The Marshall Islands have been haunted by the violent legacy of U.S. nuclear testing during WWII, which rendered the Bikini Atoll, among other islands, uninhabitable to this day. My essay examines how Marshallese writer-activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner reimagines the atrocities of WWII nuclearism, in addition to the imbricated structures of militarism, colonialism, and anthropogenic climate change, through her video-poem "Monster", performed in Hiroshima, Japan, to forge intimate kinships with the disavowed, the disabled, and the disfigured. Routed through ancestral knowledges and cultural legends, "Monster" attends to the Marshallese feminized trauma of miscarriages and stillbirths as a result of nuclear radiation that is deeply felt across generations. I argue that Jetñil-Kijiner’s decolonial feminist of color poetics mobilize a monstrous and abject aesthetic as a resistive form of witnessing, mourning, and healing that registers more-than-human entanglements to navigate the conditions of racialized and gendered injury, environmental destruction, and nuclear refugeehood. Through a transnational video performance in a space that holds both violent imperial and parallel nuclear histories, Jetñil-Kijiner weaves together relationalities of care that traverse across oceanic, terrestrial, bodily, material, environmental, spatiotemporal, cultural, and linguistic borders. In doing so, Jetñil-Kijiner offers an alternative figuration of staking claims to state-sanctioned violence that applies pressure on the global regime of human rights and autonomous liberal human subject as organizing institutions and categories for enacting solidarities within and without the Pacific.

Authors:
Reese Aschheim Yau, New York University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Reese Aschheim Yau (they/them) is a currently an M.A. Candidate in Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. They are researching Asian/Pacific/American and Queer, Trans, and Feminist literary practices.

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