Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android investigates the threat conveyed and maintained by the nuclear cycle: mining, research, health, power generation and weaponry. Central to this polyvalent 'report' on the infiltration of our lives and control over them exerted by the industrial-military complex, are critiques of the creation, storage and use of atomic weapons, the exploitation of Australian Aboriginal people and their lands through British atomic testing in the 1950s, and an exposé of a language of denial in the world of nuclear mining/energy/military usages. 'Nuclear' is also parenthetically investigated in its function as extended metaphor and question for poetry and poetics. Key is a consideration of the use of the language of the 'atomic' in cultural spaces, and in 'the arts'. Indigenous land-rights claims in the face of uranium mining, the semantics of waste and of the glib usage by nuclear power companies of the fact of global warming to suit their own corrosive agendas. The triumphalism of scientific and cultural discourse around 'nuclear' and the threats by nuclear fission are by association brought into question. The nuclear cycle throws the whole future of human beings into doubt, and this book seeks to assemble new resources of resistance through creative and critical mediums, including poetry and poetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android investigates the threat conveyed and maintained by the nuclear cycle: mining, research, health, power generation and weaponry. Central to this polyvalent 'report' on the infiltration of our lives and control over them exerted by the industrial-military complex, are critiques of the creation, storage and use of atomic weapons, the exploitation of Australian Aboriginal people and their lands through British atomic testing in the 1950s, and an exposé of a language of denial in the world of nuclear mining/energy/military usages. 'Nuclear' is also parenthetically investigated in its function as extended metaphor and question for poetry and poetics. Key is a consideration of the use of the language of the 'atomic' in cultural spaces, and in 'the arts'. Indigenous land-rights claims in the face of uranium mining, the semantics of waste and of the glib usage by nuclear power companies of the fact of global warming to suit their own corrosive agendas. The triumphalism of scientific and cultural discourse around 'nuclear' and the threats by nuclear fission are by association brought into question. The nuclear cycle throws the whole future of human beings into doubt, and this book seeks to assemble new resources of resistance through creative and critical mediums, including poetry and poetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

War and Literary Studies poses two main questions: First, how has war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars today study the literature of war what are the key concepts in play? Seeking to complement the extant scholarship, this volume adopts a wider and more systematic approach as it directs our attention to the relation between warfare and literary studies as a field of knowledge. What are the key characteristics of the language of war? Of gender in war? Which questions are central to the way we engage with war and trauma or war and sensation? In which ways were prominent 20th century theories such as critical theory, French postwar theory, postcolonial theory shaped by war? How might emergent concepts such as 'revolution,' 'the anthropocene' or 'capitalism' inflect the study of war and literature?

The Franco-Japanese coproduction Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is one of the most important films for global art cinema and for the French New Wave. In Through a Nuclear Lens, Hannah Holtzman examines this film and the transnational cycle it has inspired, as well as its legacy after the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. In a study that includes formal and theoretical analysis, archival research, and interviews, Holtzman shows the emergence of a new kind of nuclear film, one that attends to the everyday effects of nuclear disaster and its impact on our experience of space and time. The focus on Franco-Japanese exchange in cinema since the postwar period reveals a reorientation of the primarily aesthetic preoccupations in the tradition of Japonisme to center around technological and environmental concerns. The book demonstrates how French filmmakers, ever since Hiroshima mon amour, have looked to Japan in part to better understand nuclear uncertainty in France.

More than a decade after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, what we are witnessing is not a Second Nuclear Age – there is no post-atomic – but an uncanny, quiet return of the nuclear threat that so vividly animated the Cold War era. The renewed threat of nuclear proliferation, public complacency regarding weapons stockpiles, and the lack of a single functioning long-term repository after seventy years and thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste reveals the industry’s capacity for self-reinvention abetted by an ever-present capacity to forget. More than “fabulously textual,” as Jacques Derrida described it, the protean, unbound, and unending materiality of the nuclear is here to stay: resistance is crucial. Toxic Immanence introduces contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives that resist and decolonize the nuclear. Contributors highlight the prevalence and irrationality of slow violence and colonial governance as elements of the contemporary nuclear age. They propose a reappraisal of Cold War-era anti-nuclear art as well as pop culture representations of nuclear disaster, while decolonizing pedagogies advance the role of education in communicating and understanding the lethality of nuclear complexes. Collectively, the essays develop a robust critical discourse across fields of nuclear knowledge and integrate the work of the nuclear humanities with environmental justice and Indigenous rights activism. This reach across ways of knowing extends artistically: the poetry and photography included in this volume offer visions of past and present nuclear legacies. Conceived as a critical reflection on the potential of nuclear humanities, Toxic Immanence offers intellectual strategies for resisting and abolishing the global nuclear regime.

Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) uses an ethnographic lens to explore the dissonances associated with the commodification of Chornobyl’s heritage. The book considers the role of the guides as experience brokers, focusing on the synergy between tourists and guides in the performance of heritage interpretation. Banaszkiewicz proposes to perceive tour guides as important actors in the bottom-up construction of heritage discourse contributing to more inclusive and participatory approach to heritage management. Demonstrating that the CEZ has been going through a dynamic transformation into a mass tourism attraction, the book offers a critical reflection on heritagisation as a meaning-making process in which the resources of the past are interpreted, negotiated, and recognised as a valuable legacy. Applying the concepts of dissonant heritage to describe the heterogeneous character of the CEZ, the book broadens the interpretative scope of dark tourism which takes on a new dimension in the context of the war in Ukraine. Tourism and Heritage in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone argues that post-disaster sites such as Chornobyl can teach us a great deal about the importance of preserving cultural and natural heritage for future generations. The book will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of heritage, tourism, memory, disasters and Eastern Europe.

This book is based upon the collaborative efforts of the Ontogenetics Process Group (OPG) – an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research group that began meeting in 2017 to explore new and innovative ways of thinking the problem of complexity in living, physical, and social systems outside the algorithmic models that have dominated paradigms of complexity to date. For all the descriptive and predictive power that the complexity sciences offer (the ability to compute feedback systems, recursive networks, emergent dynamics, etc.), they also presume that the living world in all of its modalities (biological, semiotic, economic, affective, social) can be reduced to finite schema of description that delimits in advance all possible outcomes. What is proposed in this volume are conceptual architectures for the living that are not only irreducible to physico-mathematical frames of reference, but that are also as vital as the phenomena they wish to express. In short: life is more complex than complexity. What emerges from this engagement is not the ascendance of a new transcendental principle (or, what amounts to the same thing, a foundational bedrock) derived from the physico-mathematical sciences, but just the opposite: a domain in which the ontological and the epistemological domains enter a zone of strange (and unavoidable) entanglement. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.