This essay argues that technology, specifically sound reproduction, was a crucial terrain of struggles for civil rights, farmworkers’ rights, and Indigenous self-determination in the 1960s. Two-way radiotelephony including citizens band (CB) mediated the civil rights movement’s development and formative connections with the Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian movements. Through archival research of movement records and media, I show that a goal of the civil rights movement was to develop grassroots technopolitical agency through CB communications, self-defense, and movement building. Part of the “Southern diaspora” (Donna Murch) of people, organizations, and ideas, rural African American CB activism shaped West Coast farmworkers’ and urban social movements in the mid-1960s. I further demonstrate that Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous adaptations of CB constitute important, overlooked acts of technopolitical “reconception”: “the active redefinition of a technology that transgresses that technology’s designed function and dominant meaning” (Rayvon Fouché). While associated with freewheeling truckers, two-way radio emerged from and proliferated military and police violence. However, Black, Latinx, Filipinx, and Indigenous organizers reconceived two-way radio’s criminalizing technology of surveillant citizenship to create networks of “dark sousveillant” solidarity (Simone Browne). This media history from below expands conceptions of historical and contemporary social movements, surveillance, and media.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Ross, Corey;
(2008)
Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich
(/isis/citation/CBB001232126/)
Thesis
Sayers, Jentery;
(2011)
How Text Lost Its Source: Magnetic Recording Cultures
(/isis/citation/CBB001567268/)
Thesis
Magnet, Shoshana Amielle;
(2008)
Encoding the Body: Critically Assessing the Collection and Uses of Biometric Information
(/isis/citation/CBB001561133/)
Article
Stephen Molldrem;
Anthony K J Smith;
(2024)
Health policy counterpublics: Enacting collective resistances to US molecular HIV surveillance and cluster detection and response programs
(/isis/citation/CBB006696688/)
Article
Weiner, Amir;
Rahi-Tamm, Aigi;
(2013)
Getting to Know You: The Soviet Surveillance System, 1939--57
(/isis/citation/CBB001200564/)
Book
Foertsch, Jacqueline;
(2013)
Reckoning Day: Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America
(/isis/citation/CBB001213735/)
Book
Anke Ortlepp;
(2017)
Jim Crow terminals: the desegregation of American airports
(/isis/citation/CBB518023416/)
Book
Ellen C. Scott;
(2014)
Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era
(/isis/citation/CBB195877199/)
Book
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor;
(2016)
Colored travelers: mobility and the fight for citizenship before the Civil War
(/isis/citation/CBB521196674/)
Book
Candacy A. Taylor;
(2020)
Overground railroad : The Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America
(/isis/citation/CBB999795465/)
Book
Gretchen Sullivan Sorin;
(2020)
Driving while Black : African American travel and the road to civil rights
(/isis/citation/CBB659523141/)
Thesis
John Norman Alekna;
(2020)
Reunified through Radio: Media, Technology, and Politics in Modern China 1923–1958
(/isis/citation/CBB779355783/)
Book
Alison Kraft;
(2022)
From Dissent to Diplomacy: The Pugwash Project During the 1960s Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB579502917/)
Article
Philip Olson;
Christine Labuski;
(August 2018)
‘There’s always a [white] man in the loop’: The gendered and racialized politics of civilian drones
(/isis/citation/CBB568832607/)
Article
Slotten, Hugh Richard;
(2012)
The International Telecommunications Union, Space Radio Communications, and U.S. Cold War Diplomacy, 1957--1963
(/isis/citation/CBB001200574/)
Thesis
Dunbar-Hester, Christina;
(2008)
Propagating Technology, Propagating Community? Low-Power Radio Activism andTechnological Negotiation in the U.S., 1996--2006
(/isis/citation/CBB001561381/)
Book
Wisnioski, Matthew H.;
(2012)
Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America
(/isis/citation/CBB001201050/)
Chapter
Scott, D. Travers;
(2012)
Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films
(/isis/citation/CBB001421309/)
Article
Karin Bijsterveld;
(2021)
Slicing Sound: Speaker Identification and Sonic Skills at the Stasi, 1966–1989
(/isis/citation/CBB388750124/)
Book
Gilliom, John;
Monahan, Torin;
(2013)
SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society
(/isis/citation/CBB001421286/)
Be the first to comment!