In this article, I ask how the British nuclear humanities, and in particular literary studies, might turn towards Indigenous Australian artistic, literary and critical work on nuclear legacies. Reading responses to the afterlives of British nuclear operations at Maralinga by the activist-poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) and the artist Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha / Nukunu), I consider how, for British scholars, interpreting Aboriginal nuclear texts asks particular questions of critical practice, drawing attention to empire’s intellectual, as well as social and chemical, residues. Such work invites a reflexive critical approach, attentive to what feminist and Indigenous scholars call ‘positionality’. In Britain, the places blasted and irradiated in the name of national defence have a vague, occluded presence in collective memory. This inhibited awareness of nuclear history, I suggest, has been shaped both by avoidant attitudes to empire, and also by strongly future-oriented nuclear imaginaries. By contrast, Harkin and Scarce draw attention to intimate, ongoing encounters with toxic legacies left by imperial and settler-colonial projects. As they celebrate the resilience of dispossessed, poisoned communities for whom nuclear apocalypse is an everyday reality, they emphasise interrelated forms of responsibility: to the past, to land, and to future generations. I discuss the important challenges that their art and activism present to mainstream nuclear cultures, and to the memory of empire in Britain.

This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb “tests” visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete “dome” built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and a-void-ance—an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality—an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence—is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void.

During his visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016, the first ever to be made by a sitting U.S. president, Barack Obama claimed that " the memory of the morning of August 6, 1945, must never fade. " 1 Not only did he seek to preserve the memory of the dropping of the first atomic bomb beyond the last voices of the hibakusha, he framed this call for preservation in moral terms: " The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. " If his explicit claim is that the role of science in human atrocity can be mitigated by a renewed moral framework, the implicit message is that the practice of commemoration provides a symbolic ground for this renewed morality. Accordingly, the president's discourse of moral revolution not only affirms the largely apolitical, ahistorical nature of global memory culture, which tends to translate historical forms of exploitation into universal narratives of suffering, but it also obscures the slow violence of nuclear energy regimes by reducing nuclearity to the moment of explosion. In seeking to preserve the memory of atrocity, the moral revolutionary, however unwittingly, preserves the colonial logic of nuclear energy regimes by transforming the material exploitations of energy production into the universal grammar of commemoration. Against the idealism of the moral revolutionary, I want to recuperate the material dimensions of cultural memory and suggest that it might serve a different purpose in the context of postcolonial capital: to elucidate the materiality of an energy unconscious embedded in memory media. 2 Postcolonial capitalism here signifies the ways in which immaterial forms of accumulation and material forms of labour intersect in the colonial landscapes of global memory culture. My utilization of the term is meant to reflect the complex ways in which enclosures of knowledge and labor reinforce one another while contributing to new forms of accumulation through the aestheticization of colonial capital's material remains. 3 In my elaboration of the atomic unconscious of postcolonial capital, I adapt Michael Niblett's question regarding the mapping of energy regimes in relation to cultural media. Suggesting that patterns

Nuclear colonialism is a system of domination through which governments and corporations disproportionately target and devastate indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process. Though nuclear colonialism is an historically and empirically verifiable phenomenon, previous studies do not attend to how nuclear colonialism is perpetuated through discourse. In this essay, I argue that nuclear colonialism is significantly a rhetorical phenomenon that builds upon the discourses of colonialism and nuclearism. Nuclear colonialism rhetorically excludes American Indians and their opposition to it through particular rhetorical strategies. I identify three interconnected strategies of rhetorical exclusion that uphold nuclear colonialism. This essay discusses nuclear colonialism and rhetorical exclusion through examination of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste siting process.

No new information in this paper, I just tried to give a perspective from a person of color on the topic of nuclear weapons and their mass destructive potential

This paper explores two places usually left off nuclear maps: Madagascar and Gabon, where the French mined and processed uranium ore, starting in the 1950s. It analyses how the 'rupture-talks' of nuclearity and decolonization became intertwined, first by examining the production of these rupture-talks by French expatriates, then by exploring how sociotechnical practices at each site both belied and performed claims to rupture for Malagasy and Gabonese mineworkers. Rupture-talk had material effects: it was inscribed in sociotechnical practice, it involved staking claims to power, and it created expectations among bothélites and non-´ elites. Sociotechnical practices 'conjugated' colonial power relations, creating real and imagined technological futures in which nuclearity and decolonization confronted and shaped one another. Drawing on the insights and methods of postcolonial studies, this paper argues that focusing on uranium mining in Africa reveals the power effects of creating and maintaining the ontological categories of the nuclear age.

Nuclear histories are global yet worryingly incomplete. Linking a plutonium refinery in Washington, a uranium mine in Saskatchewan, a tsunami at Fukushima, a nuclear bomb test site in Rajasthan, a reactor ‘accident’ at Chernobyl, a shipping accident in the English Channel, and a president-to-prime-minister confrontation over the US-Canada frontier, these quasi-autobiographical essays prove the importance of public archives, personal files with fragments, oral histories, and private recollections. This is the social history, business history, environmental history, labour history, scientific and technological history, and indigenous history of the twentieth century. Hiding in Plain Sight offers everyone an entry to the irregularities of our ‘disorderly nuclear world’, and offers other researchers crucial insights to what richness lies within.

New narratives of toxic contamination are expanding and challenging our ethnographic sensibilities. In confronting the contamination left behind from the Cold War period, a range of disciplinary approaches, methods, and writing styles is necessary. Ethnography plays a crucial role here, but it cannot fly solo in these sorts of projects. In this review essay, I compare three books from authors belonging to distinct scholarly traditions, each one dealing with complicated cases of radioactive contamination that began in the Cold War era and that demand rethinking in the contemporary one. Anthropologists have much to learn from approaches pursued in other disciplines, particularly if the end goal is a more holistic portrait of contamination and toxicity.