Experts Reflect on Pacific Narratives at Book Launch Exploring Nuclear Legacies
by Aanchal Saraf
On June 24th, 2024, the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies hosted an event celebrating the recent publication of a monograph by CAPAS-Fellow Dr. Anaïs Maurer, The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists. The event featured a film screening followed by panelists Dr. Jessica Hurley, Dr. Teresa Shewry, and Dr. Rebecca H. Hogue responding to Maurer’s book, with Dr. Aanchal Saraf moderating the proceedings.
Attendees met at the Karlstorkino to view the film On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World), a virtual reality documentary that recreates the experiences of people in Hawai‘i in 2018 following the issue of a false alert indicating that a ballistic missile was inbound. The film is 38 minutes long, the same amount of time that Hawai‘i residents were suspended in a state of uncertainty before the alert was confirmed to be erroneous.
The film nodded to some of the topics of Maurer’s book, but as the panelists later discussed, tended towards reproducing the problems contained in many apocalypse stories. It was speculative, mobilizing past histories of nuclear weapons testing towards a fear of what might happen, a “looming threat.” But as Maurer’s book poignantly argues, there are entire communities in the Pacific who have experienced the nuclear apocalypse, and their stories are anything but speculative.
The panel began with remarks from Hurley and Shewry, who were joining over Zoom. Hurley described Maurer’s monograph as demonstrating the ways Pacific peoples are “apocalypse experts, both practically and aesthetically.” She praised the wide-reaching value of Maurer’s theoretical contributions, which introduced new genres for understanding the end(s) of the world(s). Shewry reflected on the importance of discussing nuclear and climate issues together, as well as the rich archive Maurer constructed through both translation and curation. Hogue echoed a shared gratitude for the impressive contributions Maurer’s scholarship has made to the study of contemporary Pacific literatures and noted the important shift in our assumptions surrounding the origins of anti-nuclear organizing in the Pacific. Maurer begins her book not with the 1960s in Fiji or the 1970s rise of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement, but with an anti-nuclear song from Uvea written directly after World War II. The room was full of curiosity and questions, many asking Maurer to speak more to the work of translation or to enumerate the genres of apocalypse that Pacific Islanders have lived (and died) through.
The event in whole was the celebration of a great accomplishment, and the praise Maurer received was well deserved. Maurer’s collection of (post)apocalyptic stories genuinely transforms us, and it prepares us for the multiple apocalypses that humanity has endured and will endure still. Her translations and close readings honor the deep epistemological work present in Pacific storytelling, and they refuse a speculative approach to apocalypse. Instead, having read The Ocean on Fire, we can approach the end of the world with renewed clarity, guided by those whose worlds have ended many times over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aanchal Saraf is an Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College and Conservatory. She researches and teaches about entangled geographies and cultures of war, empire, and knowledge. Her current project Atomic Afterlives, Pacific Archives theorizes the ‘colonial fallout’ of U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands as an ongoing logic that shapes dominant spatiotemporal, geopolitical, and disciplinary imaginaries of the Pacific. Her project engages official archives, Asian American and Pacific Islander cultural production and performance, and ethnography with nuclear-displaced ri-Ṃajeļ on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Aanchal’s creative and scholarly works have appeared in Literary Hub, Fruit Magazine, The Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Women & Performance, among other publications.
