front cover of Infrastructures of Apocalypse
Infrastructures of Apocalypse
American Literature and the Nuclear Complex
Jessica Hurley
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures

Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives.

Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement.

Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.

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front cover of The Nightmare Considered
The Nightmare Considered
Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature
Nancy Anisfield
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991
These essays assess the nature of nuclear war literature from a variety of perspectives. Scholars, activists, novelists, poets, and teachers challenge nuclear ideologies and traditional readings of apocalyptic texts. Included: Holocaust literature of the 1950s, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, poetry and nuclear war, Riddley Walker, Fiskadoro, haiku and Hiroshima, Kopit’s End of the World, O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age, and Vonnegut’s cataclysmic novels.
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