Resisting the Nuclear

Art and Activism across the Pacific

Edited by Elyssa Faison and Alison Fields

From uranium mines on the Navajo Nation to craters caused by nuclear testing on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, the production and deployment of nuclear weapon technologies have disproportionately harmed Indigenous lands. Sustained exposure to radiation from nuclear weapons and waste affects many communities from Japan to Oceania to the US West. While antinuclear activism often takes political and legal forms, artistic responses to nuclear regimes also prompt social action and resistance.

Resisting the Nuclear is an interdisciplinary edited collection featuring historians, anthropologists, artists, and activists who explore the multifaceted forms of resistance to nuclear regimes. Through a combination of interviews, scholarly essays, and discussions of contemporary art, contributors recenter the victims of nuclear technologies and demonstrate how political and artistic expression can respond to nuclear threats and effect change.

“Reshapes geographies of what we might consider affected by the nuclear, refocusing discussion onto the Marshall Islands and American West and, critically, the Indigenous people in those locations.” —Jessica Nakamura, author of Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan

“Essential reading—informative, insightful, revealing, and timely. An important invitation to remember lives lost and impacted by nuclear disasters and to pause and review the ways nuclear power has been mobilized in relation to US imperialism and racial-settler capitalism.” —Susette Min, author of Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art

Elyssa Faison is L. R. Brammer Jr. Presidential Professor and associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and author of Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. Alison Fields is Mary Lou Milner february

Carver Professor of Art of the American West and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture.

328 pp., 18 color illus., 32 b&w illus., 1 map, 7.25 × 9 in.

$35.00s / £26.99 Pb / 9780295752341

$35.00s / £26.99 eb / 9780295752358

Visual Studies / History / Asian Studies / Asian American Studies / Native American and Indigenous Studies critical ethnic studies and visual culture

A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book

Contributors Melanie Armstrong, Holly Barker, Peter Goin, Margo Machida, Yuka Tsuchiya Moriguchi, Jennifer Richter, Shinpei Takeda, Seiichirō Takemine, Akiko Takenaka, Naoko Wake, Sherri Wasserman, and Ran Zwigenberg