Browsing by Author "Wilson, Clint"

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    Reporting Exposure: The Midwives of Nagasaki
    (2024-03) Wilson, Clint
    Between June 1950 and January 1954, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) piloted a novel program partnering with midwives’ associations in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, branding the enterprise the “Genetics Registration Program.” This short-lived collaboration aimed to surface firsthand reports of pre- or neonatal death and even physical corpses for autopsies, for which midwives were remunerated at a set scale by the American scientists in charge. So detailed were these largely financial records that reporting within “12 hrs. of death” was worth double the rate of reporting “later than 24 hrs. after death,” according to memos contained within William “Jack” Schull Collection at the McGovern Historical Center in Houston, Texas. This article, “Reporting Exposure: The Midwives of Nagasaki,” interrogates how the “Early Termination Program,” a branch of the Genetics program defined “exposure” and how the “exposed” were determined to be “profitable objects for study,” as one memo articulated. At stake in this project is more than historical analysis; these ABCC documents illustrate paradigmatic responses to the scalar and social logics of toxicity, particular with reference to the measurement of distance and time. These archival documents reveal invaluable insights about first-of-its-kind statistical collation and confirmation biases, to say nothing of how they animate conversations about life, death, and the sociopolitical tensions this arrangement undoubtedly complicated.
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    Toxic Media: Poison and Pollution in the Modernist Imaginary, 1915–1965
    (2021-04-26) Wilson, Clint; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, Cary
    Toxic Media: Poison and Pollution in the Modernist Imaginary, 1915–1965 recovers a wider literary legacy invested in the concept of “toxicity” as a decidedly aesthetic term, connecting a growing awareness of environmental precarity to a new kind of ecological poetics. Scholars of modernist literature have, in recent years, taken the period’s engagement with toxicity more seriously, finding tropes of “toxic refreshment,” “toxic discourse,” or other variously ambivalent portrayals of the twentieth century’s hazardous wastes and by-products. Toxic Media, however, does not recuperate modernist writers as proto-environmental thinkers, but rather reexamines how the period’s art and literature contains eccentric descriptions that helpfully image toxicity as a process of mediation and thus extend the legacies of modernism far beyond its traditional, historical boundaries. In fact, this distinctly “modernist” sense of the toxic is more in keeping with the linguistics of toxicity, where the Greek toxicos rightly means “arrow,” not “poison.” The “toxic” has long been associated, therefore, with the media of dissemination and directionality, rather than discrete moments of poisonous irruption or exposure. In redirecting to the systems of exposure, rather than finite moments of exposure, Toxic Media hopes to chart new pathways into modernist studies as well as the environmental humanities, which often privilege the dramatic event above the less visible media that serve as the conditions of possibility for those events. Between the years of 1915 and 1965, modernist writers were working through these very systems of exposure in the form of bodily breath, urban infrastructure, and sites of waste. From World War I poetry to the writings of the Black Chicago Renaissance, from the high forms of poetic Symbolisme to the contemporary articulation of ecopoetics, modernist accounts of the toxic are invaluable for the way they redirect attention to ecological and literary media, ultimately demanding a new archaeology of toxicity as a medium unto itself.