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{
    "pk": 43015,
    "title": "The Pacific Proving Grounds and the Proliferation of Settler Environmentalism",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Runit Dome is an eighteen-inch thick concrete dome covering the buried nuclear waste from twenty-three atomic tests conducted by the US military in the 1940s and ’50s in Pikinni Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Known to locals as “The Tomb,” it is leaking into the Pacific Ocean, in part because of the rising sea levels produced by global warming. Runit Dome brings climate change into direct relation with the legacies of nuclear imperialism in the Marshall Islands. This essay examines how Cold War securitization paradigms problematically inform the ecological management strategies developed by international policy-making entities such as the United Nations in the mid-twentieth century. While much literary and cultural scholarship on the rise of the nuclear age has focused on the concomitant rise of insecurities about body and environment under the duress of wartime, this essay crafts a different but intertwined history, showing how the transformation of the Pacific Ocean into a nuclear testing ground was parlayed into governmental projects for the remaking of life itself under the auspices of risk management. Military-backed and government-funded scientific experiments with nuclear and other weapons throughout the Pacific suggest a new phase in US imperial world-making, as the ecologies of waters, islands, sea creatures, and Pacific Islanders were turned into experimental materials for modeling shifts in social and ecological forms of governance. When environmental protections take for granted concepts such as enclosure, risk management, and Enlightenment formulations of property-owning and rights-bearing subjects, they manifest a \nsettler environmentalism\n that too easily paves the way for capitalist regeneration under the aegis of eco-development projects rather than systemic change that understands human, nonhuman, and environment to be always already in relation. To break from perpetually extractive relations to land, sea, and life, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s video poem “Anointed” models how environmental futures must reckon with the causes of past and ongoing harm, and this essay concludes with a brief reflection on this poet-activist’s work.",
    "language": "en",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives  4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "settler environmentalism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Pacific Islands"
        },
        {
            "word": "Nuclear Testing"
        },
        {
            "word": "Bikini Atoll"
        },
        {
            "word": "ecological management"
        },
        {
            "word": "critical financial studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner"
        },
        {
            "word": "\"Anointed\" video poem"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Special Forum: Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5ps5x93q",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Aimee",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Bahng",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "AIMEE BAHNG is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College. Her prizewinning book, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (2018), examines narrations of futurity across various platforms, from speculative fiction by writers of color to the financial speculations of the one percent. With teaching and research interests at the conjuncture of transnational Asian/American cultural studies and queer-feminist science and technology studies, she has published a range of articles on techno-Orientalism and Asian/American speculative fiction. She is currently working on another book manuscript, tentatively titled “Transpacific Ecologies: Settler Environmentalism and the Gentrification of the Sea.”",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2020-08-21T19:44:16+02:00",
    "date_accepted": "2020-08-21T19:44:16+02:00",
    "date_published": "2020-11-27T23:28:38+01:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/43015/galley/32054/download/"
        }
    ]
}