The birth and development of commercial television in Cuba in the 1950s occurred alongside political and social turmoil. In this period of dramatic swings encompassing democracy, a coup, a dictatorship, and a revolution, television functioned as a beacon and promoter of Cuba’s identity as a modern nation. In Broadcasting Modernity, television historian Yeidy M. Rivero shows how television owners, regulatory entities, critics, and the state produced Cuban modernity for television. The Cuban television industry enabled different institutions to convey the nation's progress, democracy, economic abundance, high culture, education, morality, and decency. After nationalizing Cuban television, the state used it to advance Fidel Castro's project of creating a modern socialist country. As Cuba changed, television changed with it. Rivero not only demonstrates television's importance to Cuban cultural identity formation, she explains how the medium functions in society during times of radical political and social transformation.

The birth and development of commercial television in Cuba in the 1950s occurred alongside political and social turmoil. In this period of dramatic swings encompassing democracy, a coup, a dictatorship, and a revolution, television functioned as a beacon and promoter of Cuba’s identity as a modern nation. In Broadcasting Modernity, television historian Yeidy M. Rivero shows how television owners, regulatory entities, critics, and the state produced Cuban modernity for television. The Cuban television industry enabled different institutions to convey the nation's progress, democracy, economic abundance, high culture, education, morality, and decency. After nationalizing Cuban television, the state used it to advance Fidel Castro's project of creating a modern socialist country. As Cuba changed, television changed with it. Rivero not only demonstrates television's importance to Cuban cultural identity formation, she explains how the medium functions in society during times of radical political and social transformation.

The twelve chapters in this volume seek to overcome the nationalist paradigm of Japanese repression and exploitation versus Korean resistance that has dominated the study of Korea’s colonial period (1910–1945) by adopting a more inclusive, pluralistic approach that stresses the complex relations among colonialism, modernity, and nationalism. By addressing such diverse subjects as the colonial legal system, radio, telecommunications, the rural economy, and industrialization and the formation of industrial labor, one group of essays analyzes how various aspects of modernity emerged in the colonial context and how they were mobilized by the Japanese for colonial domination, with often unexpected results. A second group examines the development of various forms of identity from nation to gender to class, particularly how aspects of colonial modernity facilitated their formation through negotiation, contestation, and redefinition.

"A very solid and comprehensive collection of essays that allows readers to witness more concretely the variety of forms that the dialogue between literature and the radio has taken in the last century. An outstanding book."--Jean-Michel Rabate, author of Jacques Lacan and Literature "This book is a real gift: its variety of essays in different voices provides an opportunity to get up to speed with the sometimes suprising ways that radio helped to structure modernism, served as a foil for modernist writers and artists, and forced the modernists into a more constructive engagement with issues of elite and popular culture. A lively collection."--Kevin J.H. Dettmar, author of Is Rock Dead? It has long been accepted that film helped shape the modernist novel and that modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on modernist literature, remains the invisible medium. The contributors to Broadcasting Modernism argue that radio led to changes in textual and generic forms. Modernist authors embraced the emerging medium, creating texts that were to be heard but not read, incorporating the device into their stories, and using it to publicize their work. They saw in radio the same spirit of experimentation that animated modernism itself. Because early broadcasts were rarely recorded, radio's influence on literary modernism often seems equally ephemeral in the historical record. Broadcasting Modernism helps fill this void, providing a new perspective for modernist studies even as it reconfigures the landscape of the era itself.

Initially created to counteract broadcasts from Nazi Germany, the BBC’s Eastern Service became a cauldron of global modernism and an unlikely nexus of artistic exchange. Directed at an educated Indian audience, its programming provided remarkable moments: Listeners in India heard James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake on the eve of independence, as well as the literary criticism of E. M. Forster and the works of Indian writers living in London. In Radio Empire, Daniel Ryan Morse demonstrates the significance of the Eastern Service for global Anglophone literature and literary broadcasting. He traces how modernist writers used radio to experiment with form and introduce postcolonial literature to global audiences. While innovative authors consciously sought to incorporate radio’s formal features into the novel, literature also exerted a reciprocal and profound influence on twentieth-century broadcasting. Reading Joyce and Forster alongside Attia Hosain, Mulk Raj Anand, and Venu Chitale, Morse demonstrates how the need to appeal to listeners at the edges of the empire pushed the boundaries of literary work in London, inspired high-cultural broadcasting in England, and formed an invisible but influential global network. Adding a transnational perspective to scholarship on radio modernism, Radio Empire demonstrates how the history of broadcasting outside of Western Europe offers a new understanding of the relationship between colonial center and periphery.

First demonstrated in 1928, color television remained little more than a novelty for decades as the industry struggled with the considerable technical, regulatory, commercial, and cultural complications posed by the medium. Only fully adopted by all three networks in the 1960s, color television was imagined as a new way of seeing that was distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It also inspired compelling popular, scientific, and industry conversations about the use and meaning of color and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. In Bright Signals Susan Murray traces these wide-ranging debates within and beyond the television industry, positioning the story of color television, which was replete with false starts, failure, and ingenuity, as central to the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture. In so doing, she shows how color television disrupted and reframed the very idea of television while it simultaneously revealed the tensions about technology's relationship to consumerism, human sight, and the natural world.

Examining work by novelists, filmmakers, TV producers and songwriters, this book uncovers the manner in which the radio – and the act of listening – has been written about for the past 100 years. Ever since the first public wireless broadcasts, people have been writing about the radio: often negatively, sometimes full of praise, but always with an eye and an ear to explain and offer an opinion about what they think they have heard. Novelists including Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, and James Joyce wrote about characters listening to this new medium with mixtures of delight, frustration, and despair. Clint Eastwood frightened moviegoers half to death in Play Misty for Me, but Lou Reed's 'Rock & Roll' said listening to a New York station had saved Jenny's life. Frasier showed the urbane side of broadcasting, whilst Good Morning, Vietnam exploded from the cinema screen with a raw energy all of its own. Queen thought that all the audience heard was 'ga ga', even as The Buggles said video had killed the radio star and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers lamented 'The Last DJ'. This book explores the cultural fascination with radio; the act of listening as a cultural expression – focusing on fiction, films and songs about radio. Martin Cooper, a broadcaster and academic, uses these movies, TV shows, songs, novels and more to tell a story of listening to the radio – as created by these contemporary writers, filmmakers, and musicians.