Jessica A. Schwartz Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. xi, 299 pp., B/W photographs, figures, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781478013686 (hardcover), ISBN 9781478014614 (paperback), ISBN 9781478021919 (ebook) and ISBN 9781478

Abstract

From the moment of picking up this book, with its arresting cover art of a Uranium-235 AtomModel and its introductory chapter “ItWas the Sound That Terrified Us,” there is a clear sense that stories of trauma and suffering await the reader. This is an ambitious work, covering around seventy-five years of history and music in the Marshall Islands, a volatile period of nuclear activity and experience, the resonance of which is far from over. The author Schwartz frames the work within “a politics of silence and sound,” drawing asmuch attention to the “conspicuous manipulation of silence” as it does to the sounds of Marshallese musical culture (5). The book is organised into five chapters, and an introduction, of equal length. The Introduction is densely theoretical: a sophisticated consideration ofmusic and gender, power, race, and decolonisation in the context of the Marshall Islands. Chapter One provides a detailed discussion of the politics of radiation and the complex relationship between the United States of America and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI); there are strong assertions here on the gendered nature of nuclear violence and onwomen’s disempowerment in the process. Chapter Two presents the experience of the people of Rongelap Atoll as “human radiation experiments” (98) and focuses particularly on the effect of radiation (and treatment) on Rongelapese women’s voices and how this affects, amongst other things, Rongelapese musicality. Chapter Three focuses largely on the experiences of the people of Bikini Atoll and the staged nature of their removal. Here the physicality and gendered characteristics of performance/performing are explored: women’s voices, due to the effects of radiation but also the need to assert authority within the constructedmasculine narrative, are “trapped in a gendered register” (142). The role of anthems in relation to identity also features here. Chapter Four explores the role of Christianity and the Church in the lives of the people, and in particular Bikinian men’s voices and broader performance practices as “part of their larger decolonial struggles” (174). Crucially, here the author acknowledges the complexity of identify formation and Bikinian’s “interwoven inheritance: the spirit of sharing alongside Rongelapese, Marshallese, Ijjidik, Oceanic, Christian, American, and so forth” (210). Chapter Five, the Yearbook for Traditional Music (2022), 54, 73–81