Dirty Wars: Landscape, Technology and Power in Western Literature since Pearl Harbour

该项目通过在此期间产生的富有想象力的文学作品，阅读珍珠港袭击以来美国西部的历史。它认为，美国加入第二次世界大战开启了西方空间军事化的进程，这一进程在冷战期间及冷战后仍在继续，并从根本上改变了西方在地区、国家和国际背景下的意义。军事化有多种形式，包括将日裔美国人关押在西部沙漠的营地；在新墨西哥州研制原子弹；无数军事设施遍布人口稀少的地区；对核武器和生物武器以及先进军事技术进行广泛的地上和地下试验；贮存核废料和其他有毒废料的项目；与墨西哥边境的防御工事和监视；以及在边境地区和中南美洲进行的旷日持久的“毒品战争”。这些政策和事态发展导致人口流离失所；建立隔离区和重兵把守的安全限制；收回数百万英亩的公共土地，包括许多土著圣地；以及大面积的污染，包括植物群和当地社区。这个过程帮助西部成为美国最强大的地区之一，无论是政治上还是经济上，并推动了西部城市的崛起，同时也通过排斥各种形式的废物——不需要的和贫穷的人口，无法修复的污染景观，成千上万的有毒物质，这些物质将在数千年内仍然是一个威胁。通过对大量小说和非小说文本的批判性考察，其中许多尚未得到持续的批判性关注，本研究认为，在过去的半个世纪里，关于西方的写作试图以不同的方式质疑日常生活军事化的社会和环境后果。总之，这些文本提供了该地区的另一种历史形式，旨在揭示政治和军事工业利益联盟推动“安全”论点的方式，这些论点有助于使土地和社区的剥削和破坏合法化。本研究按时间顺序排列，追踪了文学对军事化的反应，从拘留到“毒品战争”，并通过考虑二战后西方历史揭示的意识形态和实践的令人不安的连续性来结束，这些意识形态和实践指向了9 / 11之后对感知到的安全威胁的强烈军事化反应。简而言之，本研究将后珍珠港西部视为当代美国政治文化的熔炉。它还在这一时期找到了批判和抵抗的文献，对军事化国家安全国家的辩护者所推动的想象共识提出了有力的反驳。

This project reads the history of the Western United States since the attack on Pearl Harbour through the imaginative literature produced during the period. It argues that entry of the US into World War II inaugurated a process of the militarisation of Western space that continued during the Cold War and after and which radically transformed the meaning of the West in its regional, national and international contexts. Militarisation has taken a number of forms, including the internment of Japanese Americans in camps in the desert West; the development of the atomic bomb in New Mexico; the siting of innumerable military installations throughout the sparsely populated region; the extensive above ground and underground testing of nuclear and biological weapons and advanced military technologies; the projects to store nuclear and other toxic waste; the fortification and surveillance of the border with Mexico; and the protracted 'war on drugs' that is conducted in the borderlands and into Central and South America. These policies and developments have involved the displacement of populations; the construction of exclusion zones and heavily policed security restrictions; the withdrawal of millions of acres of public land, including many sacred indigenous sites; and the contamination of vast areas, including flora and local communities. The processes that have helped the West become one of the most powerful regions in the US, both politically and economically, and has served to drive the rise of Western cities, has also constructed by exclusion various forms of waste-unwanted and abjected populations, irredeemably contaminated landscapes, tons of toxic matter that will remain a threat for thousands of years.Through the critical examination of a wide-range of fictional and non-fiction texts, many of which have as yet received little sustained critical attention, this study argues that writing about the West over the last half-century has variously attempted to interrogate the social and environmental consequences of the militarization of everyday life. Together, these texts provide a form of alternative history of the region that seeks to expose the way a coalition of political and military-industrial interest have pushed arguments about 'security' that served to legitimise the exploitation and destruction of land and communities. Structured chronologically, this study tracks the literary response to militarisation from internment to the 'war on drugs' and concludes by considering the ways in which the history of the post-WWII West reveals disturbing continuities of ideology and practice that point toward the kinds of strenuously militarised responses to perceived security threats post-September 11. In short, this study sees the post-Pearl Harbour West as the crucible of contemporary American political culture. It also locates during this period a literature of critique and resistance that offers a powerful rejoinder to the imagined consensus promoted by the apologists of the militarised national security state.