Department of Musicology

Abstract

This article listens to Marshallese radiation songs to hear how singers subject to US nuclear colonial practices—including US nuclear testing (1946–1958), extant displacement, and human radiation experimentation—continue to be ignored in official capacities, even after nuclear colonialism officially ended with the Republic of the Marshall Islands’s sovereignty through the Compact of Free Association (1986). US nuclear imperialism is persistent given the establishment of these official spaces where the Marshall Islands and United States governments are allowed to interact, politically, and the radiation communities, particularly women subject to disproportionate impacts from nuclear colonialism, are denied entrance or, (literally and metaphorically), voice. Radiation songs, which detail the ongoing and systemic violences of US nuclear imperialism, are ways that singers subversively make their petitions to US citizens and governmental representatives heard. Songs challenge the exclusionary modern systems (law, politics, mass media, biomedicine) that continue to claim specialized knowledge by advancing Marshallese epistemologies, sensibilities, and embodied, or lived experiences of nuclear violence. As a matter of the health humanities in transnational context, the uneven development of the global working class through constitutive colonial conditions and durative imperial networks are matters this essay points up.

Despite the music industry's attempts to genericise world music, it is not a genre, though it is nonetheless possible to talk about world music as a field of cultural production. There are identifiable forms of capital, such as the types of authenticities musicians are expected to sound and exhibit; and there are identifiable positions available to be taken, concerning the proximity of the musician's sound to western popular music, and, most prominently, the position of whether or not to sing in English or another major European language. This essay takes up the theoretical problem of genres and fields: What is the relationship between an industry-imposed genre and a field? How do forms of capital congeal in fields? In today's neoliberal capitalism, it is clear that the fields of power and economics are increasingly encroaching on all fields of cultural production, to the extent that some genres of music have become brands. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.