Slow Violence: French Nuclear Imperialism in Film and Literature

Please join us for a lecture by Professor Jill Jarvis, Associate Professor of French at Yale University, and a screening of Amira Khalfallah’s award-winning short film, Esseghayra (Miss) (2020), followed by an artist-scholar discussion and Q&A.

"Slow Violence: French Nuclear Imperialism in Film and Literature" examines the power of artists and authors to provide what demographic data, historical facts, and legal trials have not in terms of attesting to and accounting for both the immediate and slow violence that the French inflicted upon Algerians through nuclear experimentation in the Sahara Desert during the 1960s.

Between 1960 and 1966, the French conducted seventeen nuclear tests, in turn exposing thousands of soldiers, nuclear program workers, and the local population to radioactivity that blanketed vast swaths of the Sahara Desert. Due to the classification of the locations of these test sites and the level of radiation emitted, inhabitants of the Sahara continue to endure the health and environmental legacy of nuclear imperialism. As scholar Jill Jarvis notes, “Radioactive dust still emanates from the Sahara, from those nuclear bombs, whose effects are absolutely indelible. In this sense, even the sand itself has been occupied by colonial occupation.”

This event places the recent scholarship of Jill Jarvis, Associate Professor of French at Yale, whose work draws together readings of multilingual texts by Algerian authors, in conversation with the recent creative work of Algerian filmmaker Amira Khalfallah. Examining these events through the nuanced lenses of film and literature provides the opportunity to scrutinize the prominent issues of nuclear war and experimentation within a colonial and post-colonial context.