Resisting the Nuclear: Art and Activism Across the Pacific

From uranium mines on the Navajo Nation to craters caused by nuclear testing on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, the production and deployment of nuclear weapon technologies have disproportionately harmed Indigenous lands. Sustained exposure to radiation from nuclear weapons and waste affects many communities from Japan to Oceania to the US West. While antinuclear activism often takes political and legal forms, artistic responses to nuclear regimes also prompt social action and resistance.

Resisting the Nuclear is an interdisciplinary edited collection featuring historians, anthropologists, artists, and activists who explore the multifaceted forms of resistance to nuclear regimes. Through a combination of interviews, scholarly essays, and discussions of contemporary art, contributors recenter the victims of nuclear technologies and demonstrate how political and artistic expression can respond to nuclear threats and effect change.

Elyssa Faison is L. R. Brammer Jr. Presidential Professor and associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. She is author of Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. Alison Fields is Mary Lou Milner Carver Professor of Art of the American West and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. She is author of Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture. Contributors: Melanie Armstrong, Holly Barker, Elyssa Faison, Alison Fields, Peter Goin, Margo Machida, Yuka Tsuchiya Moriguchi, Jennifer Richter, Shinpei Takeda, Seiichirō Takemine, Akiko Takenaka, Naoko Wake, Sherri Wasserman, and Ran Zwigenberg