Apocalyptica

Nuclear Hauntings & Memory Fields, For the Time-Being(s)

Karen Barad — 2024-01-22

Introduction: Nuclear Ghosts, A Special Issue

Jenny Stümer — 2024-01-22

Nuclear Temporalities

Gabriele Schwab — 2024-01-22

The invention and unleashing of the first atomic weapons generated a historical rupture in the order of things that irrevocably changed the ways in which humans inhabit the world and experience time. The haunting knowledge of the power of nuclear weapons to potentially annihilate planetary life leaves a profound mark on human temporality and psychic life and creates transgenerational nuclear trauma. One of its effects is a subliminal, if not unconscious haunting from the future that overshadows human temporalities. Apart from this haunting from the future, nuclear temporalities also extend to sites of slow or structural nuclear violence. In my contribution, I will trace the entanglement between nuclear temporalities and nuclear subjectivities, including reflection on scale, deep time, nuclear half-life, temporal necropolitics, and psychic toxicity.

Co-Conjuring: Practicing Decolonial Nuclear Criticism

Lisa Yoneyama — 2024-01-22

The article explores decolonial nuclear criticisms in transpacific contexts. It focuses on different cultural productions—film, play, ethnography, historical narrative, and literary criticism—to consider what I call cultural practices of co-conjuration. Co-conjuring practices in some of the texts I explore alert us to the entangled relations between apparently distinct nuclear catastrophes—for example, among radiogenic harm suffered by Indigenous communities, the wartime use of atom bombs, and the meltdown of nuclear reactors. By calling forth ghosts, memories, affects, and a sense of justice associated with nuclear-specific loss and pain in the longue durée of colonialism, militarized empires, extractive settler capitalism, and environmental crises, co-conjuring has the potential to produce relational sensibilities that can move us beyond the colonial partitioning of nuclear knowledge. The paper furthermore considers what must be wagered when we attempt to produce relational knowledge by connecting incommensurable histories and experiences across disparate times and spaces.

The Pikinni Ghost: Nuclear Hauntings and Spectral Decolonization in the Pacific

Jessica Hurley — 2024-01-22

In his 1962 account of US nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands Neil O. Hines described irradiation as a practice of haunting, figuring radiation as “the faint footprints of the Bikini ghost” (72). This essay takes up the different conceptions of the ‘Bikini ghost’ constructed by the US nuclear complex and by Indigenous ri-M̧ajeļ to theorize nuclear decolonization in the Pacific as a mode of living with ghosts. The first part of the essay analyzes the 1957 return of the surviving members of the Ron̄ļap community to Ron̄ļap. In this repatriation the US was uncharacteristically concerned that the Native population would return to their ancestral lifeways; I read this concern as an attempt to exorcize the ‘ghost’ of radiation culturally in ways that could not be achieved physically, keeping alive the idea that radiation was non-apocalyptic at a key moment in Cold War nuclear debates. The second part of the essay analyzes Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s 2018 video poem Anointed as a decolonial approach to nuclear ghosts. Built around the image of the cracking Runit Dome, Anointed stages the return of the nuclear past: the nuclear materials that are literally seeping into the present through the cracks in the containment dome, and the histories of mundanely apocalyptic colonial violence that these materials both figure and perpetuate. While Western models of (nuclear) haunting insist that the ghost must be exorcized or contained, however, Jetñil-Kijiner reclaims the haunted oceanscape as a site of relation within Marshallese epistemologies to produce a resurgent decolonial reality that includes nuclear ghosts in its practices of care.

Atomic Totem: Australian Settler Nuclearism, the Disavowal of Aboriginality and Morbid Reconciliation

Annelise Roberts — 2024-01-22

Although the actual welfare of nearby Aṉangu populations was so clearly disregarded throughout the period of British nuclear testing in South Australia in the 1950s and 60s, curiously, the aesthetics of the nuclear testing project itself were awash with Aboriginal-derived symbolism, imagery, and language. From the names of testing sites and operations, to the declaration by a member of the surveying crew to the media that a mushroom cloud was “a perfect portrait of a myall blackfeller written with atomic dust,” the nuclear testing was repeatedly associated with Aboriginality. This was not a practice unique to Australia; as Jessica Hurley notes, other nuclear-armed nations shared this “compulsion to name nuclear laboratories and technologies after [Indigenous] nations, practices and spaces” (2018, 97). In this essay, I draw on a range of textual sources—a memoir by government surveyor and raconteur Len Beadell, as well as less traditionally ‘literary’ texts (such as place-naming practices)—to examine the ways in which this appropriative act points to a complex process of disavowal that takes place in the settler imaginary. Focusing on the mid-century Australian context, I find that where the existential anxieties of the nuclear age meet the unconfronted violence and dispossession of colonialism, confused and uncanny visions arise; partial acknowledgements of the primacy of First Nations’ claims to country arise in the moment at which all the possibilities of nuclearism—megadeath, the new atomic potential for massive violence and destruction—are also present. In this field, a strange and morbid vision of settler/Indigenous reconciliation emerges from the settler cultural imaginary.

’You don’t screw with the Sahara’: Radioactive Dust and the Return of the French Imperial Repressed

Roxanne Panchasi — 2024-01-22

In 2021 and 2022, traces of the series of nuclear bombs France detonated in Algeria during the 1960s seemed to ‘come home’ in the form of tons of ‘lightly radioactive’ Saharan sand that filled the atmosphere above and rained down onto surfaces throughout France. Multiple commentators characterized this ‘African dust’ as a postcolonial ‘boomerang,’ the return of a repressed past, a haunting, and a kind of revenge. This article considers closely the range of representations of this Saharan sand in France as material and metaphoric deposits on the contemporary landscape. Pursuing the coincidence of these recent episodes of a recurrent phenomenon with the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and a particular moment of reckoning in the history and legacies of French nuclear imperialism in North Africa and the Pacific, the article examines radioactive dust as memorial evidence, toxic residue, and imperial remains.

