The research project “Broadcasting in the Potuguese Empire: Nationalism, Colonialism and Identity” (BiPE), led by Nelson Ribeiro, and funded by the Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology, organized its first international workshop, which took place on January 10th 2019. The event offered a brilliant opportunity for vibrant discussions on the theme of European imperial and colonial radio histories, as well as on different epistemological and methodological research approaches to media history, including media archive work. The latter mainly focused on the Portuguese media and colonial archival landscape as a specific case study. The workshop was organized in panel sessions and roundtables, allowing very thought-provoking discussions.

PETER HANENBERG (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa), the director of the Research Center for Communication and Culture within the Faculty of Human Sciences, that hosts the project, welcomed all the participants and underlined the interdisciplinary character of the research project. In his view, BiPE will allow for thinking of “the media both as source and an object of history”. NELSON RIBEIRO (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa), the Principal Investigator of the research project, started by presenting the BiPE’s main research arguments, goals and approaches, as well as the research team, including Sílvio Santos (Universidade de Coimbra), Rogério Santos (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa), Ana Isabel Reis (Universidade do Porto), Catarina Valdigem (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa), Simon Potter (University of Bristol) and Vincent Kuitenbrouwer (University of Amsterdam). Nelson argued that the study of the media within the imperial projects had been primarily focusing on the metropolitan perspective, ignoring how the media have actually operated within the colonial territories, and more importantly how they have projected the empire. The BiPE thus intends partly to answer this question by looking into the importance of the many radio clubs set up within the Portuguese colonial territories in broadcasting within and to the empire. While seeking a comparative view with other colonial geographies, BiPE will also look into the unique features of radio broadcasting within the Portuguese colonial context. For that purpose, the research team will be conducting documental and archival research on the colonial radio policies and practices, in addition to undertaking an oral history approach to professional colonial broadcasting and radio practices.

SÍLVIO SANTOS (Universidade de Coimbra) chaired the first panel of the workshop “Researching Broadcasting and Empire”, which provided a comparative approach to histories of different European imperial and colonial broadcasting cases, namely the British, the Dutch and the French. SIMON POTTER (University of Bristol) presented the audience with important conceptual and epistemological questions in his talk on the British case. He supported a comparative research agenda on history of both imperial and colonial broadcasting, claiming that it has been fundamentally Euro and Western-centric. He also interrogated whether there is still room to conduct research on the history of broadcasting in the Empires, insofar as this object has been, according to him, overtaken by different fields of study, such as Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Critique, and more recently the History of Globalization. According to him, it risks losing a whole object of research. Potter also made an important distinction between two epistemological objects – “colonial broadcasting” and “imperial broadcasting” – which he believes to be productive both in comparative and national-based research. Afterwards, Simon accounted for the first colonial broadcasting steps across different points of the British empire, from former Ceylon to the Falkland Islands.

In his talk, VINCENT KUITENBROUWER (University of Amsterdam) offered an insightful account of the history of colonial broadcasting in the Dutch East Indies, during the first two decades of the 20th century. Kuitenbrouwer drew on an 800 pages document of Notes of Advisory Council of Nirom (the Netherlands Indies Radio Broadcasting Corporation) to think through the “Glass House” metaphor, which refers to the information and processes that escaped colonial control. He discussed insights whereby large amounts of information produced by the Dutch colonial bureaucracy can allow for rich historical entanglements between private, amateur and state broadcasting agents; as well as contradictions and signs of resistance to colonial rule both expressed through multiple languages and hybrid music formats brought into the airwaves. Kuitenbrouwer’s talk reinforced Potter’s argument that to conduct (such a) media history “invites us to think about when does decolonisation start.”

MORGAN CORRIOU (Université Paris 8, Vincennes, Saint-Denis) talked next about the case of Tunisia under the French Protectorate in the 1930s and 1940s. By this example she explored the contribution of an intermedial approach in the history of colonial broadcasting. Corriou stressed that radio was but one of the media that defined the circulation of the news, as it relied on other media such as the press and the cinema to shape listening practices. Her intermedial perspective emerges from a cross-media colonial consumption analysis that she uses to understand the different roles played by various media in different cultural practices of consumption in French Tunisia. It also arises from the examination of the colonial state’s perception of each media technology and outlets used, and of their role in promoting colonial values and culture as well as controlling and limiting the expressions of Arabic culture.

The roundtable discussion, that followed in the morning session, was chaired by ANA ISABEL REIS (Universidade do Porto). The first speaker was CAROLYN BIRDSALL (University of Amsterdam), who focused on three main current and recent transnational approaches in the Radio archive research. The first one looks into geopolitical entangled media histories, seeing how media history research entangles with the political context. The second one focuses on the politics of media labour, for example creative production, and addresses interconnections between media labourers and the broader political, social and cultural spectrum, thus allowing for instance for a sharper focus on often marginalised media professionals. The third looks into the material cultural radio legacies, within the scope of heritage studies and heritage (material and sound) memory studies.

