Book review: Bodies, Affects, Politics: The Clash of Bodily Regimes

Abstract

pleasingly jarring exploratory experience. For example, a social history of Buckley Space Force Base coexists just a few clicks away from Jeff Gipe’s provocative 2015 memorial artwork, Cold War Horse. An image of the controversial Candelas housing development adjacent to Rocky Flats is a mere page away from a short essay by Katherine Schmidt on the Maybell Disposal Site. In this way, the Atlas condenses nuclear space and time. The featured essays are elegant and diverse in scope. They include authors such as Stephanie Malin, A. Laurie Palmer and Gretchen Heefner. Artistic highlights include Abbey Hepner’s ‘Uravan’, which is a collection of laser-cut engravings of the vanished uranium mill town of Uravan, superimposed onto the contemporary landscape. Allan Ginsberg’s wry 1978 ‘Plutonian Ode’ to Rocky Flats plutonium pit manufacturing plant and Claudia X. Valde’s poignant flag-based work, ‘For the Future, With Love’, are also featured. The cartography page within the Atlas offers a comprehensive, simple, and clickable A–Z of each nuclear site in Colorado. Upon selection, each location includes a brief referenced description and a link to a relevant keyword; for example, ‘Deployment, Training, Command and Control’ or ‘Refining’. However, the overarching site is deliberately multicursal, which creates a meandering but occasionally aimless user experience. While this format mirrors the anfractuous nature of nuclear issues, it may also create some navigational challenges for the casual reader. However, the inclusion of multiple pathways is creative, and does offer insights into the complexity and connectivity of nuclear places and mobilities. This project is representative of a larger inclusive turn in cultural geographies, more generally. While the Atlas is currently set across Colorado and its hinterland, I envisage that the globalised nature of the nuclear industrial establishment could offer an expansion upon this original work. Perhaps, in due course, we can hope for ‘A People’s Nuclear Atlas of the World’.