Dr Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Edinburgh. She works primarily on the representation of the human body on stage and politicized representations of the body more generally, with a special interest in the work of Samuel Beckett, depictions of physical pain and disability, the work of Samuel Beckett, and popular culture. She is the author of two monographs: Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Postwar Francophone Drama (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), and is currently working on a new project on the forgotten stage plays of modernist novelists.
Hannah Simpson
Contributions
Picturing Nuclear Suffering: Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows
[Content note: brief discussion and accompanying imagery of racialized propaganda.]
The bodily injury caused by nuclear warfare constitutes a massively collective form of modern suffering. However, for many in the West, it also represents a markedly “foreign” pain, inflicted on distant bodies in other lands. The only instances (thus far) of nuclear weapons being deliberately utilized in combat are the US deployment of the “Little Boy” A-bomb in Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” in Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 respectively. The 100,000 immediate deaths and ensuing agonies of radiation poisoning were borne primarily by Japanese soldiers and civilians and Korean slave laborers––who were, for many midcentury British and American citizens, unimaginably “foreign” bodies, caricatured and dehumanized in Allied war propaganda throughout the 1940s (fig. 1).