Atomic Afterlives, Pacific Archives: Unsettling the Geographies and Science of Nuclear Colonialism in the Marshall Islands and Hawaiʻi
Date of Award
Fall 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
American Studies
First Advisor
Lowe, Lisa
Abstract
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear weapons within the Marshall Islands and relocated only four of the many Marshallese atoll communities exposed to detonations or fallout. These communities were exiled across the Pacific and continental United States, though some eventually repatriated despite lingering radiation, unexploded ordnances, and other remnants of U.S. military warfare on their home atolls. Many nuclear diasporic Marshallese migrated to Hawai‘i, specifically the Big Island. The long durée fallout of this atomic history followed these communities, which face the continued medical consequences of radiation exposure, racial discrimination, and economic instability. At the center of my project is the history and present of what I term “nuclear colonialism,” the logic through which empires deem certain geographies justifiably collateral to the project of nuclear experimentation. Nuclear colonialism specifies not just the United States as a colonial power, but also the role of nuclear science and nuclear bombs in enshrining U.S. colonial authority. I underscore the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific—of which the Marshall Islands was a part¬—as a post-World War II colonization of the Pacific Islands and I argue that the development of nuclear science and its attendant technologies, the slow violence of radiation exposure and bioaccumulation, and the accretive forms of displacement and dispossession that nuclear detonations catalyzed are all iterations of a specifically nuclear colonialism. In order to sufficiently map the various contours of nuclear colonialism, this project draws on three distinct kinds of sources: official government archives, ethnographic interviews, and cultural production. Chapter one tracks a series of research trips that administrative anthropologists, military strategists, and nuclear physicists made to the Marshall Islands prior to the first detonation in 1946. I examine their use of ethnographic photos, scale models, and workplace photography, respectively, to produce colonial knowledge about the Marshall Islands that justified further colonization and militarization. I contrast these colonial tropes with the knowledge created by the play “Last Virgin in Paradise” by Vilsoni Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa, and the photography series “The Physicists Have Known Sin” by Jane Chang Mi, both of which offer countervisuals of the Pacific that emphasize relation, smaller scales, and are grounded in place and time—in sharp contrast to imperial visual technologies. My second chapter is a meditation on the historical record itself, asking how war, nuclear detonations, and environmental disaster events have shaped the paper and non-paper archives of the Trust Territory Period. The chapter jumps between the 1970s, when Marshallese from Enewetak were fighting for repatriation, and the present, in which the Enewetak nuclear diaspora in Hawai‘i longs for return. It examines the papers of Jack Tobin¬—an anthropologist and colonial administrator for the U.S. Trust Territory—and images and documents from the Trust Territory archives alongside other sites of history: radiation bioaccumulating in the giant clam, nuclear waste dumped in the Marianas Trench and at Runit Dome, nuclear remembrance events by the Enewetak diaspora on the Big Island, and finally, an artists’ installation by Joy Enomoto and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner which draws parallels between contemporary militarisms and the histories of nuclear detonations and nuclear waste dumping in the Pacific. The third chapter is situated in the present, comprised primarily of ethnographic interviews I conducted with Marshallese who were subject to nuclear radiation exposure and forced displacement to the Big Island of Hawaiʻi because of U.S. nuclear detonation programs. This chapter argues the centrality of the Big Island as a nuclear colonial geography as well as highlights the contemporary racism and precarity these diasporic communities face. I also consider how fallout has atomized through the life courses of my interlocutors, rather than just accumulating at either end of their lives as reproductive injustice or bodily collapse. My last chapter examines how Marshallese women were differentially racialized and gendered because of nuclear fallout, looking at the links between the mid-century mass production of synthetic fashions, reproductive justice work in response to the racialized medicine practiced by U.S. colonial administrators in the Trust Territory, and the aesthetic and political import forwarded by three forms of cultural production: the political ephemera produced for the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific conferences, the video poetry of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, and the weaving done by a Big Island-based Marshallese women’s group known as Wodde Jippel. This chapter links unlikely geographies and examines the co-constitution of race and gender in both the imperial core and its colonies, specifically in the shadow of the bomb.
Recommended Citation
Saraf, Aanchal, "Atomic Afterlives, Pacific Archives: Unsettling the Geographies and Science of Nuclear Colonialism in the Marshall Islands and Hawaiʻi" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1199.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1199
