Nuclear Ghosts
A very Special Issue of Apocalyptica
By Michael Dunn
Nuclear threats are a topic of extenuating anxiety that have come and gone repeatedly and yet, like the radioactive materials found under a crypt on the island of Runit of Jessica Hurley’s article The Pikinni Ghost: Nuclear Hauntings and Spectral Decolonizations in the Pacific – which she suggests, are “uncannily animate” (2023, 86) – radioactivity never really goes away. And while Russia’s war on Ukraine, has again, editor Jenny Stümer suggests, aptly drawn attention to nuclear apocalypse in the broad cultural imaginary it bears reminding ourselves that the ghosts “begin by coming back” (Stümer 2023, 9). The nuclear post-apocalypse, suggests Stümer, “must be grasped as a form of accumulative, slow violence and enduring coloniality that divides, occupies, and ultimately structures entire worlds, specific communities, and ordinary subjectivities” (2023, 11). From Australian nuclear settler colonialism, autobiographical ghosts, and nuclear temporalities to the everyday haunting of ordinary aestheticization of disaster itself, the destabilizing yet destructive power of anthropogenic radioisotopes, and the return of the French imperial repressed, the issue covers a heady, hefty, and anything but homogenous number of aspects that reflect the extensity of nuclear entanglements.
First off, it falls to Karan Barad the truly transdisciplinary scholar of both feminist theory and physics to appropriately complicate the often sublime over simplification of nuclearity. They trace haunting as a deconstructive force, “not a destructive force that blows itself apart” (2023, 37) that, as such, troubles time and reads time-beings as a “dynamism of differentiating entangling” (2023, 28). Haunting, in Barad’s work, is hence an activity of the world, a form of ongoing worlding, or “spacetimemattering,” with vast consequences for our perception, memory, nuclearity, the “violence of calculations of lives that matter” (27), and, perhaps, most importantly, the “material force of justice, and the possibilities for living and dying otherwise” (2023, 38). Following on from Barad’s bold yet refreshing reworking of materiality, Gabriele Schwab’s continuing contribution to the posthumanities and her work on environment and radioactivity is equally explored in her article on Nuclear Temporalites. Tracing the entanglements of nuclear temporalities and nuclear subjectivities, Schwab argues that the knowledge of the all-encompassing destructive power of nuclear weapons induced a fundamental fracture in the varied senses of temporality: a haunting that comes at ‘us’ from the past and extends into the future. Not only is the “irresolvable problem of toxic waste” an issue of hauntology but, argues Schwab, so is the “temporal scale itself” that haunts various media artifacts that deal with said planetary and scalar toxicity (Schwab, 2023, 51).
Similarly, yet entirely distinctly, to Schwab – and following a method of multiplicity that interrogates the operative basis and function of dualist and monist conceptions of nuclear violence – Lisa Yoneyama establishes the intricate entanglements of seemingly distinct nuclear catastrophes. As such, Yoneyama paints a picture for the possibility of polyvalent, multi-varied, and intersectional practice of relational justice across time and spaces. While also looking at various culture productions such as films, plays, and stories etc. Co-Conjuration: Practicing Decolonial Nuclear Criticisms offers the readers an enlightening sense of “connectivity among different times and spaces,” (Yoneyama 2023, 69) and not merely thinking of catastrophe as out or over ‘there’ with a perceived and predestined threat to ‘here’ and ‘now’ whatever those things might actually means. Despite this, Yoneyama strictly states that, “[a]ppreciating relational connectivity, however, cannot be confused with building another version of humanistic, universal knowledge based on putative sameness and surface commonality at the expense of the geohistorical specificities of radiontology” (2023, 81).
From the transpacific to the pacific islands, Jessica Hurley, whose previous work on (2020) is a fundamental exploration of how apocalypse can work as overarching and all evasive (and even invasive) genre; reading nuclear waste as a colonial weapon, sets out to ‘unexorcise’ the return of the nuclear past in her article The Pikinni Ghost: Nuclear Hauntings and Spectral Decolonizations in the Pacific. By insisting that readers look long beyond the Western models of haunting, Hurley offers up instances of ‘living with ghosts;’ that is, “cultural practice that has become inhabited by the nuclear ghost” (2023, 94). And while Hurley asserts an intrinsically distinctive ontology of care, she still suggests that the Marshallese “are forced to live in highly radiotoxic environments in order to sustain the denial and splitting of those who irradiated them” (2023, 95).
