On Electric News in Colonial Algeria

This is one of those rare books that you didn’t know you needed until after you read it. I picked it up to get some of Asseraf’s thoughts on radio consumption and reception by various state-based news sources that we would decry for being “propaganda” today. I’ve been struggling through a particularly difficult section in my dissertation where I’m trying to make sense of Italian and French radio wars (guerre des ondes) in Tunisia, especially between stations like Radio Colonial and Radio Bari. As I was reading the introduction, it began to dawn on me that, while he is interested in the “content” of such historical moments, he’s far more interested in responding to larger questions about media history and the way it applies to North Africa. Although I did not find as much content-based utility as I had hoped, I found something much more significant, and Asseraf’s way of guiding his readers through his way of thinking about “electric news” caused an (electrical) light bulb to go off in my head.

Here, Asseraf is pushing back on earlier studies of news media, which have generally given the bulk of their attention to newspapers and other form of print media. Other studies, which are much less numerous, build on those and think about “ages” of news media. Newspapers replaced manuscripts, telegraph lines gave new power to those newspapers, which were then surmounted by the radio, television, and now the internet. All of that is interesting and all, but Asseraf says “No, there are not ‘ages’ of media. Rather, different media exist alongside one another and give mutual reinforcing power to the others.” To me, the most notable case is the electrical telegraph, which spread information long distances (whether between Algeria and other Arab countries, or between Algeria and France), upon which rumors are built and spread information in other ways. “Electric” in the title has two meanings—the literal case of “electrification” in advances in news media, and its ability to “electrify” a society in a metaphorical sense, which is what happens when layers of news media pile on top of one another.

At first, I questioned the extent to which news media piles upon one another rather than “replacing” earlier forms. We always hear about the crisis of newspapers and the difficulties they faced (and still face) in the wake of the internet. However, then I thought more closely. While newspapers in the US are not necessarily electrical in themselves, they respond to claims made on television (think all of the refutations of Fox News) in the US, which then makes jokes out of online social media posts, which often reference other forms of media. This becomes some enormous, mutually constitutive dynamo, and Asseraf does some outstanding scholarship in the tracing of topics like the spread of pan-Islamism through the telegraph, the use of songs as a form of news during World War I, examination of events in Libya and Palestine in order to further bolster Algerian nationalism, and the way that newsreels (in cinemas) and the radio produced and strengthened political polarization. I also loved drawing my parallels in “surveillance archives” written (and often still existing) in Tunisia with Asseraf’s experiences in French and Algerian archives.

This is some really good stuff. I want to re-read the chapter on newsreels and the radio sometime next week, and I think I’m going to need more time to think about the rest of the text. God bless Arthur Asseraf for his close eye and intellectual rigor. This is a must-read well beyond MENA history and media history—it’s also a rumination on the way historians do history and the way that publics make sense of the present.