Colgate University Assistant Professor of Geography Emily Mitchell-Eaton spoke on Indigenous Pacific Islander — or Pasifika — feminist geographies in the context of resisting the intersecting violences of imperialism and nuclear testing in a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies brown bag presentation titled “Feminism Against Empire: Using Feminist Methods for Justice in U.S. Pacific Diasporas” on Tuesday, April 15.
Mitchell-Eaton began by explaining how working with feminist geographic methodologies in the context of nuclear empire was a longtime personal interest that evolved out of her recent book project, “New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States.” Her book explores an unlikely connection shaped by the spatial processes of imperialism and migration between the American town of Springdale, Ark. and the Marshall Islands, where the U.S. conducted nuclear testing in the 20th century. Mitchell-Eaton demonstrated the intersecting nature of colonialism and nuclearity, emphasizing how nuclear testing constituted a form of imperial violence for nuclear-affected communities.
“We’re thinking about a history of nuclear testing, which is not just testing,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “‘Testing’ tends to have a kind of a benign or banal association versus atomic bombing, right? But these tests were real, experienced as warfare by many of the people of the communities that lived through them.”
During the course of her research, Mitchell-Eaton found a gap in the geographic scholarship of nuclear testing.
“One of the things I noticed in these mapping projects was a troubling trend in nuclear-affected communities […] that a lot of these women, especially women’s art and activism, were completely absent from a lot of these mapping projects,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “They sort of vanished from the story that these maps were telling.”
Mitchell-Eaton drew on Indigenous and feminist Pasifika scholarship and activism in continuing her research, working towards an understanding of how nuclear maps, even those created with the intention of generating awareness about nuclear justice, tended to reproduce the imperial power dynamics that enabled nuclear testing on Indigenous lands in the first place. For example, Mitchell-Eaton analyzed popular photographs of nuclear detonations from a perspective high in the clouds to advance her feminist critique of how visual representations can perpetuate colonial geographic imaginaries.
“With no discernible landmarks to help the viewer like us identify location, and no life forms to give the viewer a sense of the social meaning of the place, these blasts became simply spectacles,” Mitchell-Eaton said.
Mitchell-Eaton also criticized nuclear devastation simulations conducted by the American government in Nevada, in close proximity to real human victims of U.S. nuclear testing – unknowing and unwilling participants in the real violence being acted out in the abstraction of digital and in-person ‘war game’ scenarios.
These two trends of nuclear visualization persist into contemporary ways of looking at the effects of nuclear weapons. Mitchell-Eaton focused on the problematic nature of the nuclear overlay map — maps in which a nuclear event that has occurred in one geographic location is superimposed onto another location. A popular example of a nuclear overlay map presented by Mitchell-Eaton was styled as an interactive game, allowing players to simulate the consequences of dropping the atomic bomb used in Hiroshima in 1945 by the U.S. on their own American hometowns. She explained how a feminist methodological analysis helped her to develop an original critique of the problem posed by these kinds of maps.
“Feminist geographic analyses of maps tend to look at things like positionality, identity, the social and lived meanings of place and relationality between place, emotions and so-called everyday experiences and stories,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “What I found was that many of these dimensions were actually missing from these maps, so I thought a feminist critique was sort of well-poised to help us understand these maps.”
Mitchell-Eaton laid out four feminist critiques of nuclear overlay maps, focusing on how they eliminate the relationality between places and place-based actors, reinforce colonial notions of Indigenous lands as empty, misleadingly depict nuclear events as fixed points or snapshots rather than as events whose effects extend out in time and space and finally permit viewers continued geographic ignorance of the places and people that have experienced nuclear testing and bombing, rather than educating them.
“While we might gain kind of an emotional proximity to a real, albeit distant event — we’re simulating that it happens to our home, maybe it makes us feel something about what it might feel like if this actually happened at home — we lose a sense of relationality between places,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “To remove the relationality between the U.S. military and those two Japanese cities and their civilian population targets is to obscure U.S. culpability in this military atrocity. What we don’t see once that distance between perpetrator and target is removed is how that distance mattered and what and who traversed it.”
Sophomore Pule Motsamai was surprised by Mitchell-Eaton’s conclusion, having used nuclear overlay maps before and having previously found them to be useful in promoting nuclear justice awareness.
“It was very intriguing to hear a new perspective on nuclear simulations. I’d always appreciated these types of ‘what-if’ maps for their anti-war sentiment, because they demonstrate the awful scope of nuclear warfare,” Motsamai said. “However, the presentation highlighted how the decontextualization of these nuclear events removes real human experience from nuclear violence, which is the most important part of the story.”
Junior Natalie Yale expressed interest in how Mitchell-Eaton applied specifically feminist methodologies to her research on decolonizing the nuclear empire.
“I was particularly drawn to Professor Mitchell Eaton’s commitment to a feminist methodology when considering nuclear overlay maps and artistic counter-cartographies because it spoke to the transdisciplinary applicability of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies praxis,” Yale said. “Brown bags in general — and in particular the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies series — are exciting because they offer a unique window into faculty research in a way that doesn’t always come across in class. The brown bags show that professors are teachers and researchers.”
Mitchell-Eaton concluded her brown bag by presenting alternative examples of spatial representations that effectively capture the various dimensions of nuclear effects, specifically working within Pasifika women’s art and activism. For example, the piece “Nuclear Hemorrhage: Enewetak Does Not Forget” by Joy Enomoto and No’u Revilla was framed by Mitchell-Eaton as successfully reflecting the lasting impact of nuclear testing on the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Similarly, Mitchell-Eaton presented the performance-based poem “Anointed” by poet and climate activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner as showcasing the Marshallese lived experience of colonialism and U.S. nuclear testing.
“These are really different ways of telling spatial stories about nuclear legacies and nuclear justice than we saw in the previous nuclear simulations,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “These alternative nuclear visualizations, I think, offer us really great potential for developing translocal and transnational feminist solidarities that are premised upon relational, lived understanding of place.”
Ultimately, Mitchell-Eaton emphasized how feminist perspectives on geography play a vital role in challenging our unquestioned assumptions about spatial representations.
“As geographers often say, maps are powerful. They shape the way that we’ve come to know the world, far from being benign or neutrally descriptive depictions of space,” Mitchell-Eaton said. “Maps are always subjective. They’re always telling a certain story — so what are the kinds of stories that we want our maps to tell?”
