Being nuclear : Africans and the global uranium trade / Gabrielle Hecht
- Author:
- Hecht, Gabrielle
- Published:
- Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2012]
- Copyright Date:
- ©2012
- Physical Description:
- xx, 451 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
- Contents:
- Introduction : the power of nuclear things. Proliferating markets -- Imperial projections and market devices -- Colonial enrichment -- The price of sovereignty -- In the shadows of the market -- Nuclear work. A history of invisibility -- Nuclearity at work -- Invisible exposures -- Hopes for the irradiated body -- Conclusion : uranium in Africa.
- Summary:
- Remaking our understanding of the nuclear age, the author is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, but does that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? She lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be "nuclear." She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure and asks, could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? These questions about being nuclear--"nuclearity"--lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between "developing nations" (often former colonies) and "nuclear powers" (often former colonizers). Nuclearity is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one. The author follows uranium's path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market.
- Subject(s):
- ISBN:
- 9780262017268 (hardcover : alk. paper)
0262017261 (hardcover : alk. paper) - Bibliography Note:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [407]-451) and index.
- Source of Acquisition:
- Purchased with funds from the Edward J. and Eleanor Black Nichols Library Endowment Fund; 2013
- Endowment Note:
- Edward J. and Eleanor Black Nichols Library Endowment Fund
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