Ordinary Hauntings in Irradiated Land

Marisa Karyl Franz — 2024-01-22

Examining three art projects that rely upon the materiality of nuclear exclusion zones in Chornobyl and Fukushima, I propose a framework of haunting to understand how everyday things become saturated with the everyday lives of those who lived with them. These art pieces (Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s Chernobyl Herbarium, Eva and Franco Mattes’s Fukushima Texture Pack, and Ai Weiwei’s А Ray of Hope) do not represent or document the disaster as momentary or as spectacular, but as a slow durational violence that is experienced in the daily lives of people, the land, and the material things left behind after evacuation. Rather than an aestheticisation of disaster itself or of the Zones as post-apocalyptic pastoral, these works haunt us with the ordinary affect of human habitation in what are now exclusion zones and mourn the loss of a familiar and everyday place of home.

’A New Chernobyl’: Narratives of Nuclear Contamination in Russia’s 2022-3 Ukraine War

K. M. Ferebee — 2024-01-22

In January 2020, I visited the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone as part of research into contemporary narratives that characterized the Zone as a post-human area of timeless and infinitely abundant nature. By the time the resulting paper appeared, however, war had altered the stories being told about the Zone. As I wrote in an afterword, media narratives of the Russian invasion of Chornobyl transformed radioactivity itself into a natural and national part of the Ukrainian landscape, one that was by turns vulnerable (in need of defense and protection) and vengeful (punishing Russian intruders). But what does it mean for anthropogenic radioisotopes to be either ‘natural’ or ‘national’? How might such narratives destabilize readings of the nuclear as inherently disruptive and alien? And does this destabilization make possible new understandings of the Anthropocene as an era defined by the dispersal of anthropogenic radioisotopes? In this paper, I engage in close analysis of media narratives surrounding the Russian invasion of Chornobyl, drawing on both the nuclear humanities (particularly Joseph Masco's work on the "nuclear uncanny" and Kate Brown's history of Chornobyl) and human geography perspectives on the constitution of place. I ask what affordances emerge from a view of radiation as other than contaminating and what dangers might be present in the same claim.

Mediation and Autobiographical Ghosts

Katherine Guinness — 2024-01-22

In the summer of 2022, New York City Emergency Management released a PSA advising New Yorkers how to prepare in the case of a nuclear attack. Though provoked by the war in Ukraine, the many bewildered and shocked responses to the PSA revealed that a ‘return’ to fears of nuclear war was unimaginable for most New Yorkers, not to say most Americans. At the same time, reporting on this PSA from countless news outlets contained a curious detail: journalists were identified not merely by reporting agency, but through short bios filled with personal details about hobbies, family, and pets, among other things. This paper begins with the contrast between ‘unimaginable’ nuclear disaster and the need to foreground personal details in otherwise impersonal discourse. This contradiction between the unimaginable and impersonal confronts a demand to make things ‘relatable’ and intimate. Drawing on my previous arguments about ‘negative hauntology,’ or a collapse of temporality that leads one to imagine that a future disaster has already happened, that one is always-already a victim of disaster, that one haunts one’s own present as a ghost, this paper frames how many relations today seem ghostly, a fact which emerges from the contradiction between the impersonal and personal. Drawing out how spectral apparitions have long been linked with the capacities and limitations of mediation, this paper argues that the specificity of ‘nuclear ghosts’ emerges at the intersection of mediating otherwise imperceptible, yet present dangers, and mediating perceptible, but distant others who are framed through banal, yet intimate traces.

The Brennillis Plant, A Nuclear Ghost at the Gates of Hell

Melanie Le Touze — 2024-01-22

The following is an excerpt from our ongoing project on the Brennilis plant in the Monts d’Arrée in Finistère, France, which has been a nuclear ghost since 1985. The project combines photography, interviews, and philosophical reflections. It aims to show how the myths and legends of Brittany (France) overlap with the lifeworlds of inhabitants around the Brennilis plant in an effort to highlight the impact nuclear technology has on its surrounding area. We juxtapose this documentation with sociological, philosophical, and literary reflections. In converging these elements the project combines each aspect to create something new altogether. Our approach is echoed by the use of Lomography, a photographic technique that admits flaws and blurs, heavy vignettes, unusual lightening, apparitions and tinctures, illuminating those haunting aspects and ghostly traces in lived environments less obvious to the unmediated eye. As typical with all ghostly matters, ours is a work still in progress.

Experiencing the Trinity Test in New Mexico

Elva Österreich — 2024-01-22

What is a ghost? Is it a continuing spirit through time that refuses to die? If so, that is what my book, The Manhattan Project Trinity Test: Witnessing the Bomb in New Mexico, is about—the legacy of the first atomic bomb, set off in the southern New Mexico desert, 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945. Known as the Trinity Test, this event, happening almost 80 years ago, has been called the dawn of the nuclear age.

For the 60th anniversary of that first atomic bomb in 2005, the newspaper I was working for, the Alamogordo Daily News, brought the staff together to dig out the stories our paper had printed regarding the event and to write new stories for a special edition. I put together a replica of the front page of that long-ago style of the paper, bringing all those elements together. It was that project which made me realize as the event falls back into history, those people who experienced it and were affected by it are rapidly disappearing. Thus, the idea for the book was born and I started talking with those who remember and who are still alive today as well as their children. I also worked to unearth the words and experiences of those no longer alive—the scientists and journalists, for example, who had left written accounts and other pieces to sort through.

Gabriele Schwab’s Radioactive Ghosts: A Review

Theresa Meerwarth — 2024-01-22