Across the waves : how the United States and France shaped the international age of radio / Derek W. Vaillant ; Robert W. McChesney and John C. Nerone, editors.

"In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting's political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting governmental and other institutions shaping international radio's use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio's power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior"-- Provided by publisher.

"This book is the first comparative history of 20th-century U.S.-French radio broadcasting and its consequences for cultural politics and international/global communication. As U.S. electronics firms raced into Europe, a succession of French governments cautiously participated in U.S.-French broadcast experiments. The first "transatlantics" revealed disparate national visions of radio's place in the emerging international/global arena. During World War II, however, and continuing into the Cold War years, U.S.-French broadcasting and statecraft wove tightly together, with tangible consequences for how Americans and the French learned to listen to each other. Radio became a projection space of U.S.-French national identity and difference, shaping culture and politics in an international/global media age. This book studies the period from 1931--when live, two-way programs first linked Paris and New York--to 1974, when France disassembled its state media system and the curtain fell on almost a half century of close and continuing radio association. This book uses extensive research in U.S. and French archives to analyze the work of transnational cooperative enterprises, notably among them an initiative to bring a torrent of French-produced, English-language content onto U.S. airwaves after World War II. It shows how a mobile cohort of U.S. and French nationals and expatriates created radio's transnational/global technical structures and aesthetic possibilities, and analyzes how different aesthetic aims and technical systems shaped cultural politics between us. This book brings the history of radio squarely into scholarly conversations about the root formations and tendencies of contemporary global media"-- Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Acronyms and Abbreviations -- Introduction: At the Border of U.S.â#x80;#x93;French Broadcasting -- Part I: The Rise of U.S.â#x80;#x93;French Broadcasting, 1925â#x80;#x93;44 -- 1 At the Speed of Sound: Techno-Aesthetic Paradigms in U.S.â#x80;#x93;French Broadcasting, 1925â#x80;#x93;39 -- 2 We Wonâ#x80;#x99;t Always Have Paris: U.S. Networks in France and Europe, 1932â#x80;#x93;41 -- 3 Voices of the Occupation: U.S. Broadcasting to France during World War II -- Part II: Shaping a U.S.â#x80;#x93;French Radio Imaginary, 1945â#x80;#x93;74

4 Served on a Platter: How French Radio Cracked the U.S. Airwaves5 The Air of Paris: Womenâ#x80;#x99;s Talk Radio, Gender, and the Art of Self-Fashioning -- 6 The Drama of Broadcast History after May 1968 -- Afterword: Radios at the Heart of Nations -- Appendix: U.S.â#x80;#x93;French Radio Time Line -- Notes -- Selected Resources

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