Indigeneity, Time and the Cosmopolitics of Postcolonial Belonging in the Atomic Age (original) (raw)
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Australian Literary Studies, 2023
In this article, I ask how the British nuclear humanities, and in particular literary studies, might turn towards Indigenous Australian artistic, literary and critical work on nuclear legacies. Reading responses to the afterlives of British nuclear operations at Maralinga by the activist-poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) and the artist Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha / Nukunu), I consider how, for British scholars, interpreting Aboriginal nuclear texts asks particular questions of critical practice, drawing attention to empire’s intellectual, as well as social and chemical, residues. Such work invites a reflexive critical approach, attentive to what feminist and Indigenous scholars call ‘positionality’. In Britain, the places blasted and irradiated in the name of national defence have a vague, occluded presence in collective memory. This inhibited awareness of nuclear history, I suggest, has been shaped both by avoidant attitudes to empire, and also by strongly future-oriented nuclear imaginaries. By contrast, Harkin and Scarce draw attention to intimate, ongoing encounters with toxic legacies left by imperial and settler-colonial projects. As they celebrate the resilience of dispossessed, poisoned communities for whom nuclear apocalypse is an everyday reality, they emphasise interrelated forms of responsibility: to the past, to land, and to future generations. I discuss the important challenges that their art and activism present to mainstream nuclear cultures, and to the memory of empire in Britain.
Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology (Review)
Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2023
Nuclear colonialism is an international problem', writes Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator at the Institute of American Indian Arts (2021: 53). The phrase 'nuclear colonialism', initially coined by activists Ward Churchill and Winona LaDuke, refers to the system where government and industry exploit Indigenous peoples and lands globally to ensure the processes of uranium mining, refining and its fission in reactors and weapons (1992: 255-62). Through the assembly of 38 works in media such as painting, photography, film, collage, fibre arts, sculpture and installation, the curatorial team behind Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology ties together communities across North America, the Arctic, the Pacific and Oceania through histories of radioactive exposure, and makes it clear that multiple governmental and corporate entities are consistently at the heart of nuclear colonialism as they disproportionately locate radioactive projects in Native lands. Although several exhibitions in recent years have addressed complex relationships between visuality and nuclear histories, including Camera Atomica (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015), Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape (Krannert Art Museum, 2019-20) and Contemporary Perspectives on the Nuclear-World in Art (Tin Sheds Gallery, 2022), among others, Exposure is the first to scrutinize the relationship between nuclear toxicities and their prevalence in Indigenous communities transnationally. The exhibition arrives on the heels of the 75th anniversary of the first nuclear detonation by US government scientists. That event, and the US government's use of atomic bombs on the human and non-human residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, inaugurated the nuclear age and catalysed the immeasurable and often invisible nuclear dangers made palpable through the artworks on display. The artists and curatorial team responsible for Exposure centre upon specific, diverse and ongoing Indigenous entanglements with all things nuclear while contextualizing these narratives within an extended temporal and spatial context. Put another way, Exposure successfully offers a complex view of the repercussions of the nuclear age for multiple Indigenous communities, yet the exhibition compellingly situates atomic detonations, uranium extraction, the siting of nuclear wastes and the brutal aftermath of radioactive toxicities within broader systems of settler-colonialism. Several works in the exhibition attend to the devastating impacts of the nuclear complex on ecologies and lifeways, while also foregrounding
Mapping the Atomic Unconscious: Postcolonial Capital in Nuclear Glow
During his visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016, the first ever to be made by a sitting U.S. president, Barack Obama claimed that " the memory of the morning of August 6, 1945, must never fade. " 1 Not only did he seek to preserve the memory of the dropping of the first atomic bomb beyond the last voices of the hibakusha, he framed this call for preservation in moral terms: " The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. " If his explicit claim is that the role of science in human atrocity can be mitigated by a renewed moral framework, the implicit message is that the practice of commemoration provides a symbolic ground for this renewed morality. Accordingly, the president's discourse of moral revolution not only affirms the largely apolitical, ahistorical nature of global memory culture, which tends to translate historical forms of exploitation into universal narratives of suffering, but it also obscures the slow violence of nuclear energy regimes by reducing nuclearity to the moment of explosion. In seeking to preserve the memory of atrocity, the moral revolutionary, however unwittingly, preserves the colonial logic of nuclear energy regimes by transforming the material exploitations of energy production into the universal grammar of commemoration. Against the idealism of the moral revolutionary, I want to recuperate the material dimensions of cultural memory and suggest that it might serve a different purpose in the context of postcolonial capital: to elucidate the materiality of an energy unconscious embedded in memory media. 