5 - Calling the West Indies: Una Marson’s Wireless Black Atlantic

Summary

If questions of propaganda, politics and national identity proved troubling to writers who broadcast to domestic and American audiences, they were even more vexing for those writers of colonial extraction who were tasked with representing Britain and its objectives to the imperial periphery. As an agency charged with projecting a positive image of Britain to its colonies and allies abroad, the Overseas Service had little time for dissenting views of the Empire. And yet, as with the Home Service, administrators and producers at the Overseas Service recognised that in the context of total war and significant civilian sacrifice, programming would need to reflect the communities it was intended to reach. As it grew in size and importance over the course of the war, the Overseas Service therefore engaged its international audience in a complex and contradictory act of cultural rapprochement. It engaged broadcasters of colonial origin who understood first-hand the experience of listening in to the metropole from its periphery. As nationalists of varying degrees of commitment, these writers had to contend with the fact that the BBC was, first and foremost, an agent of imperial diffusion. The story of their participation in Second World War broadcasting, however, indicates that the need of the state to propagandise to its subjects could yield consequences unintended by official institutions of communication and persuasion. In handing the microphone to late imperial writers, the BBC opened the airwaves to coded articulations of political and cultural autonomy.

Though these writers participated with reservations, many recognised that the war offered opportunities for shaping political and cultural debate both at the point of reception and at the point of transmission. Focusing on Calling the West Indies (1941–5), a programme hosted by Jamaican activist and poet Una Marson, this chapter examines the ways in which the imperial networks of the BBC offered colonial writers a means of voicing previously unrepresented identities that ranged from the regional to the transnational. Marson offers a productive case study because of the dedication with which she approached the task of representing West Indian and diasporic black experiences at the BBC.