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  • Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture by Alison Fields
  • Robert (Bo) Jacobs (bio)
Discordant Memories: Atomic Age Narratives and Visual Culture By Alison Fields. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 256.

"Containment—the process of gaining control over something harmful," writes Alison Fields, "is a key mechanism for responding to traumatic memories" (p. 16). Her book proceeds to explore nuclear-themed artwork as locations where the containment of nuclear memories has fractured, revealing a disjointed and evolving memory culture in the wake of Hiroshima. Fields opens with an exploration of the so-called "Hiroshima Maidens," twenty-five young women who experienced the nuclear attack on Hiroshima as children and were brought to the United States ten years later to receive reconstructive and plastic surgeries. This bold start establishes that institutions may strive to contain historical traumas in narratives of event, impact, and consequence, but they are better understood as organic and living beyond the memorialized event, just as the bodies of those who endured it.

The book then contrasts the formal memorializations of the attacks in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, these museums exemplifying the "discordant memories" of the title. Although the official curations—in service to the communities in which they are embedded—seem to describe disparate events, it is on the "leaking" of memory culture beyond both of these containers that the book centers its analysis. Fields argues that "the experience of atomic trauma cannot be contained" (p. 80), then proceeds to lay out several chapters detailing this dynamic.

These chapters explore a series of pieces by artists and writers working in multiple media who deconstruct and reenvision memory cultures of the nuclear attacks, augmenting their trajectories of inheritance. Many are master practitioners within their medium. Of particular note are the participatory [End Page 625] and responsive multimedia works by Shinpei Takeda, the range of historical and topical focuses of various members of the Atomic Photographers Guild, and the photographic explorations of Navajo uranium mining landscapes by Will Wilson. An examination of the role of manga in reproducing and then leaking outside of the formal Japanese Hiroshima narrative and the tension between survivor testimonies and official curation also reveal the vitality of this leaking.

Though it also surveys "atomic bomb literature" produced in Japan in the decades following the nuclear attacks, the book is at its best when analyzing visual artwork. Fields asserts that "visual expressions of memory offer possibilities for resisting linear, closed-off narratives of the past and for reflecting the continuing, and often cyclical, nature of trauma" (p. 19). We are fortunate the book includes seventeen full-color photographic plates that allow us to encounter a number of the original works that Fields describes.

Fields uses her inquiry to guide readers through the growing awareness that the 1945 nuclear attacks were not the solitary moments of nuclear harm on human beings and communities: to contextualize some of the artwork, she walks readers through the history of nuclear testing and uranium mining. This is most evident in the discussion of the work of members of the Atomic Photographers Guild, many of whom played a central role in foregrounding this ongoing history through their work. The fact that the Guild includes the work of Yoshito Matsushige, the only photographer to capture images on the actual day of one of the nuclear attacks on Japan, links the visualization of direct nuclear attack with ongoing assaults on human beings and the ecosystem during the Cold War.

In tracing how Hiroshima has continued leaking out of its curatorial containment, Fields shows us a history that is alive and imbricated with human beings who experienced the direct attack and all of us who continue to inherit and live amid its historical ripples. I was particularly interested in the complicated relationships that many of the pieces imply between radiologically affected communities in the United States and Hiroshima as both place and mythic icon. I welcome work that pursues that fault line, both artistically and politically, as well as work that extends this analysis into the many other sites of nuclear harm around the world.

A second generation of scholars...

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