By contextualizing Albert Wendt's Black Rainbow with histories of nuclear testing in Oceania, this thesis contends that the novel's representations of underground spaces critique the practices of underground nuclear testing that predominated in the late Cold War. The nuclear colonial powers attempted to domesticate the underground in willful ignorance of the ways that the subterranean sphere shapeshifts mercurially between domestic and wild. This thesis incorporates Kamau Brathwaite's framework of tidalectics to rebuke the perceived dichotomy between land and ocean and to show that the underground is inherently multifaceted and imbued with resistant potential. In examining the plural meanings and attendant critical possibilities presented by Black Rainbow's subterranean settings, I articulate the ambivalences lurking within colonial conceptions of these spaces and examine interconnections between ideas of the underground, cultural conceptions of ecology, and feminist decolonial theory. The relationality between these elements is central to Black Rainbow's indictment of the colonial conceptions of land (and human-land interactions) that justified underground nuclear testing programs during the Cold War and continue to shape the structural conditions producing and exacerbating contemporary ecological crises.
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