After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice (original) (raw)

Matters of Empathy and Nuclear Colonialism: Marshallese Voices Marked in Story, Song, and Illustration

Music and Politics, 2016

The tests and scientific and medical programs were shrouded in secrecy; information about the tests conducted on Marshallese bodies and their lands remains largely classified. I conducted ethnographic work from 2008 through 2010 in what is now the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), politically autonomous from the United States since 1986, and in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri from 2011 onwards. Marshallese will often note that they do not have a written history; rather, they rely on their voices to interactively share their oral histories in story and song. My Marshallese interlocutors living in the RMI and US stress the value of collecting these dynamic oral histories as well as utilizing them for pedagogical purposes and in platforms for social justice at events like the annual Nuclear Remembrance Day ceremonies. In 2013, I co-founded the Marshallese Educational Initiative (MEI), an Arkansas-based nonprofit to develop intercultural pedagogy and outreach through projects such as the Marshallese Oral History Project and Digital Music Archive (MOHP), Nuclear Remembrance Day, and collaborative work with Marshallese college student members of the Manit Club (Culture Club). In this article, I define Marshallese voices in terms of material and political representations. The word for voice and sound are the same in the Marshallese language (ainikien). Voice is its sonorous materiality, but it also represents the throat, where various physiological and emotional processes coalesce. Marshallese body perception of the throat as the center of the emotions also speaks to larger notions of connectivity, communication, and social values. Marshallese social organization is based on land and lineage, specifically, land is inherited through matrilineal orientation. Unlike western notions of property, every Marshallese is born with land and thus rights on and from that land. Decolonization, as a form of nation building, depends on a Marshallese politics of the voice. These voices mark colonial encounters and two political ontologies. 1 Drawing from Adriana Cavarero and Jacques Rancière, among others, who have explored the politics of voice as first and foremost a question of the sensible (and its distribution), and anthropologists Amanda Weidman and Laura Kunreuther who have considered the postcolonial associations of voice in terms of subjectivity and co-constitutive realms of private and public expressivity, I extend discussions of the voice and politics, and the politics of voice, to offer a contemplation on how vocal materiality can afford productive conversations around the relationship between empathy and nuclear colonialism.

Looking for Light on the Dark Side of the American Dream— Exploring the Painful Legacy of Nuclear Colonialism in Paradise

It is estimated that in the last thirty years over 30% of Micronesians, or some 75,000 individuals, have immigrated to Hawai'i, Guam and the United States (US) mainland in accord with the Compact of Free Association (COFA). The reasons vary but nearly always revolve around the desire for a better life—yet running beneath these individual and family migration histories is the undeniable nuclear legacy of the US military in Micronesia. From 1946 through 1958 the US dropped 109 megatons of munitions, releasing radiation equivalent to more than 7,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs in the Marshall Islands, which has resulted in uninhabitable atolls and extreme environmental degradation in the region. These environmental conditions have been further exacerbated by climate change, in the forms of rising sea-levels and resulting comprised freshwater lenses, destructive storms and extreme droughts. This article seeks to explore the motivational factors pushing and pulling many Pacific Islanders to and from their homes in Micronesia, as well as the discrimination and harsh economic realities, such as homelessness, they encounter when arriving in the Aloha State. There is limited awareness in the US and international circles of these newest Americans and the immense challenges they face. Consequently, this article seeks to add to the burgeoning body of understanding on this complex issue, highlight the hard-won successes of all those impacted by COFA, while considering the rising rates of income inequality amid the ongoing homeless crisis in the US and calls on Congress to further support those that continue to live with the painful legacy of nuclear colonialism in the Pacific.

Bomb Archive: The Marshall Islands as Cold War Film Set

Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images, 2023

This essay offers a decolonial analysis of the inaugural moment of the United States' Cold War project-the nuclear weapon "testing" in oceanic environments. As an alternative to the usual framing of Pikinni Atoll as a site of the Cold War arms race that tends to invisibilize Marshallese experiences through a Cold War binary logic, this article invites the reader to focus on the Pikinni Atoll as a film set. It offers such an approach with the hope of reframing questions of justice and recognizing the worlds lost due to the production of US nuclear modernity.

