Reading Fanon, Reading Radio IN 1959, IN THE MIDST OF THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE IN ALGERIA, FRANTZ FANON PUBLISHED L’AN V DE LA RÉVOLUTION ALGÉRIENNE (A Dying Colonialism), which contained a chapter dedicated to the role of radio in anticolonial resistance. he chapter, “Ici la voix de l’Algérie” (“his Is t he Voice of Algeria”), describes how the radio changed from mouthpiece of the French occupation to voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily between 1954 and 1956. Before the liberation struggle, Fanon tells us, over ninety-five percent of ra- dio receivers belonged to Europeans, for whom the radio was a link to Radio-Alger—or, simply, “Des Français parlent aux Français” (“Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen” [“Ici” 309; Dying Colonial- ism 74]). he station was a “réédition ou écho de la Radiodifusion française nationale installée à Paris” (“re-edition or an echo of the French National Broadcasting System operating from Paris”) and “exprime avant tout la société coloniale et ses valeurs” (“is essentially the instrument of colonial society and its values” [305; 69]). A key shit occurred around 1954, when Algeria joined the Maghreb Front and radio became an important instrument for the dissemination of news to the Algerian people in their struggle against French colonial- ism. At a rate not seen before, Algerians acquired radio receivers that allowed them to tune in he Voice of Fighting Algeria, which ampli- ied an emergent national consciousness, connecting listeners across scattered outposts to the common anticolonial struggle. his revolu- tionary broadcast, Fanon suggests, “aura, sur le plan de la cohésion, de la prise en masse du peuple, une importante capitale” (“was to be of capital importance in consolidating and unifying the people” [318; 84]), transforming not only what but how radio was heard. Far more than a sociological analysis of a technological device, Fanon’s chapter ofers a remarkable phenomenology of reception. On the one hand, Fanon describes Algerian listeners huddled around radios between nine o’clock and midnight each night, seeking the elusive frequency for the routinely jammed revolutionary broadcast MICHAEL ALLAN is associate professor of comparative literature and Petrone Faculty Scholar at the University of Or- egon. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton UP, 2016), and he was an EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2017–18. theories and methodologies Old Media / New Futures: Revolutionary Reverberations of Fanon’s Radio michael allan [ PMLA © 2019 michael allan PMLA 134.1 (2019), published by the Modern Language Association of America 188