Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War

A good book, addressing itself to a neglected area of an important topic. Williams draws on an impressively broad and diverse range of nuclear texts for his study and has some intelligent observations to make. His readings of literary and filmic texts are detailed and enlightening. The thesis of Paul Williams's study addresses the racial-and sometimes postcolonial-cultural tropes that arise in primarily nuclear and post-fallout sf. As noted in his preface, the study is centered on an idea articulated by novelist Arundati Roy that nuclear weapons are white weapons of colonialist power. Accordingly, Williams's work also looks to contribute to the growing field of racial and colonialist dialogue that has emerged in sf studies in recent years. Of course, Williams is entering a thoroughly developed scholarly field of atomic sf criticism, and his work is perhaps best paired with Patrick Sharp's Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture (2007). Unlike Sharp's more traditional historical framing that covers a few texts in detail, however, Williams canvasses a wide spread of films, hard sf, popular fiction, poems, film lyrics, and speeches that range across five decades. Williams then probes how their aggregate atomic visions register the predominantly "white" role of nuclear futurism. Divided into eight chapters, the middle six of which are organized thematically, then loosely chronologically, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War opens with an overview that details a pre-1945 history of racial ideologies and aerial bombings. Of the seven remaining chapters, four focus principally on American fictive spaces: Chapter 2 looks at how post-nuclear US geographies create "inverted frontiers" where Anglo survivors are the unsophisticated minority (e.g., William Tenn's "Eastward Ho!" [1958]); Chapter 4 examines the African Diaspora in relation to 1950s and 1960s sf in urban spaces such as Philip Wylie's Tomorrow! (1954), and concludes with a discussion of Octavia E. Butler's more recent novel Dawn (1987); Chapter 5 uses the critical lens of black modernity to identify how specific sf and poetry critique contemporary race hydraulics; and Chapter 6 is focused on the role of racial minorities in fiction set within Los Alamos National Laboratory. One of the strongest features of the project is that it catalogues so many atomic sf works that would otherwise be spread across the disciplinary ether. Williams also finds creative ways to read less obvious geographies of postnuclear sf. A case in point is Chapter 3's adoption of Neil Gaiman's idea of "soft places" to characterize the postcolonial Australian outback of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), which feels innovative and holds promise, although the subsequent analysis is centered almost entirely on character development within the film. This chapter begs for some sort of criticalhistorical correlative, such as scholarship on Australia's colonial history or relevant postcolonial scholarship. Moreover, Williams often does not adequately represent and respond to other scholars (in atomic sf and other fields). This oversight is most strikingly noticeable in the subsection of Chapter 5 where Williams addresses racial narratives in Langston Hughes's "Simple" short stories (1940s-1950s) and Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972); in 1995, Ken Cooper discussed the same texts in a book chapter entitled "The Whiteness of the Bomb" (Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, ed. Richard Dellamora) and with more or less the same space, scope, and critical approach. While Williams does note in his introduction that he will try to nuance Cooper's position, in the chapter itself he does not remind readers how similar his approach is, and then mostly parallels Cooper's claims, yet only cites him for sound bites a few times in the section. Similarly, the infusion of pertinent primary or secondary historical sources would have aided in Chapter 6's reading of fiction set at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Williams identifies concerns of Jewish identity in Dexter Master's The Accident (1955), and his analysis would have been enriched by adding how, for one thing, historians and former employees have noted that there was really no concept of Jewish consciousness or identity at Los Alamos until further into the Cold War period. Such points in the book present frustrating missed opportunities for Williams to add substantially to already existing critical race discourse in atomic sf criticism. Although Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War covers a wide, eclectic range of texts, what is included and what is omitted in this book is sometimes puzzling. Williams predictably references the uranium-mine denouement of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), but curiously overlooks Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), despite that novel's pervasive, scathing critique of how "bomb ideologies" mold issues of Anglophone modernity, race relations, nuclear weapons use, and colonial redress. Beyond Thunderdome gets an entire chapter, but there is not even a mention of Waterworld (1997), a film with a heroine named Enola (after the nuclear bomber that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima) and a conclusion set on the "dry land" of a Japanese mountaintop. Perhaps the most interesting new work and the best analytic focus of the book comes in Chapter 7, entitled "The Hindu Bomb." Here Ruchir Joshi's reimagined past and speculative futures in The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001) are discussed in relation to other South Asian writers' assessments of the political pressures between Pakistan, Hindu Nationalists, and the Indian pursuit of weapons technology. Williams argues that the racial and religious undertones that accompanied these pursuits of nuclear dominance were still influenced by India's and Pakistan's secondary status to Western nations. The concluding chapter