My article, “Addressing the Atomic Specter: Ginsberg’s ‘Plutonian Ode’ and America’s Nuclear Unconscious” is now available to read in Symplokē 27.1-2 (2019).
“The poem, prophetic in its moment of writing, anticipated the larger social movement in which it would participate and addresses what I will call America’s nuclear unconscious. In the years following, during the peak of antinuclear protests in the United States, Ginsberg continued to revise and perform the poem. However, when the antinuclear protests of the late 1970s began to separate the issues of nuclear disarmament and power plant decommissioning, despite their many linked environmental, social, and political consequences, Ginsberg’s poem tried to hold them together.2 Composed at the edge of cold war détente, “Plutonian Ode” articulates what would soon be subsumed under Reagan-era escalation by figuratively drawing together nuclear weapons, waste, energy, and raw materials—forms of the nuclear that had been disarticulated in service of proliferation and what cultural historian Joseph Masco calls America’s “radioactive nation-building project” (2006). It is the repression of the relations between nuclear forms that forms America’s nuclear unconscious. And it is the work of the poem to manifest the contradictions that structure this enduring site and condition.”
Read the full article here.