Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh Krupar, eds, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021), reviewed by Joseph M Sussi

Abstract

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016: 31) describes ‘tentacular thinking’ through the arachnid’s sprawling ‘feelers’ that seem to stretch and entangle in mysterious and emergent ways, feeling in dark corners and wrestling with ‘a host of companions in sympoietic, threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting’. In A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021, henceforth referred to as Atlas), a ‘tentacular’ nuclear history is constructed that ‘feels out’ the lives ‘lived along’ the ‘nets and networks’ of the U.S. Nuclear Industrial Complex (p. 32). The Atlas is a remarkable digital book edited by the interdisciplinary artist Sarah Kanouse and the cultural geographer Shiloh Krupar. Kanouse, Krupar, and the over 40 contributors – including geographers, artists, anthropologists, and individuals directly impacted by the legacy of nuclear Colorado – unpack the sprawling history of nuclear development that has seismically and ecologically shaped Colorado as well as the mobilization of a labor force to implement the equally ‘tentacular’ administrative effort to mass produce the atomic bomb.