Radioactive Ghosts

Gabriele Schwab is distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine. She holds appointments in comparative literature, anthropology, English, and European languages and studies. Her books in English include Subjects without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction; The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language; Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma; and Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Subjectivity, Culture.

• ContentsPreface: Of Three-Eyed Fish and Other GhostingsIntroduction: Why Nuclear Necropolitics Today?Part I. Nuclear Subjectivities1. No Apocalypse, Not Now: Derrida and the Nuclear Unconscious2. Nuclear Colonialism3. Critical Nuclear Race Theory4. The Gender of Nuclear SubjectivitiesInterlude: Children of the Nuclear AgeWith Simon J. OrtizPart II. Haunting from the Future5. The Afterlife of Nuclear Catastrophes6. Hiroshima’s Ghostly Shadows7. Postnuclear Madness and Nuclear Crypts8. Transspecies Selves: Intimacies, Extimacies, AnimaciesCoda: Postnuclear Ecologies: Language, Body, and Affect in Beckett’s Happy DaysAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"This book, a wake-up call and a tour de force of wide-ranging interdisciplinary scholarship, is beautifully written and accessible; Gabriele Schwab moves nuclear power discourse further by focusing on aspects rarely addressed together, like psychic, racial, gender and class implications. Her short personal interludes add yet another layer of meaning. Radioactive Ghosts should be required reading for everyone hoping the human species can survive."-E. Ann Kaplan, author of Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Literature"The innocent sounding Manhattan project forever put a Damocles sword on human existence. The first uranium that made the Project possible was dug from Africa. Drawing parallels between the extraction of uranium and the extraction of slave labor, Gabriele Schwab shows the prominent role of colonialism and race in the politics of nuclear production and possession. Radioactive Ghosts, with its clarity of prose and thought, reminds us that we humans have only the one planet. Why, oh, why should any nation be proud that they have the capacity to destroy all planetary life? Exorcise these radioactive ghosts by banning and destroying all these weapons of human destruction. End this MADNESS."-Ngugi wa Thiong'o, author of Wrestling with the Devil"Gabrielle Schwab’s thought-provoking book makes a timely contribution to the on-going nuclear debate."-Journal of Peace Research