Waves of destruction: Nuclear imperialism and anti-nuclear protest in the indigenous literatures of the Pacific

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.

Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands: Genocide in the Pacific?

Raphael Lemkin’s sociological conception of genocide provides an analytical lens through which to highlight the culturally destructive effects of the United States nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands. Mohammed Abed provides a useful framework for understanding the indigenous Marshallese as a culture susceptible to genocide, and the techniques outlined by Lemkin highlight the ways in which their culture has been fractured or destroyed. The question of intent arises, but should not overshadow the threat to the existence of Marshallese culture. This is after all what Lemkin sought to protect.

Postcolonial Disaster, Pacific Nuclearization, and Disabling Environments

2010

This essay examines the intersections between postcolonial and disability studies in relation to the disastrous effects of Pacific nuclearization. It explores how two fictional texts, Robert Barclay’s Meļaļ (2002) and James George’s Ocean Roads (2006), portray the nuclear Pacific as a disabling environment conditioned by imperialist military interventions. Situating comparative analyses in relation to Mark Priestley and Laura Hemingway’s sociological research on disaster and disability and Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial theory of necropolitics, the essay shows how both novels foreground deep entanglements between the presence of nuclearism and disability in the region. In so doing, they politicize notions of post-disaster recovery in ways that anticipate more inclusive and anticolonial futures.

MILITARY COLONIALISM, PACIFIC NUCLEARISATION, AND THE MARSHALLESE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION IN ROBERT BARCLAY'S MELAL

Revista Interdisciplinar de Literatura e Ecocritica, 2020

This paper strives to argue how Robert Barclay's Melal is a fictionalisation of the long history of military violence and atomic radiation by the USA in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. Subverting the Western idealistic notion of the Marshall Islands as a Garden of Eden and a tropical paradise, unspoiled by modern development, this paper explores how Barclay's Melal serves as an important point of departure to bring to focus how life in the atolls have become synonymous with radiation arid a nuclear wasteland, and the different ways in which the indigenous people of the area are forced to grapple with this superpower parochialism. Despite postcolonial studies' preoccupation with issues of marginality, the social and ecological issues of the Marshall Islands have received little or no interest from the field. Melal seems to be a major intervention bringing to public visibility the chilling truth of the socio-political and cultual ramifications of Pacific nuclearisation. By corollary, the paper is also a protest against mainstream Euro/North-American ecocriticism which despite claiming itself as normative, severely failed to voice for the environmental perceptions beyond the European/north-American national borders.

The Nuclear Sensorium: Cold War Nuclear Imperialism and Sensory Violence

Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 2019

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium” - the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

"Hiroshima Sublime": Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia/Pacific Imaginary

Southeast Asian Review of English, 2021

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels. As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōe lamented, "To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there." However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublime as a trauma of geopolitical domination and racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (raptured by these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installing Patriot missiles as signs of their global supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinated by self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a 'post-nuclear' era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility: at once urging the globe towards annihilation and yet also towards transactional and dialogical unity at the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, with its "sublime Patriot" missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.

(De)Territorializing the Home. The Nuclear Bomb Shelter as a Malleable Site of Passage, in: Society and Space 35: 4 (2017), pp. 674-693.

This paper explores the worldwide unprecedented bunker infrastructure of Switzerland. Since the 1960s, the country has built hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb shelters in family homes. Drawing on poststructural theories of social practice and ritual theory, the all-pervasive structures in the private sphere are analyzed as transitory spaces that coordinate the movement and connections between different milieus, regimes, and bodies. By studying the operational scripts of the authorities and the spatial arrangements and artifacts of the shelter, the paper argues that a sequenced set of “rites of passage” were to be practiced in order to guarantee a transition into the postapocalypse without any violations of norms, social roles, and affective regimes. However, this “territorializing” process launched by the state with the aim of engineering a “bomb-proof” society met with little success. By ignoring, distorting, or violating the constant prewar situation in their homes, Swiss people, as early as in the 1970s, started to undermine the shelter as an instance of concrete governmentality. Being traversed by various processes of “deterritorialization” the bunker lost its function as a locus of secured passage and transformed into a highly dynamic “empty space” that hides, till this day, residua for creativity and difference.