Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. xi, 299 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781478014614.
It is not easy to advance a genuinely new perspective on the most told and most widely known story of a particular place. In this case, that means the short and long-term effects of four decades of US colonial rule in the Marshall Islands, characterized by a series of forced displacements of local populations to make way for, and respond to, the consequences of militarization and nuclear weapons testing. Yet, Jessica Schwartz’s Radiation Sounds manages to do just that. By placing what she interchangeably calls “bomb songs” and “radiation songs” at the heart of her analyses, Schwartz aims to unravel some of the ways in which Marshall Islanders with ancestral roots in Roñļap (Rongelap), Pikinni (Bikini), and Kuwajleen (Kwajalein) use music to preserve history, petition for justice, and cope with the consequences of colonial atrocities.
Underpinning the book is an attention to the “highly controlled yet dynamic boundary between sound and silence that continues to be an essential component of our relationship to nuclear weaponry and its devastating global consequences” (4). Schwartz uses the opposition between sound and silence in various analytical ways throughout the book, but it remains a central metaphor for the political relationship between the United States (a political entity) and Marshall Islanders (human beings).
As I understand it, silence comes into being for the US through secrecy (at the time of nuclear testing and in its aftermath) and by remaining silent when it comes to accepting responsibility for wrongdoings. This, in turn, effectively silences Marshall Islanders in several ways, including silencing of female political power and the matrilineal kinship system (metaphorical silences), controlling information and restricting public speech (regulatory silences), and silences resulting from the vaporization of islands and radiogenic disease (actual silences) (23).
I use the caveat “as I understand it” because, as a reader, I am left with the awkward task of interpreting or decoding the text. Much of the book, and especially the introduction, is draped in impenetrable language, characterized by abstract theoretical metaphors (“global harmony,” “biopolitical remediation,” “radioactive citizenship”) and strange adjectives (“sensorial commodification,” “minoritized positions,” “atollic movements”), often within sentences spanning six to eight lines. This is not a critique based on taste or preference, but of the fact that the potential theoretical interventions of the book remain ungraspable and, more importantly, that the critical political message contained in the subject remains obscure (or silenced). Indeed, the preference for theoretical abstraction shines through by the complete lack of both methodological reflections and human beings in the Introduction.
This is not to say that human life-experiences are missing from the book. Chapter 2 centres on the physical constraints on women’s voices due to radiation exposure to give an intimate account of the medical and ethical mistreatment suffered by people from Roñļap. In doing so, Schwartz astutely links women’s vocal practices to political protests in ways that show both female empowerment and the capacity the songs have for an effectful refusal of stigmatization. This is also a part of the book where the sound-silence metaphor comes into its rights, as Schwartz points out the connection between literally failing female voices and the failures of the modern justice system, characterized as a “regime of silence” (109). This succeeds because she puts human life-experiences at the front of her analysis.
Schwartz is at her ethnographic best in the final chapter, when she traces the intellectual history of a particular welcome song, having to navigate internal disagreements and tensions between its origin and its multifaceted contemporary meaning, all the while keeping her attention on local terms and their interpretation. This leads her to a grounded understanding of the concept of freedom (anemkwōj, literally his/hers/its-and-you)—a key concept in the welcome song—as reliant upon interdependence and coproduction. The term is therefore relational and can be construed differently in different situations, just like the meaning of the song can change in different contexts (231).
Yet, these chapters share the same weaknesses as the rest of the book, including frequent overstatements and a haphazard use of sources. For example, in chapter 3, we read that, when singing for Americans, “Bikinians are listened to, particularly when they sing in the Marshallese language, as ‘othered,’ having been exoticized and linked to nuclear erasure in US media, not to mention connected by name to the hypersexualized bikini bathing suit” (168). However, we never hear from any kind of audience and the claim is never put in a context to substantiate it; instead, we are supposed to accept this assessment outright.
In chapter 4, we are presented with an extensive analysis of the phrase jab keroro (stop chattering)—which Schwartz links to the root term roro, understood as an incantation of the spirit—to say that the phrase is a remnant of missionary colonization meant to “phase out the spirited noise of the ancestors” (178). The take-home point, made without references to local interpretations, linguistic work, or research on missionary history, is that jab keroro can be read “in line with other vocal controls that stem from white supremacist, colonial mentalities surrounding Indigenous noisiness, such as how missionaries debased Marshallese roro and called it ‘chant’” (179). Did the missionaries ever use the term jab keroro themselves in their conversion efforts? Nothing in Schwartz’s analysis points to that.
The major problem with these examples, and the book in its entirety, is that they rely on a caricature of an evil other, whether cast as “the US” or “the missionaries,” stripped of nuance and analytical depth. The result is a series of poorly substantiated claims that are so easily dismissed that the important political and ethical messages this material holds, disappears. If that is the case, is that not in itself an act of silencing?
Ola Gunhildrud Berta
University of South-Eastern Norway, Vestfold