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"GABRIELLE HECHT"
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Being Nuclear
Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had \"sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa\" (later specified as the infamous \"yellowcake from Niger\"). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did 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? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be \"nuclear.\" Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear--a state that she calls \"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, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one.Hecht follows uranium's path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market. She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
eBook
Being nuclear : Africans and the global uranium trade
Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear - a state that she calls 'nuclearity' - lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between 'developing nations' and 'nuclear powers'. Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one.
Book
INTERSCALAR VEHICLES FOR AN AFRICAN ANTHROPOCENE
How can we incorporate humanist critiques of the Anthropocene while harnessing the notion’s potential for challenging political imagination? Placing the Anthropocene offers one way forward; the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame. Navigating the Anthropocene from Africa requires attending to scale both as an analytic and an actor category. In order to do so, this essay proposes the notion of interscalar vehicles: objects and modes of analysis that permit scholars and their subjects to move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space. This essay discusses the creation and destruction of value/waste and pasts/futures around a uranium mine in Mounana, Gabon, to unpack the political, ethical, epistemological, and affective dimensions of interscalar vehicles and their violent Anthropocenic implications.
Journal Article
On the Importance of the Visual... and of Mentoring
Hecht pays tribute to international scholar and technology historian Tom Hughes. He conveys that Hughes subtle brilliance, already evident in the classroom, made him magnificent mentor. Hughes found large-scale technology profoundly moving. But his admiration of Edison and other system builders didn't blind him to their foibles.
Journal Article
History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa
This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems - and apartheid more generally - as forms of 'technopolitics', hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for Western governments and international anti-apartheid activists, who fought to limit South Africa's access to these systems. We argue that nuclear systems enacted the technopolitics of national identity, while computers expressed a technopolitics of social identity.
Journal Article
Entangled Geographies
The Cold War was not simply a duel of superpowers. It took place not just in Washington and Moscow but also in the social and political arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, Cold War tensions were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful way to shape countries politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Entangled Geographiesexplores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became entangled in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today's globalized world. The essays address such topics as the islands and atolls taken over for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, apartheid-era South Africa's efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation, international technical assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi'i rebellion, and the momentary technopolitics of emergency as practiced by Medecins sans Frontières. The contributors to Entangled Geographies offer insights from the anthropology and history of development, from diplomatic history, and from science and technology studies. The book represents a unique synthesis of these three disciplines, providing new perspectives on the global Cold War.
eBook
The Power of Nuclear Things
This essay explores three historical genealogies of U.S. President George W. Bush's infamous 2003 claim that Saddam Hussein sought \"uranium from Africa\" to fuel nuclear weapons. First, it considers the problem of when uranium counts as a \"nuclear\" thing, when it doesn't, and what Africa has to do with it. Second, it explores how Niger's politics, priorities, and conflicts have shaped the production and distribution of its uranium. Third, it examines an earlier moment when African provenance of uranium was geopolitically contested-the flow of Namibian uranium to the U.S., Japan, and Europe during the height of international sanctions against apartheid-showing how the entwining of licit trade and black markets made African things invisible. The essay as a whole explores how the distribution of power in material things and symbolic circulations makes some things nuclear, some things commodities, some things African, and some things all three.
Journal Article
Africa and the Nuclear World: Labor, Occupational Health, and the Transnational Production of Uranium
What is Africa's place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any “nuclear activities.” Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were “exposed to higher amounts of internal radiation than … workers in any other segment of the nuclear energy industry.” What, then, does it mean for a workplace, a technology, or a nation to be “nuclear?” What is at stake in that label, and how do such stakes vary by time and place?
Journal Article