of the book, a coda that synoptically reviews additional films and works of fiction, gestures at the 9/11 rhetoric of nuclear-weapon marshaling, and touches briefly on the War on Terror. My largest concern with the book is the sizeable gaps of time that are spanned and conflated without carefully identifying historical differences. Williams also underutilizes (or omits) large bodies of relevant scholarship. While the writing sometimes felt uneven, I appreciated that Williams admirably avoided the use of jargon-laden prose. And though each chapter could have covered its materials and their themes with greater detail and historical precision, Race, Ethnicity, and Nuclear War serves, in many ways, as an early building block for Williams's future contributions to the field. Taking as his epigraph Arundhati Roy's comment that nuclear weapons are the 'very heart of whiteness', Paul Williams' book explores the relations between race, ethnicity and the representation of nuclear weapons in sf and other texts. The work is a significant advance upon recent analyses of race in sf: by combining the perspectives of sf criticism, race theory, postcolonial theory and nuclear criticism, it shows the extent to which the sf imaginary is implicated in social capital and ideologies of white supremacy. The first chapter details the prevalence of racism and racial stereotypes (most of which have previously been studied in sf criticism) in future war fictions, very few of them nuclear. In spite of these shortcomings, the chapter lays the groundwork for the two major themes that Williams traces through to contemporary times: race and war. Moreover, Williams shows how ideas of ghettoization, fears of miscegenation and nineteenth-century eugenics have merged with policies made possible by new technological terrors in the twentieth century. Williams contends that nuclear weapons in sf represent an advance on earlier future war fictions, because they are the ultimate weapons, around which fantasies of destruction and reconstruction, fear of invasion and cultural rebirth may be constructed. For Williams, 'nuclear war decenters white privilege around the world' (128), and his work is an analysis of the ways in which sf texts deal with such decentring. The rest of the book explores, through the image of nuclear war, the continuity of such racial antipathy in sf, and also the adoption and internalization of such stereotypes in texts produced outside the Anglo-American world. The first chapter looks at three post-apocalyptic American stories: William Tenn's 'Eastward Ho!' (1958), Michael Swanwick's 'The Feast of Saint Janis' (1980), and Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka's Warday (1984). Williams contends that these narratives perform a function similar to that of the frontier myth found in the Western. By exploring the theme of survival in a harsh landscape, they also channel the social Darwinist myths of an earlier age, including that of Aryan supremacy. Williams suggests these narratives appear to be functionally similar to the Empire narratives of British scientific romance at its heyday, where white supremacy is threatened. Tenn contextualizes American 1950s racism through the presentation of a future where white populations suffer similar racism at the hands of dominant Native Americans who, using the Darwinian motif, have adapted more quickly to the post-apocalyptic scenario. It is the whites who have to return to the ocean, to the mythic Europe of white origins. Warday explores the theme using Hispanic Americans and Native Americans for its inversion, while 'The Feast of Saint Janis' uses a prosperous New Africa as its point of critique. As Williams argues, these narratives apply the stereotypes more often reserved for others to white Americans, underlined by an economic and neo-colonial logic. The world of American consumerism becomes the target: satirical in the case of the short stories; nostalgic in the case of Warday. Some of the later chapters of the book extend this argument in different directions. 'Fear of a Black Planet' describes the concern that a nuclear war might render racial purity a thing of the past. The spectre of miscegenation becomes particularly controversial when dwindling populations in a post-apocalyptic landscape adopt survival as a primary goal. In tracing this narrative from the 1950s onwards, Williams notes the changing pattern of interracial relations in American sf. Philip Wylie's Tomorrow! (1954) and Pat Frank's Alas Babylon (1959), ostensibly critical of racism against African Americans, end up utilizing nuclear war and the destruction of American cities as a way of restoring the US to its white racial homogeneity. The best section of this chapter, however, is the study of Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987). Exploring Butler's complex usage of interspecies reproduction, Williams shows that in Butler's work, nuclear weapons are produced by the same fundamental drive as racism, the belief that one group is better than another. Nuclear weapons enable the construction, almost always masculine, of a power hierarchy. In presenting Lilith's and Joseph's relationship in the novel as the transcendence of psychical xenophobia and racist fear of the other, Butler explores the possibility that perhaps the end of the species through human-alien interbreeding (and, by extension, through interracial breeding) is desirable. Williams' discussion of anti-Semitism in the Manhattan Project is well argued, but brief. Through a reading of two novels, Dexter Masters' The Accident (1955) and Joseph Kanon's Los Alamos (1997), Williams shows that the same anti-Semitism that led to the exodus of Jewish scientists to America also structured the way in which they were publicly perceived at the time. Williams also looks at Martin Cruz Smith's Stallion Gate (1986), in which anti-Semitism and institutional racism against Native Americans merge in the figure of Joe Pena. In all three novels, the rhetoric of American civilization and cultural pluralism ssurrounding the success of the