale's address to “Mother India,” a maternal body having been interpellated as central to an independent India. These questions might have been raised had the chapters been conceived less discretely. The in-between temporality of the midcentury global Anglophone novel—addressed to the not-yet-independent nation—seems to me through the radio, as Morse depicts it, indelibly feminized and queered.