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{
    "pk": 43019,
    "title": "The Politics of Invisibility: Visualizing Legacies of Nuclear Imperialisms",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Questions of visibility, witnessing, and agency are particularly pertinent to post-1945 US and French nuclear testing across Oceania. Images of enormous hovering atomic mushroom clouds have become familiar icons of this testing, while images of the effects of colonial–imperial occupation and ideology in the Pacific are rendered invisible within government-controlled imagery. Alternative forms of visualization are required to be able to (re)see the human experiences that remain central to contemporary Pacific militarization and the legacies of nuclear weapons testing. Images, be they from social media and online platforms, archives, or public exhibitions, have the political potential to make visible Indigenous experiences of nuclear testing and ongoing militarization. Here, our work expands the concept of transnational studies by centering Oceanic, archipelagic, and island thinking. This article explores how contemporary photographic imagery politicizes what has been rendered (in)visible through state-produced imagery, archiving practices, and US national park recognition.  Focusing on American-born Chinese visual artist Jane Chang Mi’s series \n(See Reverse Side.)\n (2017) and Marshallese photojournalist and filmmaker Leonard Leon’s (@pacific_aesthetics) series of Instagram posts (2019), we argue that their methods of image-making can enable alternative forms of socioethical witnessing and visibility of not only state-produced archival images but also of the Indigenous Pacific communities who are deeply affected by nuclear testing and ongoing militarization. Through close readings of their works, we question how photographic practices communicate the humanity of nuclear military conduct while bringing their viewers closer to the human experience of living in a highly militarized and nuclear context.",
    "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": "imperialism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Militarism"
        },
        {
            "word": "Nuclear Testing"
        },
        {
            "word": "Pacific"
        },
        {
            "word": "Leonard Leon"
        },
        {
            "word": "Jane Chang Mi"
        },
        {
            "word": "@pacific_aesthetics"
        },
        {
            "word": "Photography"
        },
        {
            "word": "Visual Studies"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Special Forum: Transnational Nuclear Imperialisms",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zs4q1hv",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Fiona",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Amundsen",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "FIONA AMUNDSEN is an artist and writer who has exhibited widely throughout the Asia Pacific region, United States, and Europe. She is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design (Auckland University of Technology) and recently completed her PhD (Monash University), which explored alternative modalities for memorializing stories and experiences associated with the Asia-Pacific War (WWII).  The exhibition that resulted from this research—A Body that Lives (2018)—has been nominated for the 2020 Walters Prize, Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prestigious art award.  In 2019 she was awarded a Fulbright New Zealand Scholar Award which enabled her to begin the initial research for Coming back to Life (2019– ), a photo-filmic-writing project that explores relationships between Cold War military nuclear technologies, military capitalism, nuclear environmental destruction, and spirituality.",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2020-08-21T23:50:59+02:00",
    "date_accepted": "2020-08-21T23:50:59+02:00",
    "date_published": "2020-11-19T09:00:00+01:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jtas/article/43019/galley/32058/download/"
        }
    ]
}