UC Davis

“Nuclear Poetics: Energizing Social Forms in Cold War America” argues that Black, Indigenous, queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist poet-activists were instrumental in shaping the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S. during the 1970’s and 80’s. These poets demonstrate how nuclear power both extends and intensifies white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, and settler logics. In turn, these anti-nuclear ideologies and imaginaries shaped and sustained social movements during this period. “Demonstration” as a method of representation and a type of action names how poetry articulates the obscured and contradictory logics of the nuclear age to generate new socio-ecological relations. In demonstrating the nuclear complex’s many forms—including weapons, waste, fallout, radiation, and uranium—these poets produce new social and aesthetic forms that reconfigure the nuclear complex's structures of oppression.