“This Poison Broke the World”: Remapping Nuclear Colonialism in the Cold War Pacific by Aanchal Saraf
2023 Global Asian Studies and Racialized Bodies Cluster Lecture Series
February 15, 2023
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM CST
Location
Room 1050, 10th Floor, University Hall
Address
601 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607
Zoom (pick Feb 15)
https://uic.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZModeCopjwjG9CfsOLdFoS591Fj-ayHPLQq
Cost
Free to the Public
Calendar
Download iCal File
During the Cold War, the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, producing a range of consequences that included displacement and radiation sickness. This talk considers these detonations as part of a larger paradigm of nuclear colonialism, and examines nuclear colonialism not at the scale of the bomb but at its most intimate scale: the body, wearables, and embodied practice, including touch and taste. Against such devastating afterlives, this talk turns to the work of Marshallese weavers and performance poets as feminist critiques of the differential violences engendered by nuclear colonialism, which in themselves create the conditions of possibility for collective memory, mourning, and survival.
Invited Speaker: Aanchal Saraf is a PhD candidate in Yale University’s American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies departments. Her dissertation, titled Atomic Afterlives, Pacific Archives: Unsettling the Geographies and Science of Nuclear Colonialism in the Marshall Islands and Hawaiʻi, demonstrates how US Cold War nuclear colonialism continues to shape our cartographic and archival imaginaries of the Pacific, as well as structures academic knowledge production. Her interdisciplinary project engages official archives, Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural production and performance, and ethnography. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Her creative and scholarly works have appeared in Literary Hub, Fruit Magazine, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Women & Performance, among other publications.
THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT. You can attend:
- online (make sure to pick the February 15 session in the Zoom dropdown) OR
- in-person at 1050 University Hall.
A reception will follow the in-person event. Light refreshments will be served.
Download flyer here.
Date posted
Jan 30, 2023
Date updated
Feb 6, 2023