The Midwife and the Poet Bioaccumulation and Retroactive Shock

Abstract

Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, this article works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock-tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment. Linking these experiences, the argument sets up and explores an analytical space within which the toxic modernity of planetary capitalism can resonate, structurally, with the racist violence of state colonialism: a space that also, the author suggests, describes an important dimension of Anthropocene experience itself.