Marissa J. Moorman, "Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002" (Ohio UP, 2019)

Summary


Marissa J. Moorman's book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) narrates Angolan history with the radio at its center. From its 1930s beginnings, radio has been used by actors as disparate as Portuguese settlers, guerrilla liberation movements, African nationalists and the postcolonial state to project and contest power across Angola’s sparsely populated territory. Moorman’s account pays special attention to the immateriality of radio, the clandestine and intimate experience of “listening in” while also attending to the technological—and techno-political—foundations on which that act of imagination relies.

Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.

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Elisa Prosperetti

Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor (History) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. More here: More here: https://t.co/CZLsbzn6jF.
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