ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes antinuclear literature by indigenous Pacific writers, taking the work of Marshallese performance poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner as a case study. By the time the US responded to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, American imperialism had been galvanized for more than a century by the notion of Manifest Destiny, a belief that the westward territorial expansion of the US was both inexorable and sanctioned by God. While US motivations for incursion into the Pacific were manifold, its operations in the Pacific during and beyond World War II witnessed an intensified confluence between Christian discourse and another bastion of American imperial culture: militarism. As is the case with the work of many other indigenous Pacific authors, however, Jetnil-Kijiner's work is also closely attuned to the environmental damage wreaked upon the Pacific as a result of nuclear testing and other Western geopolitical maneuvers.
