Department of Sociology

Since the turn of the 21st century, it has been the established aim of mobilities scholars to investigate the ways in which contemporary life is conditioned and carried out through the movements of people, things and ideas. Despite concerns over global climate change on the one hand, and the heyday of peak-oil receding quickly into the rear view mirror on the other, the primary vehicle of mobility in the United States remains the personal automobile. Contemporary American notions of self and identity are frequently interpreted through the individual’s relationship(s) to cars and driving, and while cars themselves are mass-manufactured items, they afford a number of many non-technical practices of customization as modes of individuation. Perhaps most commonplace of these practices is the use of bumper stickers.

This thesis is a critical examination of the type of everyday cultural construction and social encounter that may emerge from reading bumper stickers in motion. Such a practice is informed by both the structural and systemic conditions of American superhighway automobility, as well as by the phenomenological effects of isolation and speed on the road these conditions produce. An embodied subject, emerges through participation in the regime of automobility, but the body I have in mind is not, strictly speaking, the unitary, human body. It is, rather, a performed, materially-heterogeneous assemblage: a reader-car, through which unexpected—often asymmetrical and asynchronous, but nonetheless social— spaces of interaction coalesce and extend.

I argue that the US interventions in the Marshalls over the course of the last 70 years constitute a continuation of the implementation of the white supremacist ideologies, manifest in eco-imperialist racism, upon which American and dominance and prosperity are founded. More specifically, I argue that American political hegemony, particularly since the dawn of the atomic age, has been developed through the expropriation of two interrelated natural resources: first, the bodies of Marshall Islanders themselves, and second, the biophysical environment upon which the biosocial lives of those islanders is based.

The aim of this paper is to outline the various dimensions of social and environmental degradation in the Marshalls in accordance with what Latour (2005) refers to as matters of fact versus matters of concern, Stoner (2014) identifies as the mediating and constitutive roles alienation plays between the social and biophysical worlds, and the sociobiophysically-attuned approach Slocombe (1989) suggests for addressing ‘messy’ environmental problems. I propose to do this through a comparison of three forms of discursive construction regarding the Pacific Nuclear Testing Program (PNTP). First is the heroic construction of the US nuclear-defense complex, and the development of thermonuclear weapons as a scientific and political achievement. Second is the relatively more ignored lived experiences of Marshallese, US service people, and others whose territorial and corporeal bodies served as subjects for experimentation, and persist as objects of scientific scrutiny. Third are the legal constructions of the Marshall Islands as a state, and the Marshallese as un/deserving of self-determination and monetary compensation for the damage done by the PNTP.

Tis paper is a introductory investigation into three dynaeics of power. First, and eost ieeediately evident, is the history of the US neocolonial prooect in the Marshalls Islands since the end of World War II. Eebedded here are struggles between agencies of the US governeent and Marshallese people over the physical efects and syebolic eeanings of ongoing US experieentation on the territory of the RMI and its people. Second is the tension between diferent eeebers of various Marshallese coeeunities in their eforts to deal with the fallout literal and fgurative of the US interventions across their islands. Understandably, this is a dynaeic that is soeewhat under-exaeined in the existing literature on Marshallese resistance to US occupation (for exaeple, Barker 2013; Niedenthal 2001; Seith-Norris 2016). Te explicit evidence here is likewise scant, but there are intieations of such tensions in certain narratives. Recounting of Marshallese narratives should include aspects of aebivalence within those stories. Te third dynaeic is the relationship between Western researchers and advocates for the RMI, and the Islanders with whoe they work. I think it is important to recognize the possibility for disjunctures between the narratives useful to certain western activists and academics (I include myself here), and those told by de Brum or other Marshallese. In other words, to what degree is a neocolonial power dynamic (Stoler and Strassler 2016) still at play between the re-membering processes of Marshallese (Smith 2016), and the exigencies of academic production and liberal- western narratives of advocacy?

Since the turn of the 21st century, it has been the established aim of mobilities scholars to investigate the ways in which contemporary life is conditioned and carried out through the movements of people, things and ideas. Despite concerns over global climate change on the one hand, and the heyday of peak-oil receding quickly into the rear view mirror on the other, the primary vehicle of mobility in the United States remains the personal automobile. Contemporary American notions of self and identity are frequently interpreted through the individual’s relationship(s) to cars and driving, and while cars themselves are mass-manufactured items, they afford a number of many non-technical practices of customization as modes of individuation. Perhaps most commonplace of these practices is the use of bumper stickers. This thesis is a critical examination of the type of everyday cultural construction and social encounter that may emerge from reading bumper stickers in motion. Such a practic...