James Procter's Scripting Empire is a perceptive and incisive exploration of a formative conjuncture in the story of mid-twentieth-century Black Atlantic modernism centered in London. Marked on one side by the centrality of broadcast radio to the infrastructures of literary production, circulation, and identity, and on the other, by the cultural-politics of decolonization, this is a conjuncture in which a generation of diasporic West Indian and West African writers navigated, challenged, appropriated, and transformed the BBC public sphere. Scripting Empire is a study of remarkable erudition.
James Procter is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University. He is the author of Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (2003), Stuart Hall (2004), co-editor of Reading Across Worlds (2015), Out of Bounds: British Black and Asian Poets (2012), and Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception (2013), as well as numerous articles and chapters in leading postcolonial journals and book collections. His current research interests are in radio literature and empire between the 1930s and late 1960s, a project for which he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2013-14.