Strategic Science vs. Tactical Storytelling: Disrupting Radioactive Masculinity through Postcolonial Ecologies

Abstract

In both USA and India, nuclear bomb tests were first carried out and continue to be implemented in marginalized sites—Native American reservations and Bishnoi territory in India—inhabited by non-normative subjectivities. Nuclear proliferation emerging from such soft spaces (Williams) is always concomitant with performances of what I term as radioactive masculinity: a very specific form of militarized masculinity emerging from the contingent association between privileged and gendered bodies, and the nuclear bomb. By juxtaposing Native American perspectives on the bomb, represented by Leslie Silko's Ceremony, with socio-legal artifacts from the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan (India) I argue that tactical storytelling creates postcolonial ecologies, which recovers minoritarian perspectives about nuclearization and disrupts the strategic ideologies of Anglo-American modernity. I further emphasize that by not trying to represent the Other, both the Bishnoi texts and Ceremony belong to the domain of planetarity (Spivak) and question the globalizing narrative of disciplines like Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism.