Hope & Uncertainty: How We Talk about Ecological Catastrophe

 

This year’s colloquium features an international community of scholars working at the intersection of literary studies, science, and environmental humanisms for an urgent shared project: developing effective methods for communicating about ecological and climate crisis in ways that think beyond catastrophic doom narratives.

 

“The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists,” by Professor Anaïs Maurer (French & Comparative Literature, Rutgers University)

 

“Co-Conjuration: Practicing Decolonial Nuclear Criticism,” by Professor Lisa Yoneyama (East Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies, UTSG)

 

“Writing the Nuclear Free Pacific in Fiji,” by Professor Rebecca Hogue (English, UTSG)

 

“Wood and Water,” by Professor Melissa Gniadek (English & Drama, UTM)

 

 

 

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In this talk, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in Indigenous and colonial languages, ranging from poetry to songs and paintings, she shows how Pacific nuclear survivors’ stories reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South transnational solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse.

 

I will speak briefly from the article I recently published in a special issue of “Nuclear Ghosts” in theApocalyptica journal. In it I explored what I call the cultural practice of co-conjuration. Co-conjuring practices alert us to the entangled relations between apparently distinct nuclear catastrophes —for example, among radiogenic harm suffered by Indigenous communities, the wartime use of atom bombs, and the meltdown of nuclear reactors. By calling forth ghosts, memories, affects, and visions of justice associated with nuclear-specific loss and pain in the longue durée of colonialism, militarized empires, and extractive settler capitalism, co-conjuring has the potential to produce relational sensibilities that can move us beyond the co­lonial partitioning of nuclear knowledge. The presentation will focus on Village of Widows (1999), a documentary film by the Canadian film maker Peter Blow to consider what must be wagered when we attempt to produce relational knowledge by connecting incommensurable histories and experiences across disparate times and spaces.

 

 By the 1980s, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement had become one of the largest Indigenous-led multi-national grassroots organizations in the world. But how did it start and what were its values? This presentation examines the role of women writing to a regional public in the South Pacific during the formation of the nuclear free campaigns in newly independent Fiji. 

 

 This brief talk explores the need to think about the arboreal and the oceanic worlds together, from the perspective of a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature invested in Oceanic and Archipelagic frameworks. Many recent conversations about nineteenth-century energies and ecologies in Americanist contexts have focused on petrocultures, but “arborcultures” are just as critical. After all, whaling and other forms of global extraction that fueled imperialism and settler colonialism were only possible because of the wood used to build ships. At the same time, trees remain central to discourses of hope, renewal, and connection to place that bridge past and present around the globe. Using examples ranging from the work of nineteenth-century writers like Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and William Apess to contemporary novels and poetry, this talk will look toward the Pacific and gesture toward the need to think about land and oceans together (something that seems self-evident in certain scholarly circles but perhaps still necessary to point out in others).