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Infrastructure Beyond Control: Clowning the Nuclear Age

Infrastructure Beyond Control: Clowning the Nuclear Age INFRASTRUCTURE BEYOND CONTROL: CLOWNING THE NUCLEAR AGE JESSICA HURLEY Clowns are, perhaps surprisingly, recurring fi gures in nuclear litera- ture. Russell Hoban’s 1980 post-nuclear-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker includes a mutation of the English clown/puppet show Punch and Judy as a major motif, while in a more realist mode the Māori novelist James George’s 2005 Ocean Roads features a character who has leukemia as a result of his father’s work developing the atom bomb, and who spends much of the novel performing beautifully-described clown routines. Martin Cruz Smith’s 1986 Stallion Gate, a historical novel about the construction of the fi rst nuclear infrastructures at Los Alamos, opposes the Western scientism of the nuclear complex with the decolonial epistemologies of Pueblo clowns, and in activist circles anti-nuclear protestors have dressed as clowns for their protest actions across two decades (Plowshares 2018). What is it, then, that makes clowning a go-to aesthetic form for thinking about nuclear infrastructures and their failures? My contention in this essay is that clowning, as an art form rooted in the tension between control and its loss, is uniquely able to help us to concep- tualize infrastructure (and specifi cally nuclear infrastructures) as a material object that http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png symploke University of Nebraska Press

Infrastructure Beyond Control: Clowning the Nuclear Age

Hurley, Jessica
symploke , Volume 28 (1) – Nov 24, 2020
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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © symploke
ISSN
1534-0627

Abstract

INFRASTRUCTURE BEYOND CONTROL: CLOWNING THE NUCLEAR AGE JESSICA HURLEY Clowns are, perhaps surprisingly, recurring fi gures in nuclear litera- ture. Russell Hoban’s 1980 post-nuclear-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker includes a mutation of the English clown/puppet show Punch and Judy as a major motif, while in a more realist mode the Māori novelist James George’s 2005 Ocean Roads features a character who has leukemia as a result of his father’s work developing the atom bomb, and who spends much of the novel performing beautifully-described clown routines. Martin Cruz Smith’s 1986 Stallion Gate, a historical novel about the construction of the fi rst nuclear infrastructures at Los Alamos, opposes the Western scientism of the nuclear complex with the decolonial epistemologies of Pueblo clowns, and in activist circles anti-nuclear protestors have dressed as clowns for their protest actions across two decades (Plowshares 2018). What is it, then, that makes clowning a go-to aesthetic form for thinking about nuclear infrastructures and their failures? My contention in this essay is that clowning, as an art form rooted in the tension between control and its loss, is uniquely able to help us to concep- tualize infrastructure (and specifi cally nuclear infrastructures) as a material object that

Journal

symploke – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Nov 24, 2020

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