My presentation attempts to dislodge Hiroshima from available frameworks of public memory and what Lisa Yoneyama refers to as a "nuclear order of knowledge." This is a mode of colonial unknowing that obscures the colonial sites of uranium extraction in Canada's Northwest Territories and the Belgian Congo, which supplied the uranium used in the atomic bombs that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Redirecting global memory culture, I delve into the "hidden abode" of uranium distribution as it exists in relation to coal and oil energy supply chains. Examining the intimacies between the Congo, the Northwest Territories, and Japan, my project examines how power relations between colonizer and colonized were reframed and reproduced in the post-World War II era as relations between the nuclear and non-nuclear.
Co-sponsored by the Global Asias Initiative
Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. She is currently chair of gender studies and critical social thought and is a faculty member in the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Dr. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016), and also edits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press.