Description
This article presents a postcolonial ethnography of how two distinct but connected nuclear communities, the British nuclear test veterans and Kiritimati islanders, came together in April 2018 on Kiritimati to memorialise, make sense of their experiences, and attempt to make themselves visible in light of shared but unequal exposure. During the tests (1957 to 1962), there was limited, controlled, and imbalanced interaction between military servicemen and the local community. While nuclear test veterans returned to the UK afterwards, the local community remained on the atoll. Firstly, this article considers how veterans reconciled and revisited their colonial memories of island life while co-producing a fragile nuclear kinship with the contemporary island community. This article critiques the limits of nuclear kinship and considers the extent to which these unequally exposed elderly British veterans and Indigenous groups can ever truly be ‘kin’. It provides insights into how memories of the same place and time are constituted through entanglements with power and colonialism to produce alternative realities for different groups. Secondly, this article explores how both groups have been unequally exposed: not just to ionising radiation, but also to the ongoing legacies of empire. Both radiation and post-coloniality are in many ways invisible. However, both phenomena have left traces that can be examined, uncovered, and observed. By contrasting the extraordinarily long half-lives of decaying radiation from the Grapple Tests with the long durée impacts of colonisation itself, the article contemplates the “half-life” of Empire, colonialism, and white supremacy, and how state recognition of each group’s nuclear citizenship differs dramatically due to ongoing coloniality. Finally, this article introduces the notion of echo to describe the way that historical power imbalances may persist and reverberate across space and time, and to consider how fragile nuclear kinship reveals broader issues of environmental imperialism in the Anthropocene.
