Scripting Empire: Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic

Procter, J

doi:10.1093/oso/9780198894179.001.0001

Scripting Empire: Broadcasting, the BBC, and the Black Atlantic

Lookup NU author(s): Professor James Procter

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Abstract

This book will be the first comprehensive study (monograph) of the literary and cultural contribution of African Caribbean writers at the BBC during the early postwar period. Between 1943 and 1958 the BBC commissioned and broadcast the poems, plays and short fiction nearly 400 West Indian writers, including the work of an extraordinary series of then unknown authors (2 of them now Nobel Prize winners): V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Una Marson, Louise Bennett, Wilson Harris, Andrew Salkey and Kamau Brathwaite. Surprisingly, given both the pedigree of some of its individual contributors and the sheer numerical scale of its output, no literary survey of the actual content of these programmes exists, nor has there been any textual analysis of the scripts themselves. This study explores the scripting of empire at the BBC at a critical historical moment in the passage from a colonial to a post-colonial order.