Job talk by Aimee Bahng
Where: Dodd Hall 247
Aimee Bahng, Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, Pomona College
Talk Title: “Feminist, Decolonial Materialisms and the Nuclear History of Settler Environmentalism”
Talk Description
While much 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 talk 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 through the rubrics of securitization and financialization. Through critical readings of official state records and atomic research bulletins, Bahng traces the narrative strands of “ecosystems,” “regeneration,” and “strategic trust” from 1945 on, to show the structural connections among biopolitics, ecocide, and the foundations of international environmental law. To theorize a Pacific undercommons, the talk ultimately inquires after alternative formulations of interspecies connection that emerge from feminist, decolonial thought and queer-of-color critique as elucidated through the work of Larissa Lai’s transnational Asian American speculative fiction novel Salt Fish Girl and Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s video-poem “Anointed.”