Anaïs Maurer
Research project
L’Empire et l’atome: Different perspectives on French nuclear testing in Africa and Oceania
Project summary
Indigenous art under French nuclear colonialism
France values its status as the only nuclear-armed power in the European Union, but it did not develop its nuclear strike capacity on its own soil. Rather, it detonated its 210 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in its colonies, first in Algeria, then in French-occupied Polynesia. For over half a century, irradiated frontline communities have consistently opposed this colonial dimension of French geostrategy.
L’Empire et l’atome explores how half a century of Indigenous art under French nuclear colonialism complements, challenges, and enriches historical and scientific narratives about France’s nuclear strike capacity. Analysing songs, dances, paintings, graffiti, novels and digital poetry from frontline communities, this study complicates the story of France’s contemporary deterrance policy and its nuclear legacy in Algeria and Polynesia.
A new chronology of decolonial environmental activism
An transciplinary history of nuclear colonialism offers a new chronology of decolonial environmental activism. Political opposition to nuclear testing in Algeria and French-occupied Polynesia was stymied and silenced, both during and after the tests. But this project demonstrates that opposition to France’s deterrence strategy flourished away from the public sphere, in the interstitial spaces afforded by songs, dance, and literature. Analyzing antinuclear artworks in Tamazight, Reo Tahiti, and Reko Pa’umotu from the early 1960s that eschewed French censorship, this study complicates the chronological discourse about antinuclear resistance found in recently declassified military archives.
Moreover, while computer modelling of fallout focus obscures the specificities of irradiated victims and state archives focus on the deeds of the male politicians, soldiers, and scientists who speerheaded the nuclear project, Indigenous art offers a history led by different actors, with different priorities. With its feminist denunciation of the health consequences of testing, Indigenous art gives a voice to the stolen generation of stillborn irradiated children and to their mothers unable to give life under the nuclear sun. These subaltern perspectives, which are mere whispers in state archives, become a powerful cry in Amazigh and Mā’ohi “anarchives.” L’Empire et l’atome challenges asceptic and disciplinarily siloed historical writing, and asks what weight should be given to embodied experiences of nuclearity, alongside computer modeling and archival recording.
Biography
Anaïs Maurer is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her research explores Indigenous decolonial ecologies, with a focus on nuclear imperialism and climate justice. Her first monograph, The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists (Duke University Press, 2024), analyzes Pacific artists’ transgenerational fight against the nuclear arms race and climate change, by underscoring the environmental racism at the roots of both existential threats. The Ocean on Fire was awarded the MLA’s Scaglione prize in Comparative Literature and was listed in International Affairs‘ “10 best books” reading list.
Raised in Tahiti, Anaïs Maurer strives to produce public scholarship that benefits frontline communities. She has shared her research with nuclear survivors’ associations, schoolteachers, and governmental officials in Polynesia as well as at the United Nations. In addition to her academic work, she campaigns for nuclear reparations and for the abolition of nuclear weapons as a board member of the Nuclear Truth Project.
