On March 1, 1954, the US military detonated “Castle Bravo,” its most powerful nuclear bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, the US military evacuated the Marshallese to a nearby atoll where they became part of a classified study, without their consent, on the effects of radiation on humans. In Radiation Sounds Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to US nuclear militarism on their homeland. Schwartz shows how Marshallese singing draws on religious, cultural, and political practices to make heard the deleterious effects of US nuclear violence. Schwartz also points to the literal silencing of Marshallese voices and throats compromised by radiation as well as the United States’ silencing of information about the human radiation study. By foregrounding the centrality of the aural and sensorial in understanding nuclear testing’s long-term effects, Schwartz offers new modes of understanding the relationships between the voice, sound, militarism, indigeneity, and geopolitics.

"“In this fascinating ethnography of singing as a sonic politics of Indigenous postcolonial identity, Jessica A. Schwartz reveals the intimate historical relations between aurality and nuclear war. Ambitious and unique, Radiation Sounds brings the sensory materialities of ‘the bomb’ home to the lives lived and songs sung in its shadow.”" - Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation

"This is a very sophisticated and well-researched book, enriched by the sharing of personal experience and observations that illuminate the research relationships that form its foundation. . . . This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars: historians, political scientists, anthropologists, Pacific studies, gender studies, and disaster studies scholars, in addition to ethnomusicologists and dance ethnologists. In teaching, it would be a good resource for graduate students." - Yearbook for Traditional Music