Infrastructures of Apocalypse

Jessica Hurley is assistant professor of English at George Mason University.

• ContentsIntroduction: End Times1. White Sovereignty and the Nuclear State2. Civil Defense and Black Apocalypse3. Star Wars, AIDS, and Queer Endings4. Nuclear Waste, Native America, Narrative FormCoda: Nuclear EntanglementsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a wonderfully rich and first-rate account of the ways in which American literature records and critiques the material impact of the nuclear age. Jessica Hurley's focus on the infrastructure of the nuclear state, rather than on the possibility of totalizing destruction, enables a new understanding of post-45 American culture."-Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War"Infrastructures of Apocalypse is an extraordinary book. It demonstrates how postwar American literature documents the ways that nuclear technology becomes national infrastructure, with consequences for how we can understand the distribution of risk and resource in the period. Jessica Hurley’s innovative readings and keen narrative sensibility render infrastructural relations at their most paradoxical and most political. This is an urgent and timely account of how our self-made apocalypses are entangled with long historical processes and what their alternate futures may comprise."-Kate Marshall, author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction"Modest and profound."-Jewish Currents "Infrastructures of Apocalypse will instantly take its place in the growing tradition of environmental justice criticism that is carefully attuned to the entangled legacies of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the environment-and to the potential of radical futureless-ness to enact a more just present."-ISLE"Hurley's writing is lively and consistently hopeful, despite the difficult subject matter she addresses."-Modern Language Review