| This dissertation analyzes the sonic evidence of the US nuclear weapons testing program in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 and 1958. Combining multi-sited fieldwork, archival research, and oral histories I offer both a sonic history of the early American atomic age (governmental sound design and analyses of American popular music) and an ethnomusicological study of Marshallese music. I contend that nuclear culture created a new and vital, in a literal sense, role for listening and hearing---in short, a new aesthetic sensibility---that would attend to a radically inaudible phenomenon: nuclear weapons. Focusing on the secretive milieu in which nuclear weaponry was developed and tested, I argue that silence emerged as the paradigmatic atomic age sensibility and was instrumental in the management of bodies and information in both countries. In accessing new modes of listening that developed around these sensible voids, I trace the evolution of this aesthetic reconfiguration of United States society and the production of sounds that emerged from this new aesthetic, exploring the ways in which the alignment of a globalizing nuclear culture with the concept of freedom, constructed as a promise, was intimately linked to the ear, the aural, and listening to and for silences in both the United States and the Marshall Islands.;Around the many silences that accrued during this period, new modes of listening and sounding developed such as air raid sirens, Geiger counter clicks, and Civil Defense broadcasts. Analyzing ethnographic data that includes approximately one hundred interviews and hundreds of hours of audio recording and video footage, I dwell at greatest length on a repertoire of Marshallese songs that has developed over the last sixty-five years in response to the deleterious effects of nuclear weaponry and US militarism that pervade everyday life in the Marshall Islands. These songs, I argue, along with religious and contemporary music, performances, and ceremonies, work to transcend the material horrors of nuclear weaponry, contribute to a Pacific politics of indigeneity, and are powerful tools in the reorganization of Marshallese society that followed the nuclear testing program. |
