Atomic Violence Through Place and Space
-----
At a moment of great geopolitical change, nuclear-weapon states are engaging in a new arms race, even going so far as to threaten the use of these weapons to address emerging hostilities. A new chapter in nuclear history is unfolding: nuclear weapons are re-entering and affecting political and cultural discourse, reaching a new generation with no memory of their use during WWII or the Cold War arms race. Under these conditions, news headlines and pop culture still present nuclear weapons as matters of global security handled at the highest levels of government, while everyday people passively accept and live through these decisions. Yet the consequences of atomic violence are inherently intimate, destroying and contaminating specific bodies and landscapes while the state apparatus is often left untouched, or survives and is made anew. This presentation aims to address the incongruity between space and scale in nuclear politics — the dominance of country-level analysis and the erasure of personal, embodied experience. Through the exploration and use of arts and multimedia, Umayam proposes an alternative introduction to nuclear history and politics: one that acknowledges and honors the intimacy of space and place. In this talk, Umayam will focus on two experiences: uranium mining in Navajoland and the lives of Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. By insisting on this orientation as a starting point as we navigate our new nuclear era, we might refuse the path toward military competition and aggression, and instead find a way toward diplomacy and the practice of peace.
-----