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Reckoning Day
Race, Place, and the Atom Bomb in Postwar America
Foertsch also examines the location of African American characters in novels, science fiction, and survivalist nonfiction such as government-sponsored forecasts regarding post-nuclear survival. In these, black characters are often displaced or absented entirely: in doomsday narratives they are excluded from executive decision-making and the stories' often triumphant conclusions; in the nonfiction, they are rarely envisioned amongst the "typical American" survivors charged with rebuilding US society. Throughout Reckoning Day, issues of placement and positioning provide the conceptual framework: abandoned at "ground zero" (America's inner cities) during the height of the atomic threat, African Americans were figured in white-authored survival fiction as compliant servants aiding white victory over atomic adversity, while as historical figures they were often perceived as "elsewhere" (indifferent) to the atomic threat. In fact, African Americans' "position" on the bomb was rarely one of silence or indifference. Ranging from appreciation to disdain to vigorous opposition, atomic-era African Americans developed diverse and meaningful positions on the bomb and made essential contributions to a remarkably American dialogue.
Jacqueline Foertsch is Professor of English at the University of North Texas. She is author of Bracing Accounts, American Culture in the 1940s, and Enemies Within.
"Recommended."
--Choice
"Reckoning Day's real strength is its fearless exploration of a wide range of 'race-inflected' responses to the discourses of nuclear disaster."
--Stephanie Brown, Ohio State University, author of The Postwar African American Novel