This article challenges readers to relisten to rock ’n’ roll, a musical genre that has often been synonymous with postwar American culture and ideology, via the nuclear Pacific; in doing so, it proposes an Archipelagic American music studies that decenters the primacy of “the narrative of continental America (which has been a geographical story central to U.S. historiography and self-conception),” as well as U.S. musical historiography and American music studies.1 Accounts of rock ’n’ roll locate its genealogy, primarily and understandably, in African American music. Similarly, rock ’n’ roll is often considered to be an American export that has become a global phenomenon. By amplifying erasures of Indigenous lives, lands, and listenings that retain spectral presences in the grooves of rock ’n’ roll (and the systems that produce them), this article begins to map a genealogy of rock ’n’ roll that critically engages the term “America” as an imperial...
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December 01 2022
Rock ’n’ Roll (Archipelagic American Music Studies)
Jessica A. Schwartz
Jessica A. Schwartz
Jessica A. Schwartz is an associate professor of musicology at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. Schwartz's work focuses on critical, creative, and poetic dissent, as explored in Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), American Quarterly, and Women & Music, as well as DIY/punk in journal Punk & Post-Punk. Schwartz is the Academic Advisor to and co-founder of the Marshallese Educational Initiative (501c3) and cohosts the Punkast Series.
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American Music (2022) 40 (4): 553–559.
Citation
Jessica A. Schwartz; Rock ’n’ Roll (Archipelagic American Music Studies). American Music 1 December 2022; 40 (4): 553–559. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/19452349.40.4.22
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