Elizabeth DeLoughrey

The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific

This article explores how the concept of ecosystem ecologies, one of the most influential models of systems thinking, was developed in relation to the radioactive aftermath of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands. Historian Richard Grove has demonstrated how tropical island colonies all over the globe served as vital laboratories and spaces of social, botanical, and industrial experiment in ways that informed modernity and the conservation movement. I propose a similar relationship between the militarized American island colonies of Micronesia and how their constitution as AEC laboratories contributed to both atomic modernity and the field of ecosystem ecology. This was enacted through metaphorical concepts of island isolation and distributed visually by Atomic Energy Commission films that upheld an aerial vision of the newly acquired atolls for an American audience. Finally, the myth of isolation is also at work in the ways in which Marshall Islanders exposed to nuclear fallout became human subjects for radiation experiments due to the idea of the biological isolate.

Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth

While I was preparing this essay, the space shuttle Endeavour flew over my home, completing what the media referred to as a “victory lap” around Los Angeles to cheering crowds. The house shook in response to the force of the lowflying Boeing 747 that carried the fivestory, seventyfiveton spacecraft over the city and was escorted by two F35 Lightning II military jets (Feldman and Kelsey 2012). As a scholar working on the legacies of the Cold War, including the radioactive ones that we carry in our bodies, I felt a profound sense of ambivalence. On the one hand, the shuttle’s voyage around California celebrated the military-industrial complex, US victory in the Cold War, and the ongoing militarization of space. As many spectators attested, the Endeavour

QUANTUM LANDSCAPES: A ‘Ventriloquism of Spirit’

The rise of natural history as a discipline and as an area of inquiry was the result of European colonial activity in the New World tropics. While postcolonial studies has been concerned with the spatial contours of empire, it has only recently begun to explore the epistemological and ecological consequences of this construction of ‘natural’ history. Edouard Glissant has argued that the relationship between humans and nature in the Caribbean was fractured by the brutalities of the plantation system. Contemporary anglophone writers have begun to reconstruct that relationship through the use of non-realist narrative. Pauline Melvilles novel The Ventriloquists Tale brings together Amerindian mythology and Western physics in order to complicate the materialist and anthropomorphic bias of Caribbean historiography and to press against the realist boundaries of ecocritical studies.

Yam, Roots, and Rot: Allegories of the Provision Grounds

The historical and metaphysical connection between humans and the soil seems to be of vital significance to the recuperative power associated with the provision grounds, a relationship I trace by turning to Erna Brodbers allegorical novel, The Rainmakers Mistake (2007). Drawing upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and others about the differing plots of the plantation and the provision grounds, this essay explores how Brodber challenges the plot of plantation narratives and employs allegory to excavate the roots of the provision grounds, particularly the figure of the yam. While roots are a generative metaphor for cultural origins, Brodber demonstrates that decay is the material way in which we know history has passed and thus is key to the articulation of time and nature itself, a position with profound implications for the regions historiography.