The Art of Living in the Nuclear Anthropocene

"The Art of Living in the Nuclear Anthropocene" is a story of kinship, grief, and place that asks an impossible question. Is there a connection between a sister’s illness and Manhattan Project nuclear waste in North St. Louis? It is a story of commingled histories of harm that plume outward, across boundaries engineered to separate and contain, and of community activism challenging norms of “security.” To hold together parallel forms of protest—against fast death caused by racist policing and slow death caused by military-scientific-industrial disregard—means moving beyond individuated grief to recognition of the entangled terrors of racial capitalism and nuclear colonialism that produce everyday carcinogenic relations. To do so is to fall into the world, mapped by material, embodied connections between St. Louis, Hiroshima, Hanford, and the Marshall Islands. This lecture explores telling terrible stories in a way that centers relationality and compels us to seek repair instead of closure.

Welland will be joined in conversation for this event by Holly M. Barker (Teaching Professor of Anthropology and Curator for Oceanic & Asian Culture at the Burke Museum) and Shannon Cram (Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell).

Sasha Su-Ling Welland is Chair & Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, and China Studies faculty member. Her first book, A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), traces the social history and border-crossing lives of two “modern girls,” a writer and a doctor, who emerged from China’s early twentieth-century women’s movement. Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2018) is an ethnography of Chinese contemporary art as a zone of cultural encounter, in which post-socialist revaluations of rural and urban space, public and private boundaries, and masculinity and femininity are represented and questioned. Her current research on embodied ecologies, rooted in her hometown of St. Louis, examines the entanglement of military and medicine, nuclear colonialism and racial capitalism in the Anthropocene production of everyday carcinogenic relations. An editorial board member of Journal of Visual Culture, Welland has published in Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Studies, positions: asia critique, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She has curated feminist art exhibits in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

Free and open to the public (no registration, seating open until filled).