Mai Taha and Sara Salem
Department of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science
***Update, 26.09.25—thanks to the Royal Geographical Society, a recording of the lecture is available below. Our speakers have provided a selected bibliography and list of archives to accompany it; this can be downloaded here***
If you’ll be attending the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual international conference at the University of Birmingham, please join us (either in-person or virtually) for the 2025 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture, “Sonic Lives: On the Radio and Anticolonial Solidarity”, presented by Mai Taha and Sara Salem on Wednesday 27th August (4:50pm-6:30pm BST) in Teaching and Learning Building: Lecture Theatre 1 – LG18 (Keynote venue).
Abstract
How does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this lecture travels across borders, following the way sound waves themselves move. The sonic path of anticolonial history draws out new maps of solidarities that transcend the nation-station and partake in the politics of internationalism. This is partly what makes sound so important, and what made the radio so central to anticolonial movements: sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borders. From official state radio stations such as Voice of the Arabs in Egypt to pirate radio stations run by rebel movements, such as the Voice of Palestine, Radio Freedom in South Africa, the PAIGC radio in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and Voice of the Free and Fighting Algeria, the sounds of anticolonialism were often broadcasted through radio waves. Many of these stations imagined a vast audience reaching struggles across Africa, the Middle East and the wider Third World.
In this lecture, we draw out the rich landscape of radio broadcasting, from cultural programming to armed struggle and labour organising. Embedded within the design of this technology is the possibility of subversion: one can build a radio at home using a saucepan, or start a radio station from a moving, run-down van with very little resources, making it accessible to clandestine movements and enabling them to switch between locations easily. Radio also brought with it particular forms of surveillance and censorship; the radio was difficult to track, monitor and censor because broadcasters were able to stay on the move and because jamming was expensive. We thus additionally consider the radio as a material object as well as the various listening practices that emerge in relation to anticolonial broadcasting. Throughout the lecture, we will also highlight some of the creative methods we engage in as experiments with the sonic and the visual, and what these might tell us about anticolonial pasts and presents.
Mai Taha is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights at the LSE Department of Sociology. Primarily focused on the Middle East and North Africa in the colonial and postcolonial periods, Mai’s research explores the different scales of revolution that draw out historical tensions arising in workers’ movements, feminist movements and anticolonial liberation movements. It engages with these questions not only in the context of international law, human rights and international institutions, but also in the context of labour and social reproduction, taking on the home space as a central site of theorisation and critique.
Sara Salem is Associate Professor at the LSE Department of Sociology. Sara’s work explores the connections between postcolonial theory and Marxism, with special attention to the context of Egypt and the period of decolonisation in the mid-20th century. She is particularly interested in questions of anticolonial archives (the possibilities and tensions embedded within archives and archiving anticolonial pasts, presents and futures), traveling theory, postcolonial/anti-colonial nationalism, and the afterlives and entanglements of empire in the Middle East.
Together, Mai and Sara curate Archive Stories, a project about how to work with creative and non-traditional archives. Their website is a wonderful space for conversations about archiving beyond institutional archives, thinking through the possibilities that open up when we imagine the archive as expansive and as encompassing everything around us. They are also developing a book on anticolonial sound—Sonic Lives: On the Radio and Anticolonial Solidarity—exploring the role of radio in liberation struggles across Africa and the Middle East from the 1950s to the 1990s, drawing out different maps of solidarity and internationalism. You can read more about Mai and Sara’s work, and access some brilliant publications, at https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/people/academic-staff/mai-taha and https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/people/academic-staff/sara-salem
Antipode’s Editorial Collective and the Antipode Foundation’s trustees are absolutely delighted that Mai and Sara will be presenting the 2025 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture—we cannot thank them enough. We’d also like to thank the journal’s publishing team at Wiley and the good people at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) for all their work making this event happen.