In 1961, the Burma Broadcasting Service—first established by the British in 1946—added regular Rohingya-language broadcasts to its “Voice of Myanmar” radio program. In 1965, several years after General Ne Win’s military coup in Burma, the Rohingya-language broadcasts were discontinued. Within four short years, a distinct Rohingya listening public in post-independent Burma had formed and dissolved. However short-lived, the Rohingya-language broadcasts reinforced the notion that the Rohingya people were indeed an officially recognized ethnic minority group of Burma/Myanmar. The present-day Rohingya-language mediascape involves a wide array of Rohingya content creators and uploaders on YouTube and social media platforms living primarily as displaced, stateless persons. While contemporary Rohingya-language media is more abundant and accessible than ever before, the present-day realities of mass statelessness, displacement, and incarceration that define contemporary Rohingya life render nearly all forms of public life and formal political participation impossible for most Rohingyas. In this paper, I explore how contemporary Rohingyas—the majority of whom are pre-literate—constitute themselves as political subjects through various listening practices despite their formal political disenfranchisement. I ask: How does the Rohingya listening public of Burma in the early 1960s relate to contemporary Rohingya listening counterpublics (Fraser 1990) in diaspora? Using an experiential and performative understanding of the political (Hirschkind 2006; Arendt 1958), I argue that Rohingya listening counterpublics have played a crucial role in the formation and evolution of Rohingya national consciousness and Rohingya nationalist discourse.

Seventy years before the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the first phase of strikes during the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936–39 set the precedent for ethical consumption as a tenet of Palestinian nationalism. Radio played a key role in sustaining the strikes because of its capacity to shape collective action through the imagined simultaneity of “media capitalism” (Fahmy 2011). This entanglement of capitalist exchange with nationalist politics is evident in a 1936 controversy surrounding the famous Butaji department stores in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. As political parties united to convene the strike, Emil Butaji issued a radio statement expressing his concern for Arab merchants. Public outcry forced him to publish a newspaper retraction that assured readers he would close his stores in solidarity with national demands. Using archival phonograph and radio advertisements from Butaji’s stores alongside a repertoire of strike songs and chants, this paper argues for the role of Palestinian “listening publics” (Bullock 2022; Blum & Hassanpour 1996) in the production of nationalist discourses. Loab Hammoud (2023) has shown how Palestinian elites developed modernist social practices through the idealization of Western “music and auditory technologies.” Through my theorization of “consumer voice,” I extend his analysis to non-elite spaces like the cafe and village guesthouse, where Palestinians adapted colonial media tools and systems to produce indigenous epistemologies of communication and entertainment. In this context, listening became a form of political expression that transformed everyday engagement with media technologies into sites of political action, without the formal structures of nationhood.

In 1927, an Odeon advertisement for the magazine Misr al-Hadīthah (Modern Egypt) featured a young woman singer, Fathiyya Ahmed (1898–1975), whose “merciful” and “compassionate” voice entranced listeners. Despite her label as the “Sultana of Tarab and Eastern Music,” Ahmed retired from the spotlight two years later to get married and become a mother. In the Kingdom of Egypt (1922–1952), magazines and newspapers appealed to Cairo’s upper-class Egyptian women who wanted to shape the “New Egyptian Woman” as a pious, Muslim mother who guided the country away from its colonized past and into a modern future. Arab women singers such as Ahmed, Munira al-Mahdiyya, Umm Kulthum, and Layla Murad gained celebrity status for their performances both live and on 78-rpm shellac records. Yet they also faced scrutiny from the readership for their different portrayals of feminist, modern women. In this paper, I analyze advertisements and reviews of these women singers to discuss how the sonic perceptions of women’s voices were heard not only as emotional and enchanting, but also as symbols of the New Egyptian Women’s movement. Building upon scholarship on advertisements (Baron 2005; Russell 2010), sound (Fahmy 2011), and music (Danielson 1994; Racy 2003) in revolutionary Egypt, I argue that phonograph companies’ advertisements contributed to Egyptian listening publics by reifying the patriarchal structure in the nationalist movement. This paper further shows how listening to gender within the context of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Egypt is crucial to understanding broader perspectives of modern history in the SWANA region.