Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

• islands of resistance
UK, which was a commercial broadcaster, and the kind of “alternative
radio” that in subsequent years has characterized licensed campus/
community radio stations in Canada. Extrapolating further on these
differences in his discussion of Guattari’s conception of Radio Alice,
Michael Goddard noted:
This is miles away both from ideas of local or community radio in
which groups should have the possibility on radio to represent their
particular interests and from conventional ideas of political radio in
which radio should be used as a megaphone for mobilizing the masses
. . . What this type of radio achieved most of all was the short-circuiting
of representation in both the aesthetic sense of representing the
social realities they dealt with and in the political sense of the delegate
or authorized spokesperson in favor of generating a space of direct
communications. 5
In this more expansive sense, Radio Alice actively challenged listener
passivity and encouraged its audience members to become engaged in
direct speech on the airwaves through relaying live call-ins aimed at
unleashing strategic reports from the barricades, along with the unfiltered
rage of protesters in the streets and the poetic laughter of the
insurgent imagination in flight. And, for the playful protagonists and
provocateurs of Radio Alice, if this could only be done illegally, then
so much more the merrier. As it turned out in the end, the more sombre
response of the Italian state was arresting and imprisoning Radio
Alice’s operators on charges of sedition, and shutting it down.
What then would a spectrum of illegality look like in relation to the
stories of radio piracy that you will encounter in the following chapters?
While we do not want to fetishize the degree of illegality as proof
of radicalism, one way of envisioning this spectrum is in relation to
the type of legal transgression involved. Not all forms of pirate radio
involve the same perceived or actual risks. Within the wide array
of programming that encompasses pirate initiatives from “permanent”
radio stations to temporary broadcasters, it is a complicated
task to decide where each pirate project fits on a spectrum of illegality.
For example, the signal of a community-based pirate station on
an indigenous reserve may be unlicensed and unwelcome in a nearby
settler community, but it has sovereignty protections not available offreserve.
Similarly, a temporary broadcaster who is immersed in the
tactical uses of pirate radio in protest situations seemingly faces a bigger
risk of getting busted than a temporary broadcaster whose chal-