Featuring Professor Yu-Fang Cho, Society for the Humanities

How do questions of race and racialization figure in post-Fukushima cultural memory of the nuclear Pacific and transpacific nuclear modernity? In what ways can women of color and queer of color critique enable us to grapple with the entanglement of race, class, gender, sexuality, and settler colonial and ecological violence in this specific context? In this presentation, I will first discuss how Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita grapples with these questions in her recent works, and then explore how her provocative use of the spatial and temporal leaps and radical juxtapositions generatively reframes post-WWII biopolitical shift of nuclear power as a transpacific racial and settler colonial formation. Using the discussion of Yamashita's works as a point of departure, we will collectively reflect on ways that feminist and queer critiques of racial capitalism and settler colonialism can productively inform current debates about queer ecology.