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Toxic ImmanenceDecolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures |
eBook Available
Reflections on twentieth- and twenty-first-century atomic cultures and their legacies.
More than a decade after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, what we are witnessing is not a Second Nuclear Age - there is no post-atomic - but an uncanny, quiet return of the nuclear threat that so vividly animated the Cold War era. The renewed threat of nuclear proliferation, public complacency regarding weapons stockpiles, and the lack of a single functioning long-term repository after seventy years and thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste reveals the industry’s capacity for self-reinvention abetted by an ever-present capacity to forget. More than “fabulously textual,” as Jacques Derrida described it, the protean, unbound, and unending materiality of the nuclear is here to stay: resistance is crucial.
Toxic Immanence introduces contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives that resist and decolonize the nuclear. Contributors highlight the prevalence and irrationality of slow violence and colonial governance as elements of the contemporary nuclear age. They propose a reappraisal of Cold War-era anti-nuclear art as well as pop culture representations of nuclear disaster, while decolonizing pedagogies advance the role of education in communicating and understanding the lethality of nuclear complexes. Collectively, the essays develop a robust critical discourse across fields of nuclear knowledge and integrate the work of the nuclear humanities with environmental justice and Indigenous rights activism. This reach across ways of knowing extends artistically: the poetry and photography included in this volume offer visions of past and present nuclear legacies.
Conceived as a critical reflection on the potential of nuclear humanities, Toxic Immanence offers intellectual strategies for resisting and abolishing the global nuclear regime.
Toxic Immanence introduces contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives that resist and decolonize the nuclear. Contributors highlight the prevalence and irrationality of slow violence and colonial governance as elements of the contemporary nuclear age. They propose a reappraisal of Cold War-era anti-nuclear art as well as pop culture representations of nuclear disaster, while decolonizing pedagogies advance the role of education in communicating and understanding the lethality of nuclear complexes. Collectively, the essays develop a robust critical discourse across fields of nuclear knowledge and integrate the work of the nuclear humanities with environmental justice and Indigenous rights activism. This reach across ways of knowing extends artistically: the poetry and photography included in this volume offer visions of past and present nuclear legacies.
Conceived as a critical reflection on the potential of nuclear humanities, Toxic Immanence offers intellectual strategies for resisting and abolishing the global nuclear regime.
Details
472 Pages, 6.5 x 9.5
81 photos, 1 table
ISBN 9780228011361
September 2022
Formats: Cloth, eBook
“This bold and versatile collection breaks ground in employing academic and artistic approaches to consolidate a new field of nuclear humanities.” Yuki Miyamoto, DePaul University
“The first major collection of scholarship on nuclear energy humanities, …Toxic Immanence succeeds in setting the contours for a precise sector of study, while also bridging it to the well-established academic disciplines of environmental humanities, gender and sexuality studies, and critical Anthropocene studies, to name only a few.” H-Environment
“The first major collection of scholarship on nuclear energy humanities, …Toxic Immanence succeeds in setting the contours for a precise sector of study, while also bridging it to the well-established academic disciplines of environmental humanities, gender and sexuality studies, and critical Anthropocene studies, to name only a few.” H-Environment
Livia Monnet is professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at the Université de Montréal.
Table and Figures ix
Foreword | The Atomic Now xv
MAGDALENA E. STAWKOWSKI
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction | Toxic Immanence: Toward Decolonizing Pedagogies of the Nuclear 3
LIVIA MONNET
ONE: Aftereffects of Chernobyl and Fukushima
1 “The Future Is Behind Them!”: Post-Apocalypse and the Enduring Nuclear in Post-Soviet Russian Fiction 39
SHARAE DECKARD
2 From Toxic Lands to Toxic Rumours: Nuclear Accidents, Contaminated Territories, and the Production of (Radio)active Ignorance 59
SEZIN TOPÇU
3 The Fukushima Process 78
SABU KOHSO
4 Fukushima and the Rebuild of Godzilla: Multiplying Media in an Era of Multiplying Disaster 94
THOMAS LAMARRE
Afterword | Repeating, Multiplying: The Ongoing Now of Nuclear Aftereffects 127
DANIEL C. O’NEILL
