Laurence A. Breiner

Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture

A pioneering analysis of radio as both a cultural and material production, Communities of the Air explores radio’s powerful role in shaping Anglo-American culture and society since the early twentieth century. Scholars and radio writers, producers, and critics look at the many ways radio generates multiple communities over the air—from elite to popular, dominant to resistant, canonical to transgressive. The contributors approach radio not only in its own right, but also as a set of practices—both technological and social—illuminating broader issues such as race relations, gender politics, and the construction of regional and national identities. Drawing on the perspectives of literary and cultural studies, science studies and feminist theory, radio history, and the new field of radio studies, these essays consider the development of radio as technology: how it was modeled on the telephone, early conflicts between for-profit and public uses of radio, and amateur radio (HAMS), local programming, and low-power radio. Some pieces discuss how radio gives voice to different cultural groups, focusing on the BBC and poetry programming in the West Indies, black radio, the history of alternative radio since the 1970s, and science and contemporary arts programming. Others look at radio’s influence on gender (and gender’s influence on radio) through examinations of Queen Elizabeth’s broadcasts, Gracie Allen’s comedy, and programming geared toward women. Together the contributors demonstrate how attention to the variety of ways radio is used and understood reveals the dynamic emergence and transformation of communities within the larger society. Contributor s. Laurence A. Breiner, Bruce B. Campbell, Mary Desjardins, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Nina Hunteman, Leah Lowe, Adrienne Munich, Kathleen Newman, Martin Spinelli, Susan Merrill Squier, Donald Ulin, Mark Williams, Steve Wurzler

The Career of the Cockatrice

T HE COCKATRICE, which no one ever saw, was born by accident toward the end of the twelfth century and died in the middle of the seventeenth, a victim of the new science. It achieved some notoriety during the era of the bestiaries in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but rose to its greatest prominence between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, in the literature and thought of the Baroque. In fact, most modern readers encounter the creature as an ornament in the drama and poetry of the Elizabethans. Much of its story remains obscure, however. In the following pages I hope to clarify some details concerning the origins of the cockatrice, and particularly to explore its career in alchemy. This role has hitherto received no concerted attention. As an indication of its neglect, neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor the chief modern essay on the cockatrice even records the occurrence of an alchemical cockatrice. 1 Yet the name and figure of the cockatrice do appear in alchemy, and like many other conceptions similarly adopted, they accumulated there a rich system of associations. The resonance of these associations certainly helped make the cockatrice attractive for poetry, but as we shall see, they also compromised its identity. In the course of these investigations it will become apparent that the career of the cockatrice was shaped by two conditions: the lack of a taxonomy of species and the uncertain transmission of both descriptions and illustrations. When these difficulties were overcome, the cockatrice vanished.

Too Much History, or Not Enough

Edward Baugh’s essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” (1977) presents the quarrel as a condition rather than an event and investigates this specifically Caribbean psychopathology and the defense mechanisms associated with it. The investigation implicitly follows a sequence of questions: Does the West Indies have a history of its own? What does it mean to have to ask that? Whether the answer is yes or no, how does one come to terms with the answer? Is it better to have a history or to be free of one—by a willful amnesia if necessary? The investigation is complicated by the multiple meanings of the word history and by the underrepresentation of West Indian history in either literature or pedagogy until the nationalist period. Baugh’s primary example for negotiating the quarrel is Derek Walcott, and the analysis can be supplemented and extended by including two features of Walcott’s essay “The Muse of History” (1974): the image of history as a Medusa and the concept of presences. The value of Baugh’s analysis can be exemplified by applying it to the negotiation with history under way in four quite different West Indian writers: Louise Bennett, Kamau Braithwaite, Wilson Harris, and finally Baugh himself.

Mabrak: A Disappearing West Indian Classic?

Bongo Jerry’s &dquo;Mabrak&dquo; is as unequivocally West Indian a poem as one could wish. It could have come from nowhere but the West Indies; indeed, it could hardly have come from anywhere but Jamaica. It is by several criteria a very distinguished work probably the finest Rastafarian poem, a crucial text for its historical moment, and the centre-piece of one of the fundamental literary controversies in the region, the debate set off by the Savacou anthology (1971) in which it was first published.’ Yet there is something peculiar about the poem’s status, and the peculiarity can most economically be illustrated by a revision in a critical text. In 1979, Rhonda Cobham wrote the following: &dquo;Rastafarian poets such as Ras Dizzy and Bongo Jerry, whose long poem ’Mabrak’ is already on its way to becoming a West Indian classic, have been able to communicate a quality of experience which on their own few outsiders would have been able to perceive&dquo;.2 In her revision of the same essay for a new edition in 1995 the italicized