Black rainbow, blood-earth: Speaking the nuclearized Pacific in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow

Abstract

Nuclear testing on the Pacific Islands in the 20th century cemented nuclear colonialism as a defining feature of transnational neocolonialism, its ongoing consequences and justificatory fictions iterating across both the rapidly expanding nuclear and toxic waste disposal industries and headline-making transnational negotiations such as the 2015 US–India and Canada–India nuclear trade deals. This article probes nuclearism’s critical implications for postcolonial literary scholarship by investigating the nuclear thematics structuring leading West Samoan novelist Albert Wendt’s dystopian allegory of corporate totalitarianism, Black Rainbow. It explores how the novel characterizes nuclear toxicity as the intersection between material and spiritual colonialisms, from Aotearoa/New Zealand landscapes toxified by nuclear violence and colonial erasure to human bodies dis-eased when radiogenic illness entangles with the products of neo-liberal economics. Given Oceania’s centrality at the convergence of nuclear industries with the ongoing human and environmental costs of neocolonial violence, Wendt’s 1992 restorying of Oceanic resistance has never been more relevant.