Nuclear Archipelagos

This book length study of Indigenous multimedia on nuclearization in the Pacific, Nuclear Archipelagos: Radiation Empires and Indigenous Creative Arts in the Pacific, brings a new archive to the conversation on nuclear histories and peace activisms. Between 1946-1996, the U.S., U.K., and France detonated over three hundred nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Since those detonations began, Indigenous Pacific women have organized in protest of the irradiation of their land, sea, air, and bodies. While recent studies of nuclearization have focused on narratives of apocalypse, Nuclear Archipelagos illuminates how Indigenous activists’ stories of creation, rooted in ecological genealogies, recast the Pacific as a place of ongoing environmental kinship across space and time. Since both radiation and oceans recognize no borders, the scope of this project is transnational, multi-genre, and multi-lingual. It highlights Indigenous women’s solidarities across and among the Pacific, including artists and activists from the Marshall Islands, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa / New Zealand, Australia, Maʻohi Nui / French Occupied Polynesia, Samoa, Saipan, Guahan / Guam, and Belau. With attention to narratives of birth, reproductive health, bodily sovereignty, and maternity, I read literary and visual texts against government archives to argue that these writers and activists’s aesthetic choices challenge rhetorics of the Pacific as a feminized, militarized space and transform it into a place of trans-Indigenous women’s empowerment, care work, and healing.

Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms

This Special Forum in the Journal of Transnational American Studies (2020), co-edited by Anais Maurer (Rutgers University) and myself, advocates for transnational dialogue in nuclear studies that incorporates Indigenous resistance to nuclear imperialisms.