Title Pending 16803

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This essay considers the formation of colonial nuclear relations as a worldmaking process in South Africa and how these relations have continued to shape South African life beyond the end of apartheid. It focuses on the worldmaking process that philosopher Nelson Goodman calls “ordering” – the arrangement of world components in time and space – to analyze how both the apartheid regime and the global nuclear order produced racial difference and colonial relations through different spatial relationships to nuclear objects in the twentieth century, as blackness was produced through physical proximity and bodily vulnerability to radiation while whiteness became understood as mastery over nuclear materials and the power to extract their value at a distance. At the end of apartheid, it was a specific temporal ordering – an emplotment – that, telling the story of the South African nuclear complex’s transition from destructive to redemptive uses of the atom, allowed for the maintenance of its colonial nuclear relations into the post-apartheid present. The essay then turns to Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life, which through its own thematic and formal orderings of the world overturns the temporal and spatial order of nuclear colonialism. Taking up the irradiated body as a site of nuclear ordering, Get a Life both challenges the clear temporal distinctions of nuclear/post-nuclear and apartheid/post-apartheid that have facilitated the ongoing presence of nuclear colonialism in South Africa and represents the spatial entanglements that nuclear exposures bring into being – entanglements that themselves disrupt the racial-spatial order of nuclear colonialism. Get a Life both models and entrains a counterworldmaking process of antinuclear worldmaking from below: local and transnational relations of solidarity carefully built across shared nuclear vulnerabilities that, through their own (re)ordering techniques, work to bring a truly decolonized and denuclearized world into being.