Jayita Sarkar will give a conference in English about her new book project titled : “Atomic Capitalism, a Global History”.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created, in the words of George Orwell, a world “horribly stable” and “a peace that is no peace,” increasing power of the state over the individual and of the United States over the world.
He book critically examines this view and assumptions about preponderance of the United States and the state itself by placing nuclear infrastructures in a global and transnational perspective.
The discovery of nuclear things— radium, radioactivity, uranium’s properties of fission, and plutonium— powerfully linked nuclear infrastructures to corporate violence, colonialism (settler and non-settler), and genocide, which characterized late nineteenth and twentieth-century Euro-American empires.
The uranium cycle and its material infrastructures thus both benefited from and bolstered an extractivist, surveillant, and inegalitarian global system through which capitalist actors and networks benefited by disenfranchising people in faraway colonies, dependent territories, and at home. The outcome has been a complex extractivist web of inequalities that is intrinsically linked to our current economic and environmental crises.
Schedule: 6-8 p.m.
Amphitheater Jaures, at 29 rue dULM
To register :