Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic Hauntologies in the Era of Genetic Modification

In part an examination of the speculative arena of genomics, particularly through the historical context of US nuclear detonations in the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century, this essay traces a rhetorical shift in scientific interest in “mutation” to “regeneration.” This shift marks how the financialization of scientific research brokers a profitable conversion of the devastations of the atomic age to the promissory therapies of the Human Genome Project. Against this backcloth, I turn to Larissa Lai's speculative fiction Salt Fish Girl, which resurrects these specters of the Pacific to haunt the HGP's projections and tether transpacific futurity to an irradiated past.