1st Edition
Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android
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.
Introduction: Nuclear Theory Degree Zero, with Two Cheers for Derrida
Drew Milne and John Kinsella
1. Beyond Our Nuclear Entanglement: Love, Nuclear Pain and the Whole Damn Thing
Baden Offord
2. The Medical Implications of Fukushima For Medical Students
Helen Caldicott
3. Radioactive Waste and Australia's Aboriginal People
Jim Green
4. "Nuclear Consumed Love" Atomic Threats and Australian Indigenous Activist Poetics
Matthew Hall
Undermining
John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green
5. That’s Why We Came Here: Feminist Cinema(S) At Greenham Common
Sophie Mayer
Nuclear Song
Drew Milne
6. Poetry After Hiroshima? Notes on Nuclear Implicature
Drew Milne
7. Affective Rhetoric and The Cultural Politics of Determinate Negation
Tom Bristow
Two Poems
John Kinsella
8. Going Nuclear: Notes on Sudden Extinction In What Remains Of Post-Nuclear Criticism
Jonty Tiplady
9. Atomic Guildswomen
Redell Olsen
10. Postludes: Cinema at the End of the World
Louis Armand
11. Bibliographical Resources for Nuclear Criticism
Harriet David
Biography
Drew Milne edited 'Marxist Literary Theory' (Blackwell,1996) with Terry Eagleton and 'Modern Critical Thought' (Blackwell, 2003). He has published numerous essays on critical theory and poetics. His collected poems – 'In Darkest Capital' – were published by Carcanet in 2017. Recent chapbooks include: 'Earthworks' (Equipage, 2018), 'Lichens in Antarctica' (Institute of Electric Crinolines, 2019) and 'Cutting Carbons' (Institute of Electric Crinolines, 2019). He is the Judith E Wilson Reader in Poetics, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK, and a fellow of Corpus Christi College, UK.
John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016), The Wound (Arc, 2018) and Insomnia (Picador, 2019). His recent fiction includes Lucida Intervalla (novel; Dalkey Archive, 2018) and Hollow Earth (novel; Transit Lounge, 2019). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Australia.
