"Scripting Empire recovers the cultural history of West Indian and West African writing at the BBC in order to rethink the critical midcentury decades of decolonisation, late modernism, and mass migration to the metropole. Between the 1930s and the 1960s a remarkable group of black Atlantic artists and intellectuals became producers, editors and freelancers at the corporation. They included Una Marson, Langston Hughes, Louise Bennett, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Amos Tutuola, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Cyprian Ekwensi, Stuart Hall, and CLR James. Operating at the interface of a range of literary and broadcast genres, this loose network of African Caribbean writers and thinkers prompt a reassessment of aesthetic innovation and political imagination between the outbreak of World War II and the first airings of post-colonial independence. Moving beyond prevailing accounts of the novel, and narratives of extension, the book examines the role of short, serial formats and episodic structures within the vibrant economy of midcentury cultural production. Scripting Empire works comparatively across dozens of different programmes spanning the Colonial Service, General Overseas Service, Home Service, Light Programme and Third Programme"--