Radio and music listening practices in colonial Mozambique: the Goan experience

In this article, I explore the role of radio and music listening practices in re-signifying the imperial identities of the population of Goan origin, who were either born in or migrated to colonial Mozambique. Apart from relying on archival research and interviews with radio professionals and other relevant informants, I also draw on 11 in-depth interviews with Portuguese and Mozambicans of Goan origin who have lived in colonial Mozambique for ten or more years, both men and women. Alongside the biographical method, I also examine my interlocutors’ relationship with several forms of media to investigate their past practices of radio reception and music listening. I articulate Nick Couldry’s framework of media as practice with Elizabeth Bird’s approach to the historical audience to understand my interlocutors’ memories of radio and sound reception as part of a broader set of social and cultural practices through which their imperial identities are reconstructed. The research results suggest that my interlocutors’ past radio and music listening practices contributed to both reproducing and discontinuing their parents’ socio-cultural practices brought with them when they migrated from Goa to Mozambique. Additionally, such practices enabled the construction of different ambivalent forms of Goan-ness in colonial Mozambique, hence across different spaces of the empire.