HANS-ULRICH WAGNER (Leibniz Institute for Media Research / Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg) followed the roundtable. He proposed a conceptual discussion of the notion of entangled media history, which outlines a transnational research network by the same name. In his perspective, such a notion inspires a threefold epistemological framework of analysis, which he unfolded next. Firstly, it is productive to conduct media history research beyond the single medium, insofar as communication processes imply many mediation processes, where different media become interconnected. Secondly, Wagner also stressed the importance of conducting transnational media history. He mentioned the work of Andreas Fickers on transnationalizing media histories, as it allows to rethink what is central and peripheral, thus to develop approaches from the margins, in line with what Michel Hilmes also proposes. The speaker argued that these approaches provide clues for hidden stories. Thirdly, he suggested that media history research shall be taken beyond comparison, insofar as there are limits to a methodological comparison. In his thought-provoking talk, Wagner concluded that media history scholars and researchers should try to see things from different angles and perspectives and to be innovative in their research approaches.

LUÍS TRINDADE (Birkbeck, University of London) was the next participant to contribute to the discussion by proposing a dialogue between cultural history and media studies. He first highlighted the approach adopted in his book Narratives in Motion: Journalism and Modernist Events in 1920’s Portugal, where he described how newspapers reported and started to intervene in historical events, defining the course of events, both at the level of circulation, mediation and reception. He also referred to the ongoing research, which he is currently leading at the Instituto de História Contemporânea, that looks at the history of audiovisual culture from the 1940s until the 1980s. Trindade realized that the song, as a musical genre, constituted the best formal object to undertake an analysis of a cultural history of the audiovisual, insofar as it allows to break with three central dualities which also pose three fundamental methodological challenges: a) high and low brow dichotomies in popular culture; b) production and reception; c) national and transnational. According to the speaker, the song holds a crucial epistemological quality in the sense that it corresponds to an object with greater circulation than any other since it is appropriated by the wider public, the micro-social scales such as the family unit, while also moving across time.

The last contributor to the roundtable was MARIA INÁCIA REZOLA (Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa) who drew on her personal, academic trajectory and experience in conducting media history to interrogate the field of research. Somehow reflecting the history of media history as a new disciplinary field of research and studies, Rezola emphasized the shifts that it has gone through, namely from when media started being used as a research source to when media history slowly became recognized as an autonomous field of research. The question she asked related to whether there was a specific field of media history in Portugal, since there has been a considerable growth of approaches.

After the inspirational and captivating morning presentations and discussions, the workshop proceeded in the afternoon with a keynote session chaired by Nelson Ribeiro and another roundtable chaired by ROGÉRIO SANTOS (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa). The keynote speaker, JOSÉ LUÍS GARCIA (ICS, Universidade de Lisboa) discussed the often-neglected entanglements between media, history and modern empires. He stressed the fact that the media has been repeatedly reduced to their role as a source rather than as agents, as an object of research, or as instruments of power. Garcia claimed the need for a new epistemology of the historiography of the media, mainly focused on their status of political agents in different societies. In supporting such an argument, the speaker discussed three critical examples of relevant characters in colonial history, who were either defined or portraited as agents of/in media representation in different literature, journalism and media outlets: a) Roger Casement (British Consul in Belgian Congo); b) Mário Domingues (Portuguese Journalist from the Principe Island, São Tomé e Principe Archipelago); c) Amílcar Cabral (Guinean Leader of the anti-colonial movement). By addressing these examples, José Luís Garcia proposed to tighten the link between the media and political processes.

The workshop concluded after the final roundtable chaired by Rogério Santos and dedicated to the discussion of Portuguese Media Archives, History and Memory. MARGARIDA LAGES (Head of Archives and Library, Instituto Diplomático, Lisboa) gave an insight into the documents within the diplomatic archives and funds of the institute. PAULO TREMOCEIRO (Torre do Tombo, Lisboa) referred to the national archive funds and the media related documentation available there. EDUARDO LEITE (RTP, Lisboa) provided insightful quantitative accounts of 40 years of sounds kept in the National Portuguese Radio-Television Company.

Conference Overview:

Welcome Address

Nelson Ribeiro (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa): Presentation of the Research Project BiPE – Broadcasting in the Portuguese Empire: Nationalism, Colonialism, Identity

Panel: Researching Broadcasting and Empire
Chair: Sílvio Santos (Universidade de Coimbra)

Simon Potter (University of Bristol): Broadcasting in the British Empire: Sources and Debates

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer (University of Amsterdam): The Glass House Revisited: Radio Broadcasting and the Blind Spots in the Late Colonial State in the Netherlands Indies, 1920s and 1930s

Morgan Corriou (Université Paris 8): Researching Colonial Broadcasting in Its Intermedial Environment: The Case of Tunisia under the French Protectorate

Roundtable Discussion
Chair: Ana Isabel Reis (Universidade do Porto)
Carolyn Birdsall (University of Amsterdam) / Hans-Ulrich Wagner (Leibniz Institute for Media Research / Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg) / Luís Trindade (Birkbeck – University of London) / Maria Inácia Rezola (Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa): Researching Media History: Methodological Challenges

José Luís Garcia (ICS – Universidade de Lisboa): Media, History and Modern Empires: The Neglected Link
Chair: Nelson Ribeiro (Lisboa)

Roundtable Discussion
Chair: Rogério Santos (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)
Margarida Lages (Instituto Histórico-Diplomático Archive and Library, Lisboa) / Paulo Tremoceiro (Torre do Tombo Archives, Lisboa) / Eduardo Leite (RTP Sound Archive
Alfredo Caldeira / Fundação Mário Soares Archive and Library, Lisboa): Archives, History and Memory

Closing Remarks