Chernobyl's Radioactive Memory: Confronting the Impact of Nuclear Fallout

Abstract

This dissertation examines the accretive violence wrought by nuclear power on bodies and spaces through a study of Chernobyl’s transnational memory. By examining this infamous disaster, I clarify the process by which power renders those impacts invisible, as well as the ways in which memory can assist in making the real impacts of nuclear power visible. I use the term ‘radioactive memory’ to explain the potential of these memories to combat dominant narratives of nuclear power that attempt to contain the disaster’s radioactive excess. The term also encompasses the potential of any engagement with Chernobyl to provoke a deeper understanding of how nuclear power affects communities and the environment. I show how memory of nuclear disaster is conditioned in a variety of ways through multimodal and multifaceted interactions and encounters with Chernobyl in film, literature, tourism, and memorial practices. I employ a wide variety of theoretical approaches and frameworks in order to account for the myriad of possible engagements with the disaster’s memory. This dissertation challenges the idea that Chernobyl is a singular and isolated event, and instead locates it within a constellation of nuclear violence that includes an expansive history of nuclear disaster. Recent examinations on Chernobyl nuclear disaster have centered on its historical Soviet context, which while valuable, do not account for the influence of states, the nuclear industry, and other vested institutions in maintaining the global nuclear apparatus. Memory offers a generative arena for revealing the human costs and risks of living in a nuclear-powered world. A close examination of Chernobyl’s memory reveals how its impacts, along with the impacts of all nuclear disasters, concern everyone, because radiation cannot be contained within set spatial and temporal boundaries. In bringing more awareness to the mechanisms of memory that offer evidence of nuclear power’s destructive consequences, we might then be able to take responsibility for the bodily and psychological trauma inflicted by our own complicity in allowing nuclear power to develop unchecked. In doing so, we might also be able to envision a non-nuclear alternative for the future.