Scripting Empire

Reviews / Votes

In the years of decolonization, an extraordinarily talented group of Caribbean women and men engaged in a daily refashioning of empire utilizing the channels of radio. Scripting Empire, beautifully written and based on a decade of original research, addresses questions of form, genre, and technology and gives us a different lens on the BBC and the Black Atlantic. * Catherine Hall, University College London * James Procter's Scripting Empire is a perceptive and incisive exploration of a formative conjuncture in the story of mid-twentieth-century Black Atlantic modernism centered in London. Marked on one side by the centrality of broadcast radio to the infrastructures of literary production, circulation, and identity, and on the other, by the cultural-politics of decolonization, this is a conjuncture in which a generation of diasporic West Indian and West African writers navigated, challenged, appropriated, and transformed the BBC public sphere. Scripting Empire is a study of remarkable erudition. * David Scott, Columbia University * Scripting Empire juxtaposes the work of a wide range of authors and artists in a fresh and thought-provoking fashion: Una Marson and Langston Hughes, to explore transatlantic connections; Louise Bennett and Wole Soyinka, to shed light on the use of the dramatic monologue as a literary and radio form; Amos Tutuola and Derek Walcott, to consider the impact of audio hardware on writing and broadcasting; and also considers connections among members of wider networks who used literature and radio to advance their varied agendas...Procter shows why we need to pay more attention to programmes, to what they contained and how they sounded, including how accent, dialect, and idiom were deployed on-air to create a sense of community and identity and to win over listeners. * Simon J. Potter, Immigrants & Minorities * Meticulously researched, Scripting Empire shows us how much Caribbean and West African writers contributed to the BBC's domestic and international programming and equally how much the BBC shaped midcentury global writing in English. Despite being the most extensive part of the British Empire's media infrastructure, BBC radio nevertheless became a laboratory for imagining decolonization. Consulting an astonishing range of archival materials from across the BBC's many distinct radio programmes and platforms, James Procter's work demonstrates how the literary voice of global English was forged in BBC radio studios. * Peter Kalliney, William J and Nina B Tuggle Chair in English, University of Kentucky * Scripting Empire tunes in astutely to an unexplored frequency of broadcasting and literary history to make for essential reading for students of the BBC and the Black Atlantic. * Times Literary Supplement * Procter pays close attention to both the strengths and weaknesses of the BBC as a key example of the Black Atlantic, which keeps James's project alive, even as it acknowledges the silence that surrounded these specific scripts. However, scripts serve as cues for future performances. We are fortunate to see this creative revival of them. * Daniel Ryan Morse, Contemporary Literature *