“Say It Like You See It”: Radio Broadcasting and the Mass Mediation of Creole Nationhood in St. Lucia

This article examines the role of Caribbean creole languages in the imagining and “mass mediating” of postcolonial nationhood. The focus is radio broadcasting in St. Lucia, where an Afro-French creole language known as Kwéyòl coexists with the official language, English. Since St. Lucia's independence in 1979, Kwéyòl has been used increasingly on the airwaves (formerly the exclusive domain of English) by broadcasters intent on rapidly “modernizing” the language to transform it into a vehicle of national development on a par with English. But when Kwéyòl is forced into strongly regimented “English” broadcasting formats and genres, as when international news reports received at the studio in English are translated word for word into Kwéyòl, the results often seem less than “authentically” St. Lucian. In recent years some broadcasters have been responding to such problems by experimenting with distinctively “creole” programming formats that give voice to local folk perspectives and counterdiscourses. These densely heteroglossic broadcasts simultaneously capture and comment on the predicaments facing Caribbean peoples as they negotiate steadily globalizing political economies of language and information that are often hostile to speakers of “small” languages such as Kwéyòl, and to “micro-states” such as St. Lucia.