Shiloh R. Krupar, Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

Many nuclear and other U.S. military facilities from World War II and the Cold War are now being closed and remediated. Some of these sites have even been transformed into nature refuges and hailed as models of environmental stewardship. Yet, as Shiloh R. Krupar argues, these efforts are too often doing less to solve the environmental and health problems caused by military industrialism than they are acting to obscure the reality of ongoing contamination, occupational illnesses, and general conditions of exposure.

Using an unusual combination of empirical research, creative nonfiction, and fictional satire, Hot Spotter’s Report examines how the biopolitics of war promotes the idea of a postmilitary and postnuclear world, naturalizing toxicity and limiting human relations with the past and the land. The book’s case studies include the conversion of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal into a wildlife refuge, a project that draws on a green “creation story” to sanitize other histories of the site; the cleanup and management of the former plutonium factory Rocky Flats, where the supposed transfiguration of waste into wilderness allows the government to reduce the area it must manage; and a federal law intended to compensate ill nuclear bomb workers that has sometimes done more to benefit former weapons complexes.

Detecting and exposing such “hot spots” of contamination, in part by satirizing government reports, Hot Spotter’s Report seeks to cultivate irreverence, controversy, coalitional possibility, and ethical responses. The result is a darkly humorous but serious and powerful challenge to the biopolitics of war.

University of Minnesota Press catalog
on Amazon

INTERVIEW!  Shiloh Krupar on Hot Spotter’s Report, interviewed by Stuart Elden, Society and Space (October 16, 2013), https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-fables-of-toxic-waste

“The nuclear remaking of the world is the ambitious theme of Shiloh R. Krupar’s innovative and often startling new text. Dispatches from a natural world saturated with the toxic products of the U.S. nuclear state perform the uncertain futures, mutant ecologies, and new subjectivities of a post-nuclear America—an important contribution not only to environmental studies, critical theory, and nuclear studies but also to narrative form.”

Joe Masco (University of Chicago)

“Hot Spotter’s Report is at once a devastating indictment of ‘green war’ and a hopeful search for new conditions of existence in and beyond the toxic residues of militarism. Written with wit and passion, Shiloh R. Krupar’s irreverent experiments with fable, satire, and creative nonfiction do much more than disrupt the ongoing sanitization of military violence; they open space for new coalitions and political imaginings in domestic landscapes marked by the legacies of imperial war. A refreshingly novel approach to environmental and political geography.”

Bruce Braun (University of Minnesota)

BOOK FORUM AND REVIEWS

(1) BAR Book Forum! Interview with Roberto Sirvent on on Hot Spotter’s Report, Black Agenda Report (December 10, 2020), https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-shiloh-krupars-hot-spotters-report

“The U.S. military claims it is “green,” but what the Pentagon is really trying to prove is the planetary sustainability of war. . . . How we can foster care, accountability, and the right to self-determination through means other than such forms of militarized sovereignty?”

Shiloh Krupar, from the BAR Book Forum on Hot Spotter’s Report

(2) Antipode Book Review Symposium (2015) with Jenna Loyd, Julie Sze, Ryan Griffis, and Cindi Katz, http://antipodefoundation.org/2015/09/29/hot-spotters-report/   Introduction, by Jenna Loyd – excerpt:

“Shiloh Krupar’s Hot Spotter’s Report is an experiment. She pushes geography beyond the confines of social scientific inquiry and into terrains of art practice and performance where questions of research process and cultural production are much more expansive. Moreover, she draws on political rhetorics of satire, camp, and irony to diagnose and speak back to absurd realities of nuclear ecologies and governance. Her work makes important contributions to understandings of spectacle, the production of nature-human relationships, and the intimate labor and health politics of nuclear production. Not least, this project is committed to theorizing and developing practices for recognizing and opposing state technologies of erasure, forgetting, and violence.