While both U. S. bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remain painfully, violently vivid in various aspects of Japanese cultural memory, the British nuclear testing in South Australia in the 1950s and 60s, offer an often overlooked but incredibly important aspect of the crass logic of settler colonialism. “[T]he existential anxieties of the nuclear age meet the unconfronted violence and dispossession of colonialism,” and, as such, suggests Annelise Roberts in her Article Atomic Totem, that “confused and uncanny visions arise” (2023, 107) of morbid reconciliation.
Staying with the Trouble (2016) as Donna Haraway has put it, Roxanne Panchasi takes up the eerie phenomenon of what is referred to as ‘lightly radioactive’ Saharan sand appearing in France in 2021 and 2022 and the news articles and outlets that covered said phenomena that turned the French landscape, briefly, into a post-apocalyptic setting. Panchasi, by looking at the Return of the French Imperial Repressed in her article suggests that this is anything but new but, rather, that, “a vocabulary of toxicity has played an important role in discussions of the political legacies of empire in both France and Algeria, performing a double duty when it comes to the issue of France’s nuclear imperialism in the Sahara” (2023, 144).
Marisa Karyl Franz offers a perhaps alternative perspective on nuclearity in Ordinary Hauntings in Irradiated Land and, specifically, how everyday things, objects and ontologies become “saturated with the everyday lives of those who lived with them” (2023, 156). Franz’s work in Museum Studies is here of particular importance as many of the exclusion sites and zones examined, and the artworks that take place within said spaces, “mourn the loss of a familiar and everyday,” that is a, Heimlich, “place of home” (2023, 156). In this instance, ghosts aren’t spectral forces of an unknown, untouchable, and unobtainable presence but rather saturate the land upon which they once lived, ingrained in the objects that were once in their possession.
Contributing to the obviously important aspects of nuclear violence that have been re-narrativized in recent years, K. M. Ferebee explores the Narratives of Nuclear Contamination in Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. Approaching the issue from both a nuclear humanities and human geography perspective, Ferebee asks “what affordances emerge from a view of radiation as other than contaminating and what dangers might be present in the same claim” (2023, 181). By looking at the unique role of Chornobyl as a site that cements a “significant role in the national imaginary” (2023, 184). Ultimately, Ferebee suggests that the narratives of a “second Chornobyl “diverts attention from the ways in which the transnational and highly complex nature of global capitalism leaves corporations and governments enmeshed in financial support for Russia” (2023, 200).
In the summer of 2022 New York City Emergency Management released a particularly odd in relation to nuclear fallout (among other apocalyptic scenarios). In Katherine Guinness’s article Mediation and Autobiographical Ghosts, Guinness galvanizes upon this odd video’s release at a time of geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and Russia when we “live in a moment where immortality and human perfection are promised through technology” (2023, 217), many worry about the ethical implications of having children, and longtermism gains worrying popularity as a philosophy of supposed ‘philanthropy’ as opposed to inaction. All these aspects of our odd contemporary time, lead, suggests Guinness, to consistently instilling ourselves with a sense of autobiographical narrativity as extended ghosts.
While Apocalyptica thrives to publish predominately peer reviewed articles of pertinent, unique, and academic research. The journal also regularly publishes experimental pieces such as Lena Schmidt’s in volume 1 issue 2. For Nuclear Ghosts, CAPAS’ own Melanie Le Touze’s and photographer Zackie Schneyder’s The Brennilis Plant, A Nuclear Ghost at the Gates of Hell aims to highlight the impact of nuclear technology by juxtaposing documentation in the form of photography with sociological, philosophical, and literary reflections and implications in an extensive and ongoing art project (2023, 231). Following on from the minimal departure from overtly academic peer reviewed research, Elva Österreich’s Experiencing the Trinity Test in New Mexico is a journalist project that presents first hand eyewitness accounts of the initiation of the first blast through the eyes of those closest by. The piece presents excerpts and interviews from her 2020 book: . Last but not least, research associate at CAPAS reviews Gabriele Schwab’s 2020 book the implications of which informed, whether consciously or not, the underpinnings of this very special issue of Apocalyptica. Meerwarth thinks through Schwab’s book via a plurality of aspects including temporality, psychology, politics, and apocalypse.
In a first, Nuclear Ghosts gathers the best minds on issues of nuclear structures, sovereignties, and spatialities, and interrogates the intricate anchors of colonialism, capitalism, classism, sexism, racism, and ablism. With an entirely and uniquely female and non-binary authorship, Nuclear Ghosts answers the extreme violence of male mismanagement and the phallic phenomenology induced by nuclear bombs (both those dropped and those tested which will never cease to cause violence) by “attending to ghosts in order to sit with them, to live with them, to learn with them, and in some sense to unend them” (Stümer, 2023, 21).