Part of the symposium Japanese/America: Transpacific and Hemispheric

It is relatively unknown that in the 1940s, uranium from the Belgian Congo and the Northwest Territories in Canada was used in the first atomic bomb that was tested in New Mexico and detonated over Hiroshima in 1945. My presentation explores the radioactive non-sites of this history, and the ways in which nuclear colonialism designates Indigenous lands as peripheral sites of accumulation and what Traci Brynne Voyles calls “wastelanding.” I probe the colonial dynamics of accumulation through analyses of Asian/American visual representations of extractive wastelands, which evoke a dispossessed, grotesque other of the pristine colonial landscape—but also serve as a queer repository of forgotten, intimate histories of land and labor.

Iyko Day

Iyko Day is associate professor of English and critical social thought at Mount Holyoke College and co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Her research focuses on Asian North American literature and visual culture; settler colonialism and racial capitalism; Marxian theory and queer of color critique. She is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016) and she co-edits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press.