This book review symposium gathers essays from three distinct vantage points: Ryan Griffis, a theorist and artist in art practice; Julie Sze, a theorist and practitioner of environmental justice; and Cindi Katz, a feminist geographer. This scope of critical commentary speaks to the range of intellectual, aesthetic, and political domains that Shiloh Krupar’s work spans. . . . In my opening essay, I reflect on the personal stake that I have in the project . . . before offering a brief overview of the approach, content, and signal contributions of Hot Spotter’s Report. Next, each of the contributors gathered here brings a unique disciplinary perspective and focus to a particular dimension of Krupar’s work: Julie Sze situates Hot Spotter’s Report within the context of American Studies and environmental humanities; Ryan Griffis takes up the question of documentary narrative and naturalism; and Cindi Katz reflects on irreverence and its methodological and formal imperative in politics and radical geography. Closing out the forum, Shiloh Krupar describes how she has put hot spotting to work in her own home as a modest (and wildly creative and historical) practice of demilitarization.

“Hot Spotter’s Report is a groundbreaking and completely original work. Not since Valerie Kuletz’s (1998) The Tainted Desert has a scholar directly handled the politics of nuclear contamination and the cultural politics place in the US West in such an innovative fashion. . . . The book is rigorously researched, and comes from a standpoint of sustained critique of military nuclear culture.”

Julie Sze

“Hot Spotter’s Report is a complex investigation into the politics of nuclear waste in the United States. More specifically, it is an investigation into how these politics have been simultaneously shaped by the larger cultural politics of non-human nature and the bureaucracies that govern relations between the nation and its subjects.”

Ryan Griffis

“Shiloh Krupar’s Hot Spotter’s Report is an irreverent deadly serious critical engagement with the never-ending residues of war and militarism. It works by turns and all at once in several visual and literary genres–fable, play, poetry, “creative” non-fiction (including government reports), “regular” non-fiction (such as essays and academic pieces), photography, placards, and testimonial–in styles that encompass satire, camp, performance, argument, lament, and indictment. Krupar accomplishes in her text–stunningly, provocatively, furiously–the curious passionate engaged politics she urges us toward through her text. . . . Her wit is devastating, and a fitting match for the preposterousness of the biotechnologies of war and its sprawling before- and aftermaths, their calamitous clean ups, implausible environmental restorations, and criminally disingenuous individual restitutions, all of which she details meticulously and hilariously.”

Cindi Katz

“Hot Spotter’s Report makes an extraordinary contribution to radical geography, political ecology, anti-militarism, and analyses of “the Anthropocene” both in the ways it lives in and makes newly alive the residues of productions of nature as toxic, and in the possibilities a “transnatural ethical stance” offer for confronting and making something else of the biopolitics of war which permeates everyday life and space in the US. By unhiding, unforgetting, and refusing the containments of what is uncontainable, Krupar refuses to live unquietly in a political economy and political ecology of disavowal, and the irreverent noise she makes is crazily beautiful and always compelling the making of something new.”

Cindi Katz

(3) Alex Howlett (Kings College, London), Journal of Ecocriticism 5.2 (2013): 18-19

“Hot Spotter’s Report throws a wrench into the amnesiac mechanisms of the nuclear state, and offers real alternatives. An essential study into the vanishing legacy of the cold war in American history.”

Alex Howlett

(4) Peter van Wyck, “Nuclear Topographies: A Review of Krupar’s Hot Spotter’s Report,” Society and Space (May 3, 2014), https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/hot-spotters-report-by-shiloh-krupar

“Free of the methodological melancholy that so often, and perhaps rightly, can come to inflect this kind of work, Hot Spotter’s Report is an unusual text. It is an utterly unique assessment of the American initiatives to remediate, resignify and manage, conceal and green, the chemical and radiotoxic remainders of cold war military nuclear production – with particular reference to facilities at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, and Rocky Flats, and the biopolitical management of the work force that supported these sites of production.”

