#elizabeth deloughrey

[fatehbaz]

Imperial dispossession in Greenland and islands of the Pacific. Making new suburbias. Exporting US domestic lifestyles.

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Within the Western popular imagination, places like the RMI [Marshall Islands] and Greenland are often used as mirrors or-perhaps more accurately-as bellwethers: an example of what could be (or what will become of) the so-called First World [...]. They are rarely made meaningful on their own. Instead, reports published in major news outlets describe a “melting” Greenland and a “disappearing” Marshall Islands by translating their loss through symbolic forms deemed more legible to the average American. [...] [N]uclear photography endeavored to “take the place out of the landscape” so as to replace public concerns around ethics instead with awe [...], [undertaken simultaneously as] movement of peoples necessary to, first, produce terra nullius-a space emptied and made available [...] -and second, to mark that space as distinctly American through the installation of miniature suburbias in the form of military bases and bunkers [...]. Social, geographical, and material practices of division [...] reflect what Aimee Bahng has referred to as “settler colonial… constructions of enclosure” [...].

[A] “homemaking project” that once collapsed the “here” and “there” of US empire now envisions a difference that overlooks American complicity in apocalyptic climate futures upon Indigenous lands across North America, Oceania, and the Arctic. It is, in part, because of the presumed insignificance of the Marshall Islands and Greenland (and by extension their people) that these two places became pulled into the crosshairs of [...] geopolitical [projects]. [...]

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As Marshallese activist Darlene Keju-Johnson recalled, “in 1946, a U.S. Navy officer came to Bikini Island and told Chief Juda, ‘We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind [...]’… the naval officer did not tell the chief that the Bikinians would never see their home again” [...]. Moved to first Rongdrik (Rongerik), then Ānewetak, then Kuwajleen (Kwajalein), and then Kōle (Kili), ri-Pikinni struggled to survive as the United States tested sixty-seven nuclear bombs on Pikinni (Bikini) and other nearby sites between 1946 and 1958. [...] These ideologies were exported in the form of US military installations like the US Army Garrison Kwajalein Atoll and Greenland’s Camp Century, constructed in midcentury. [...] Historian Lauren Hirschberg’s analysis of the suburbanization of Kuwajleen highlights how the heteronormative nuclear family structure became central to the remaking of the atoll as both a space of exception and ��a colonial technology for marking the island as a familiar domestic national space” [...].

Through a major partnership with Bell Telephone Laboratories, the US military promoted life on Kuwajleen as a space of supreme comfort and leisure through the publication of welcome guides that boasted salons, prime rib dinners, and department store shopping [...]. Meanwhile, Marshallese day laborers who provided janitorial, housekeeping, and groundskeeping services commuted from Epjā (Ebeye), where they lived both segregated from and economically beholden to the base [...].

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Just as Marshallese were displaced from Pikinni and other atolls, Inuktun were moved to accommodate American military operations. [...] One of the largest military bases ever constructed by the United States, Thule served as a key strategic location [...] and, simultaneously, distracted from undisclosed nuclear activity at nearby Camp Century, a “city under the ice” that housed an arsenal of six hundred nuclear missiles [...]. [P]lans for Thule’s expansion in May 1953 included the forced removal of eighty-seven Inuktun and the demolition of their homes [...].

Newsreels about Camp Century similarly highlighted features designed to replicate American suburban life “under the ice.” Created by the United States in 1960, Camp Century operated as a cover for Project Iceworm, which used a network of subterranean tunnels burrowed under the Greenland ice sheet [...]. The camp, which operated only until 1966, comprised living quarters, research facilities, and a portable nuclear reactor for the stated purpose of better understanding military effectiveness and operations in Arctic conditions. In the minds of Americans, who came to know this “city under the ice” through maps, photographs, and live footage circulated by the US government, it functioned as a kind of ultimate fantasy fallout shelter that promised to keep the American way of life secure and safe [...]. The US Department of Defense 1961 short film Big Picture: City under the Ice is one example of the substantial media production surrounding Camp Century, which reveled in the engineering used to build closed-system facilities for maintaining American lifestyles amid what is frequently referred to as “barren” and “lifeless” landscapes. In it, the narrator lists items representing domestic comforts: prefabricated houses, hot showers, and “even ice cream” as a subtle underscore of the hermetic barrier between the bunker and the glacier [...].

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As Anne Spice points out in their analysis of Indigenous resistance [...], long-standing “binaries of civilized/savage and culture/nature” continue to inform theorizations of the built environment as marks of modernity. The role that infrastructure plays in state-building projects has a capillary function, pumping power in the form of oil, electricity, water, people, and capital into Indigenous territories in ways that, in turn, obscure Native presence. Tracing a substantial anthropology of infrastructure that locates transportation systems like pipelines, railroads, and highways as “settler colonial technologies of invasion,” Spice reveals how these material networks naturalize settler presence as seemingly stable, inevitable, and permanent [...]

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Text above by: Hi’ilei Julia Hobart. “Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures across Indigenous Waters.” Media + Environment 3 (1). 2021. DOI at: doi dot org/10.1525/001c.21536. Also at: mediaenviron dot org/article/21536-atomic-histories-and-elemental-futures-across-indigenous-waters [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[pairedaeza]

As a vehicle of history, a vessel of blood, and a moving island, the voyaging canoe represents diaspora origins and the capacity to navigate the future.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, from Routes and Roots

[fatehbaz]

In the June 2, 1848, edition of Frederick Douglass’s North Star, an article titled “The Telescope and Microscope” appeared [...]. The article was reprinted from [...] a popular collection of sermons by the Scottish Presbyterian minister Thomas Chalmers. Chalmers was a major contributor to nineteenth-century debates about pluralism, or the possible existence of worlds beyond Earth [...]. In Douglass’s excerpt, Chalmers replicates his famous “microscope argument” [...]: just as [...] [there is] the teeming microcosm of life to be found in a single drop of water, so [there might be] masses of life [...] on other planets [...]. Chalmers observes, “In the leaves of every forest, in the flowers of every garden, in the waters of every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life.” The microscope is able to show us, for the first time in human history, that “within and beneath all that minuteness which the aided eye of man is able to explore, there may be a world of invisible beings, and that, could he draw aside the mysterious veil which shrouds it from our senses, we might behold a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy can unfold.” We might pass by Douglass’s inclusion of “The Telescope and Microscope” as an interesting historical footnote if not for the fact that he reprinted this same article in an 1855 edition of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In fact, microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific tools and technologies made regular appearances in both the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, as they did in a number of other black newspapers throughout the antebellum period. The microscope held a particular place of interest for contributors to and editors of African American newspapers. [...] Another column reprinted in the Christian Recorder makes a similar revelation, observing that the microscope reveals one of the most “startling revelations” of contemporary scientific research: Life is everywhere. [...] The focus in both the North Star and the Christian Recorder on a possible “world of invisible beings” detected only through the optic powers of the microscope, [...] bodies that evade everyday vision and surveillance, takes on a special significance in the context of a newspaper published with the express aim of both encouraging escapes from slavery -- acts of strategically escaping visibility -- and gaining visibility and recognition [...].

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All text above by: Britt Rusert. “Delany's Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation.” American Quarterly. December 2013. [Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[pairedaeza]

Diasporic discourses often position masculine subjects as normative travelers who rely upon a feminized sea in order to imaginatively regenerate across time and space. This is why, in the language of diaspora and globalization, masculinized trajectories of nomadic subjects and capital attain their motility by invoking feminized flows, fluidity, and circulation, while the feminine (as an organizing concept) and women (as subjects) are profoundly localized.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey, from Routes and Roots