ABSTRACT
The political and cultural independence movements which sparked first-wave Oceanian literature emerged alongside the violent incursion of ‘atomic modernity’ into Pacific Islands nations. Between 1946 and 1996, the United States, United Kingdom, and France used the Pacific as a testing ground for nuclear weapons development. The nuclear colonisation of Oceania created a cascade of reproductive, health, environmental, economic, and political challenges with consequences for survivors, their families, and ecosystems that continue to this day. It also sparked Oceania’s regional movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, first through the Against Testing on Moruroa committee (ATOM) and then through the better-known Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP). As the Oceanian renaissance expanded alongside the NFIP in the 1970s, anti-nuclear activism emerged as an acute concern in the rising pan-Oceanic cultural movement. First-wave authors created what is now an established and growing field of Pacific anti-nuclear literature. Within this canon, Oceanian women writer-activists were determined to hold international nuclear policy—and local anti-nuclear politics—to account for the distinct, gender-specific violences nuclear colonialism caused for women and children.
From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, concurrent members of the anti-nuclear, women’s, and Oceanian literary movements transformed first-wave literature into a space for women’s insights into nuclearised modernity. Defying conventional boundaries between literature and nonfiction print advocacy, they depicted nuclear tests as both an immediate material threat and a synecdoche for the gender-specific consequences of militarised development policy in colonised and newly independent Pacific nations. This chapter investigates the interwoven development of these three movements through three case studies: Jully Makini’s poems linking domestic violence with nuclear militarisation and cash-and-aid-dependent capitalism; Vanessa Griffen’s advocacy against the reproductive, economic and ecological impacts of nuclear tests; and Cita Morei’s leadership in Belau’s anti-nuclear struggle. As a distinct body within first-wave literature, their texts make a vital contribution to the juncture between Oceanian literature and modernist studies, addressing both the aesthetic and political legacies of European and North American modernisms and a broader ‘global’ modernity spawned by nuclear violence.
