Description | A Transpacific Undercommons: Feminist, Decolonial Materialisms and Atomic Afterlives
While much scholarship on the rise of the nuclear age has focused on the concomitant rise of insecurities about body and environment under the duress of wartime, this talk crafts a different but intertwined history, showing how the transformation of the Pacific Ocean into a nuclear testing ground was parlayed into governmental projects for the remaking of life itself through the rubrics of securitization and financialization. Through critical readings of official state records and atomic research bulletins, this project traces the narrative strands of “ecosystems,” “regeneration,” and “strategic trust” from 1945 on, to show a structural connection between genocide and ecocide, all in the name of progress and development. To theorize a transpacific undercommons, the talk ultimately inquires after alternative formulations of interspecies connection that emerge from feminist, decolonial thought and queer-of-color critique. |
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