Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War
Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post-Apocalyptic Worlds
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
278 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2011
Ranging across fiction and poetry, critical theory and film, comics and speeches, Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War explores how writers, thinkers, and filmmakers have tackled the question: Are nuclear weapons white? Paul Williams addresses myriad representations of nuclear weapons: the Manhattan Project, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear tests across the globe, and the anxiety surrounding the superpowers’ devastating arsenals. Ultimately, Williams concludes that many texts act as a reminder that the power enjoyed by the white Western world imperils the whole planet.
D.C. Maus | Choice
“Having set himself an ambitious task in examining whether or not nuclear weapons are racially coded as a symbol of ‘white’ power, Williams delivers a study that is impressive in both its breadth and depth….an otherwise exceptional, innovative, and overdue examination of a wide range of representational responses—creative and critical, fictional and nonfictional—to the notion that the atomic bomb is a tool that serves to perpetuate an order in which the values attributed to ‘white’ culture (defined in a variety of ways) remains ascendant.”
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Introduction
1. Race, War and Apocalypse before 1945
2. Inverted Frontiers
3. Soft Places and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
4. Fear of a Black Planet
5. White Rain and the Black Atlantic
6. Race and the Manhattan Project
7. ‘The Hindu Bomb’: Nuclear Nationalism in The Last Jet-Engine Laugh
8. Third World Wars and Third-World Wars
Bibliography
Index
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