2 Postcolonial capitalism here signifies the ways in which immaterial forms of accumulation and material forms of labour intersect in the colonial landscapes of global memory culture. My utilization of the term is meant to reflect the complex ways in which enclosures of knowledge and labor reinforce one another while contributing to new forms of accumulation through the aestheticization of colonial capital's material remains. 3 In my elaboration of the atomic unconscious of postcolonial capital, I adapt Michael Niblett's question regarding the mapping of energy regimes in relation to cultural media. Suggesting that patterns
Ecokritike, 2024
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2018
This article explores the ways in which precolonial understandings of the Pacific as a cross-cultural space involving extensive interpelagic networks of trade and cultural exchange, notably elaborated in Tongan scholar Epeli Hauʻofa's 1990s series of essays celebrating Oceania as a "sea of islands", are evident in pan-Pacific indigenous protests against nuclear testing in the region. It explores indigenous literary and artistic condemnations of both French and US nuclear testing (which collectively spanned a 50year period, 1946-96), touching on the work of a range of authors from Aotearoa New Zealand, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti/ French Polynesia, before discussing a recent UK governmentfunded research project focused on the legacy of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. The project involved Marshallese poet and environmental activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and a range of her antinuclear poetry commissioned for the project (including "History Project", "Monster" and "Anointed") is analysed in the closing sections of this article.
Theatre Research in Canada-recherches Theatrales Au Canada, 2017
Sahtu Dene Metis theatre artist Marie Clements's and settler photographer Rita Leistner's intercultural and multi-media collaboration The Edward Curtis Project (TECP) explores the tense negotiations between settler and Indigenous characters who are brought together from different time frames through an Indigenous concept of fluidly intersecting temporalities (McVie). Clements re-appropriates the American photographer Edward Curtis's strategy of asking his Indigenous subjects to re-enact banned rituals and ceremonies; she thus stages Curtis as a settler avatar re-enacting scenes from his past that often involve confrontations between himself and numerous historical and contemporary Indigenous subjects. In her discussion of the production, Brenda Vellino first establishes the broader theatre studies context for the conflict transformation possibilities presented by TECP. Its intercultural rehearsal of relationship renegotiation may be read as essential for substantive redress between settler and Indigenous subjects. She discusses Clements's rehearsal of Indigenous confrontation and negotiation with the settler avatar Edward Curtis in light of a recent turn toward rereading the Curtis archive for Indigenous agency and cultural authority. She then explores Clements's critique of a politics of mediated projection as central to both the stagecraft and questions of TECP. Finally, she considers the significance of Clements's culminating Windigo exorcism ceremony as painful but necessary medicine for both settler and Indigenous subjects. Clements's and Leistner's project thus invites consideration of rehearsal as a process, practice, and trope of multi-layered relationship renegotiation between members of Indigenous and settler communities who seek active redress. The Edward Curtis Project (TECP), une collaboration interculturelle et multimédia entre l'artiste de théâtre Sahtu déné métisse Marie Clements et la colonisatrice et photographe Rita Leistner, explore les négociations tendues entre des personnages colonisateurs et autochtones de différentes époques réunis grâce à un concept autochtone de temporalités à entrecroisement fluide (McVie). Clements se réapproprie une stratégie du photographe américain Edward Curtis, qui demandait à ses sujets autochtones de reconstituer des cérémonies et des rituels interdits. Ce faisant, elle met Curtis en scène comme une représentation du colon, qui rejoue des scènes de son passé reposant souvent sur des confrontations avec des figures autochtones historiques et contemporaines. Dans cet article, Brenda Vellino commence par présenter le contexte plus large en études théâtrales dans lequel s'inscrivent les possibilités de transformation du conflit que propose le TECP. Selon elle, l'exercice interculturel de renégo-92
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