Apocalyptic Realism

Bibliographic Data

ID6057133
AuthorsRebecca S Oh (0000-0002-9863-8234, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, corresponding author), Rebecca Oh
Year2025
Volume17
Issue3
Pages546-565
Publication date2025-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-11942110
OpenAlexW7106555356
LanguageEN
References cited14

This article reads Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s documentary Arlit, deuxième Paris and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “Anointed” as examples of apocalyptic realism. This genre historicizes apocalypse and tracks the way futurelessness has been imposed selectively across the Global South. In the arid north of Niger, France’s uranium extraction has created a radioactive desert and turned postcolonial Niger into a continuing resource colony for France. In the Pacific, US nuclear colonialism made the Marshall Islands a proving ground and burial site for nuclear waste. Arlit and “Anointed” testify to the violence of nuclear colonialism by mobilizing a pessimistic aesthetic that attends especially to the destructive role of nuclear infrastructure. But Arlit and “Anointed” also record modes of continuity and community that go on in these places via alternative infrastructural systems of material distribution, care, and knowledge. Arlit and “Anointed” reflect on the deadly effects of nuclear colonialism while attesting to the ways radioactivity does not subsume the future. Together they illuminate the temporal and infrastructural antinomies central to an apocalyptic real

Arid · Colonialism · Nuclear weapon · Pessimism · Poetry · Realism

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Open DOIOpen Access