Manhattan Project is challenged by the internal racial fissures in American society: the 'othering' characteristic of civilizational superiority that makes possible any use of the Bomb is endemic to the logic that makes the construction of the Bomb necessary in the first place. One of the book's key contributions is its incorporation of literature from newer nuclear nations such as India, as well as sf produced in places such as Australia. The second chapter notes that Australia has been the setting for post-apocalyptic fictions, both before and since Neville Shute's classic On the Beach (1957) and Williams argues that these representations are 'determined by a specific image of the Outback emerging from a colonial tradition of representation, an image of recalcitrant emptiness foreshadowing the ordering of cartography' (85). Williams borrows the term 'soft place' from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, to identify those places that are 'desirable to colonizing nations as ideas and locations in the world that are unmapped and thus unclaimed in European eyes' (87). Australia occupies such a space in the sf imaginary Williams suggests, and shows how the Mad Max trilogy depicts a relation between place and people that revitalizes readings of the Australian Outback for international consumers at precisely the moment in which the relationship was becoming less significant for Australian audiences. Arguing for a more complex reading of the narrative than a simple justification of white supremacy and eventual triumph over the native/black, Williams shows that the narrative borrows features from the Western genre, where ultimately the hero must always be an exile from civilization himself. Mad Max's triumph over Aunty Entity restores to the Outback its status as an empty land; his success is at the cost of civilization itself. The image of the post-nuclear war landscape is integrated with the presumed featurelessness of Australia itself as a 'soft place' and the narrative thus depicts an internalization of the image of Australia as wilderness. Williams' nuanced study of Mad Max suffers however from brevity. While Williams tries to relate the third film to the trilogy as a whole, the discussion of Beyond Thunderdome is not given due space. The two finest chapters of the book are those where Williams discusses Black Atlantic texts and the idea of the 'Hindu Bomb'. In the former, Williams draws upon a wide range of texts, including fiction and poetry, by writers such as Langston Hughes and E.K. Brathwaite ( Hughes' Simple stories) in a reading that might be ignored by sf critics. Williams notes that the use of the Bomb against the Japanese, and not against the white Germans, was immediately read in Black Atlantic texts as an instance of racial antagonism. It is also here that Williams' epigraph begins to make sense. Williams reads the Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity, constitutive of but forever distanced from the notion of Western civilization. This very position allows writers such as Derek Walcott to launch powerful critiques of Western progress. Williams reads the resistance to nuclear weapons throughout the course of the civil rights movements, drawing upon the anti-nuclear and anti-racist stance in the work of W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin, and highlighting the important role played by black women activists such as June Jordan and Alice Walker. The logic of Roy's epigraph is more firmly explored in Williams' reading of Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (2001) as well as texts such as Romesh Gunesekera's The Sandglass (1998) and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006) in a chapter that investigates the underlying rhetoric of Hindu nationalism in the wake of nuclear weapon tests conducted by India and Pakistan in the 1990s. In an otherwise long-standing tradition, originating in the colonial period itself, of India as the birthplace and cradle of the Aryans, the assertion of nuclear dominance was invoked as a civilizational motif and a strategy of decolonization. Race, ethnicity and civilization mingle in the complex response to the 'Hindu Bomb' that managed to bring the Hindu centre-right party to power. Joshi's novel is set in two different times, the 1998 of nuclear tests and a 2017 nuclear war in which India emerges victorious against its enemies, wherein ideals such as the non-violence of the Indian independence movement are replaced by their exact opposite. As Williams argues, the assertion of nuclear power that gives credence to the rise of India to its rightful place in the world is the consequence of the marginalization faced by Indians and other non-whites in the Western world. Almost all of Williams' chapters are very well argued. The only disagreement one might raise is that the chapters seem like discrete entities when seen in relation to the thesis as a whole. Part of the reason is the brevity of some sections and overelaboration in others. An entire chapter is devoted to the study of Joshi's novel, while other chapters discuss several texts, thus diluting the force of the argument through either over-generalization or through excess and over-determinism. In spite of such quibbles, however, Williams manages to significantly extend readings of race and ethnicity in relation to the representation of nuclear war, and he treads new ground in his reading of some works, particularly contemporary ones. His combination of theoretical approaches and literary analysis also makes this an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the logic of postcolonial science fiction. This is a must-read book. Williams manages to significantly extend readings of race and ethnicity in relation to the representation of nuclear war, and he treads new ground in his reading of some works, particularly contemporary ones. His combination of theoretical approaches and literary analysis also makes this an invaluable resource for those seeking to understand the logic of postcolonial science fiction. This is a must-read book.