Andrea L. Stanton, “This is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine” (U of Texas Press, 2013)

Despite the recent booms in the study of the Middle East and North Africa, technology studies still remain scarce: one of the recent attempts to fill the void is Andrea L. Stanton‘s ‘This is Jerusalem Calling’: State Radio in Mandate Palestine (University of Texas Press, 2013). She weaves together different narratives to tell the story of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS), launched in 1936 as an attempt by the mandate government to cater to different audiences, shaping middle class culture in the mandate territory in the process. The PBS reflected the concept of the dual commitment the British had to both the Arab and Jewish populations of the Mandate, in addition to demonstrating how the populations engaged with radio as an emerging form of media.

NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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