A "Voice to Sing": Rongelapese Musical Activism and the Production of Nuclear Knowledge

Abstract

Based on two years of ethnographic work (2008–2010) in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), I present my work with a tight-knit community of Rongelapese women residing in Majuro Atoll, whose music yields insight into the role of expressive culture in mitigating the damages of a nuclear legacy, at various scales, that has often played out in secrecy and silence (Fig. 1). 1 The Rongelapese women’s musical activism, I argue following Jacques Rancière, generates dissensus, or “the essence of politics...[as] the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself.” 2 Framed within the nuclear context and rooted in an exploration of the particularities of culturally meaningful practices, conceptions of the body/senses, and notions of the political, I trace how Rongelapese women’s vocality and musicality responds locally to the global phenomenon of nuclear silences (as gaps in our present day nuclear knowledge) by making indistinguishable questions of health, politics, and generational survival as felt and thought. 3