Ranging across fiction and poetry, critical theory and film, comics and speeches, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War explores how writers, thinkers, and filmmakers have tackled the question: Are nuclear weapons white? Paul Williams addresses myriad representations of nuclear weapons: the Manhattan Project, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear tests across the globe, and the anxiety surrounding the superpowers' devastating arsenals. Ultimately, Williams concludes that many texts act as a reminder that the power enjoyed by the white Western world imperils the whole planet.
Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades.
A pioneering examination of nuclear trauma, the continuing and new nuclear peril, and the subjectivities they generate Amid resurgent calls for widespread nuclear energy and “limited nuclear war,” the populations that must live with the consequences of these decisions are increasingly insecure. The nuclear peril combined with the looming threat of climate change means that we are seeing the formation of a new kind of subjectivity: humans who are in a position of perpetual ontological insecurity. In Radioactive Ghosts, Gabriele Schwab articulates a vision of these “nuclear subjectivities” that we all live with. Focusing on the legacies of the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, and nuclear energy politics, Radioactive Ghosts takes us on a tour of the little-seen sides of our nuclear world. Examining devastating uranium mining on Native lands, nuclear sacrifice zones, the catastrophic accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the formation of a new transspecies ethics, Schwab shows how individuals threatened with extinction are creating new adaptations, defenses, and communal spaces. Ranging from personal accounts of experiences with radiation to in-depth readings of literature, film, art, and scholarly works, Schwab gives us a complex, idiosyncratic, and personal analysis of one of the most overlooked issues of our time.
After the first use of nuclear weapons in 1945, Albert Einstein warned that 'we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe'. Today we are no longer drifting but racing toward catastrophe at breakneck speed. This book analyses recent events that have brought about a dangerous Third Nuclear Age. From the collapse of arms control treaties and the development of hypersonic missiles, to the pop culture that shapes how we think about nuclear weapons, via how nuclear weapons intersect with the global threats posed by pandemics, populism, climate change, corruption, militarism, and racism, this book explores the nuclear zeitgeist of today. It presents the case for critical nuclear studies, and provides an important intervention into debates about nuclear weapons and international security. Today, the planet stands on the brink of catastrophe. This book tells you why, and what we can do about it.
A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.
How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.
Drawing focus on a crucial period of contemporary British history, this book explores Cold War anxieties over Imperial decline and British identity through analysis of space in popular twentieth-century spy fiction, enabling the cultural impact of decolonisation to be read in a new and revealing light. Visiting the literary representation of space, identity, and power in the work of Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, it is an excellent resource for any scholars with an interest in spy fiction, British fiction, and popular literature.
The Cyborg Caribbean examines a wide range of twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction texts, arguing that authors from Pedro Cabiya, Alexandra Pagan-Velez, and Vagabond Beaumont to Yasmin Silvia Portales, Erick Mota, and Yoss, Haris Durrani, and Rita Indiana Hernandez, among others, negotiate rhetorical legacies of historical techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. The authors span the Hispanic Caribbean and their respective diasporas, reflecting how science fiction as a genre has the ability to manipulate political borders. As both a literary and historical study, the book traces four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy, nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed understandings of corporality and humanity in the Caribbean. By recognizing the ways that increased technology may amplify the marginalization of bodies based on race, gender, sexuality, and other factors, the science fiction texts studied in this book challenge oppressive narratives that link technological and sociopolitical progress. .
Offers a fascinating window into how the fraught politics of apology in the East Asian region have been figured in anglophone literary fiction. The Pacific War, 1941-1945, was fought across the world’s largest ocean and left a lasting imprint on anglophone literary history. However, studies of that imprint or of individual authors have focused on American literature without drawing connections to parallel traditions elsewhere. Beyond Hostile Islands contributes to ongoing efforts by Australasian scholars to place their national cultures in conversation with those of the United States, particularly regarding studies of the ideologies that legitimize warfare. Consecutively, the book examines five of the most significant historical and thematic areas associated with the war: island combat, economic competition, internment, imprisonment, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout, the central issue pivots around the question of how or whether at all New Zealand fiction writing differs from that of the United States. Can a sense of islandness, the ‘tyranny of distance,’ Māori cultural heritage, or the political legacies of the nuclear-free movement provide grounds for distinctive authorial insights? As an opening gambit, Beyond Hostile Islands puts forward the term ‘ideological coproduction’ to describe how a territorially and demographically more minor national culture may accede to the essentials of a given ideology while differing in aspects that reflect historical and provincial dimensions that are important to it. Appropriately, the literary texts under examination are set in various locales, including Japan, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Mexico, Ontario, and the Marshall Islands. The book concludes in a deliberately open-ended pose, with the full expectation that literary writing on the Pacific War will grow in range and richness, aided by the growth of Pacific Studies as a research area.