TWO: The Cold War and Post-Cold War Nuclear State and Its Geopolitics: Imaginaries and Contestations
5 Shaking, Trembling, Rattling, Shouting: Seismic Politics in the Nuclear Age 139
JOSEPH MASCO
6 What Is the Matter with Nuclear Weapons Communication? 151
BRYAN C. TAYLOR
7 The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service: 10-Year Final Report on Public Agency Organizing and Operational Responses to Cold War Legacies and the Nuclear Stockpile 174
SARAH KANOUSE AND SHILOH KRUPAR
8 Sounding Out the Nuclear: An Atomic Opera 197
JULIET PALMER, JULIE SALVERSON, AND PETER C. VAN WYCK
9 Poetry and Anti-Nuclearism: Τεχνη and the “Fundamental Project” 214
JIM KRAUS
Afterword | Fears and the (Nuclear) Apocalypse: Who Is Afraid of What? 231
KARENA KALMBACH
THREE: Archaeologies and Heritages
10 Emergency/Salvage Archaeology: Excavating Media and Uranium in the Glen Canyon 237
THOMAS PATRICK PRINGLE
11 Nuclear Waste as Critical Heritage 262
CORNELIUS HOLTORF AND ANDERS HÖGBERG
Afterword | Lingering Radiation: On Violent Pasts and Open-Ended Futures 282
RUBY DE VOS
FOUR: Nuclear Aesthetics: Contemporary Art, Nuclear Colonialism, and the Transformation of Life and the Environment
12 Atomic Aborigines: Appropriation and Colonization of Indigenous Australia during British Nuclear Testing 291
MICK BRODERICK
13 The Antipodean Stance of Pam Debenham’s 1980s Screenprints 309
N.A.J. TAYLOR
14 The Immanation-Image: Immanent Experience and Kazakhstan’s Socialist and Postsocialist Modernity in Almagul Menlibayeva’s Video Installation Transformation (2016) 332
LIVIA MONNET
Afterword | The Possibility of a Situated Nuclear Knowledge: Art in Contaminated Sites 373
KYVELI MAVROKORDOPOULOU
FIVE: Artists’ Contributions
15 Inheritance: Radiant Reflections from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima: 20 Poems by Bo Jacobs for 20 Photographs by elin O’Hara slavick 383
ROBERT (BO) JACOBS AND ELIN O’HARA SLAVICK
16 Nuclear Family: A Poem 424
CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ
Postface | Unmaking the Nuclear Future 429
JESSICA HURLEY
Contributors 433
Index 443
Foreword | The Atomic Now xv
MAGDALENA E. STAWKOWSKI
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction | Toxic Immanence: Toward Decolonizing Pedagogies of the Nuclear 3
LIVIA MONNET
ONE: Aftereffects of Chernobyl and Fukushima
1 “The Future Is Behind Them!”: Post-Apocalypse and the Enduring Nuclear in Post-Soviet Russian Fiction 39
SHARAE DECKARD
2 From Toxic Lands to Toxic Rumours: Nuclear Accidents, Contaminated Territories, and the Production of (Radio)active Ignorance 59
SEZIN TOPÇU
3 The Fukushima Process 78
SABU KOHSO
4 Fukushima and the Rebuild of Godzilla: Multiplying Media in an Era of Multiplying Disaster 94
THOMAS LAMARRE
Afterword | Repeating, Multiplying: The Ongoing Now of Nuclear Aftereffects 127
DANIEL C. O’NEILL
TWO: The Cold War and Post-Cold War Nuclear State and Its Geopolitics: Imaginaries and Contestations
5 Shaking, Trembling, Rattling, Shouting: Seismic Politics in the Nuclear Age 139
JOSEPH MASCO
6 What Is the Matter with Nuclear Weapons Communication? 151
BRYAN C. TAYLOR
7 The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service: 10-Year Final Report on Public Agency Organizing and Operational Responses to Cold War Legacies and the Nuclear Stockpile 174
SARAH KANOUSE AND SHILOH KRUPAR
8 Sounding Out the Nuclear: An Atomic Opera 197
JULIET PALMER, JULIE SALVERSON, AND PETER C. VAN WYCK
9 Poetry and Anti-Nuclearism: Τεχνη and the “Fundamental Project” 214
JIM KRAUS
Afterword | Fears and the (Nuclear) Apocalypse: Who Is Afraid of What? 231
KARENA KALMBACH
THREE: Archaeologies and Heritages
10 Emergency/Salvage Archaeology: Excavating Media and Uranium in the Glen Canyon 237
THOMAS PATRICK PRINGLE
11 Nuclear Waste as Critical Heritage 262
CORNELIUS HOLTORF AND ANDERS HÖGBERG
Afterword | Lingering Radiation: On Violent Pasts and Open-Ended Futures 282
RUBY DE VOS
FOUR: Nuclear Aesthetics: Contemporary Art, Nuclear Colonialism, and the Transformation of Life and the Environment
12 Atomic Aborigines: Appropriation and Colonization of Indigenous Australia during British Nuclear Testing 291
MICK BRODERICK
13 The Antipodean Stance of Pam Debenham’s 1980s Screenprints 309
N.A.J. TAYLOR
14 The Immanation-Image: Immanent Experience and Kazakhstan’s Socialist and Postsocialist Modernity in Almagul Menlibayeva’s Video Installation Transformation (2016) 332
LIVIA MONNET
Afterword | The Possibility of a Situated Nuclear Knowledge: Art in Contaminated Sites 373
KYVELI MAVROKORDOPOULOU
FIVE: Artists’ Contributions
15 Inheritance: Radiant Reflections from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima: 20 Poems by Bo Jacobs for 20 Photographs by elin O’Hara slavick 383
ROBERT (BO) JACOBS AND ELIN O’HARA SLAVICK
16 Nuclear Family: A Poem 424
CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ
Postface | Unmaking the Nuclear Future 429
JESSICA HURLEY
Contributors 433
Index 443