Peter van Wyck

(5) Nicole Seymour, “Review Essay: We Have Never Been Postwar: Limning the Long Half-Life of the Military-Industrial-Environmental Complex,” Ecozon@ 6.1(2015): 188-94, https://ecozona.eu/article/view/651 (reviewed with Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism)

“A work of art as much as academic scholarship, Hot Spotter’s Report offers ideas and approaches relevant to myriad areas, including queer ecology, radical geography, performance studies, environmental justice, disability studies, and animal studies, in addition to environmental history and military history. . . . Shiloh Krupar’s Hot Spotter’s Report is breathtakingly creative, generative, and truly interdisciplinary: easily the most exciting piece of scholarship I have encountered in years. . . . Krupar goes beyond whistle-blowing or cataloguing work with an intricately-staged consideration of green war’s cultural-conceptual operations: how it functions by exploiting spectacle and uncertainty, and how it is quintessentially biopolitical, arranging relationships among humans and nature, creating and destroying life as it sees fit, and shaping conceptions of what counts as waste and what has value. . . . While certainly grim on the one hand, her work also seeks to show how those remaindered populations and entities live on, in ways that are often wonderfully perverse, obscene, and darkly funny.”

Nicole Seymour

(6) Bryan C. Taylor, “Review Essay,” cultural geographies 22.1 (2015): 203-6 (reviewed with Kristen Iverson, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats)

“This volume is an exciting tour de force – its scope and depth are remarkable for a scholar at a relatively early stage in her career. Her future work should be anticipated with enthusiasm.”

Bryan C. Taylor

“Krupar examines how post-Cold War nuclear officials increasingly administer the environment through neoliberal practices which, far from diminishing or resolving militarism, perpetuate its premises, promising a future of continuing disaster. Provocatively, this argument surfaces various contradictions and absurdities surrounding current nuclear cleanups, and clarifies their ideological support. This critique is not, however, based on either modernist suspicion of institutional power, or a conventional erotics which opposes nuclear violence. Instead, it adopts the relational logic of deconstruction, and directs impiety with wit and verve to ventilate the excesses of life-giving spectacles which surround the perpetual crisis of nuclear waste. These excesses, Krupar argues, are produced as nuclear officials mobilize seductively virtuous tropes such as sacrifice, protection, nostalgia, and responsibility to administer related solutions. Those solutions, however, perpetuate regressive ontologies that arbitrarily separate humans and nature, and encourage humans to appropriate nature as a dumping ground – even as they claim to accomplish its renewal. This argument culminates in Krupar’s argument for a ‘transnatural’ ethics that ‘challenges humans to take responsibility, yet relinquish the certainty of knowing what justice looks like beforehand, in order to explore more experimental coalitions.’”

Bryan C. Taylor

(7) Barbara Rose Johnston, review, Environment and Society: Advances in Research 5.1 (2014): 153-155

“[I]f Krupar’s primary goal is to demonstrate the power of a transdisciplinary performance art that challenges, engages, and encourages fundamental shifts in thinking about bureaucratic processes and scientific doublespeak, thus revealing the hidden agendas that drive the complex process by which toxic realities are managed, she succeeds. Collectively, her satire, fables, and critical essays demonstrate a government response to toxic waste and nuclear disaster that functions in ways that preempt, pacify, or silence individual and collective protest, rather than effectively and demonstrably repairing the ulcerating conditions endangering human and environmental health.”

Barbara Rose Johnston

(8) Ryan Griffis, “Documentary Excess and Contaminated Fields: A Contextual Review of Shiloh Krupar’s Hot Spotter’s Report, Journal of the New Media Caucus (NMC | Media-N) (2015), http://median.newmediacaucus.org/art-infrastructures-information/documentary-excess-contaminated-fields-a-contextual-review-of-shiloh-krupars-hot-spotters-report/

Krupar employs textual performance . . . alongside theoretical exposition and researched case studies to unpack the social and ecological ramifications of the U.S.’s nuclear waste policy. Importantly, the aesthetic experimentation in the book is no less sharp in what it reveals; the problems posed by nuclear waste in the U.S. are not defined solely by containment technologies and remediation plans. Krupar proposes to challenge the creation and performance of official language to ‘handle’ nuclear waste through a performance of her own, which she insists we consider alongside official realities.

Ryan Griffis