| Abstract | While Western narratives of the apocalypse place the catastrophic, earth-ending event in the future, Indigenous stories often cast the end of the world as something that has already happened, the effects of which continue to reverberate throughout Indigenous lives.1 Current apocalyptic fears in the Global North coalesce around an encroaching climate crisis, this crisis imaginary itself a representational form that obscures how the increasing collapse of ecosystems has been ongoing for hundreds of years for colonized peoples both in the Americas and around the world.2 Such fears around natural disaster, even when understood as the result of human activity, rarely cite slower forms of violence or prior existing apocalyptic events such as the dropping of the atomic bomb and ensuing decimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The atomic bomb is one striking example of a networked, and obscured, apocalypse: the uranium used in the construction of the bomb was mined from the African Congo, the Canadian Northwest Territories, and the Southwest United States, where the first bomb was detonated in testing. Existing alongside and setting the preconditions for these nuclear events are the ways in which the New World was settled in the first place. The Middle Passage and the experiences of enslaved Africans in the Americas can also be described as world ending. Artist and writer Hannah Black sums it up: “The disaster has already happened and this is all aftermath.”3 Indeed, to understand the apocalypse heralded in 1492 is to understand the coconstituted nature of settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and, as recently argued by Lisa Lowe and Iyko Day, the economics of “alien” (figured by these authors as Asian) labor. I use apocalypse, and more precisely nuclear apocalypse, to further understand and complicate the triumvirate of analytics (dispossession of Indigenous life and land, fungibility of Black flesh, and nonenslaved Asian labor) that structure modernity and make possible its undoing.4 The narratives of Burning Vision and Ceremony, a text I discuss briefly as a resonant narrative of nuclear colonial interconnectivity, prompt a reconsideration of the discrete difference between these categories. The arguments that follow do not call for a flattening into sameness but a stretching and linking of analytic categories to understand how and why colonized peoples worldwide have been harmed by the atomic bomb in its many stages of production and detonation. |
