The Ocean on Fire

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings. She shows how Pacific nuclear survivors’ stories reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South transnational solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse.

Anaïs Maurer is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. Her research explores Indigenous decolonial ecologies, with a focus on nuclear imperialism and climate justice. Raised in Tahiti, she is conversant in colonial and Indigenous languages alike. For the past decade, she has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Pacific, compiling a unique corpus of Indigenous ecocritical stories in French, English, Spanish, Tahitian, Mangarevian, and Uvean, encompassing a wide variety of artistic genres from print literature to dances and graphic arts. She also collaborates with nuclear physicists to add her cultural and historical expertise to studies of nuclear contamination in French-occupied Polynesia. Her second monograph project is entitled ’Aita Atomi: Les artistes mā’ohi contre le colonialisme nucléaire. In addition to her academic work, she campaigns for nuclear reparations and for the abolition of nuclear weapons. 

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