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What does the word bikini evoke for you? A woman in a two-piece bathing suit, or a site for nuclear-weapons testing? A bikini-clad woman invigorated by solar radiation, or Bikini Islanders cancer-ridden from nuclear radiation? The sensational bathing suit was named for Bikini Atoll. This was the site in the Marshall Islands for the testing of twentyfive nuclear bombs between 1946 and 1958. Bikini Islanders testify to the continuing history of colonialism and ecological racism in the Pacific basin. The bikini bathing suit is testament to the recurring tourist trivialization of Pacific Islanders' experience and existence. By drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name. The sexist dynamic the bikini performs—objectification through excessive visibility—inverts the colonial dynamics that have occurred during nuclear testing in the Pacific, objectification by rendering invisible. The bikini bathing suit manifests both a celebration and a forgetting of the nuclear power that strategically and materially marginalizes and erases the living history of Pacific Islanders. The bikini emerges from colonial notions that marginalize" s/pacific" bodies while genericizing and centering female bodies.

For Pacific Islanders the name Bikini evokes memories and visions of a s/pacific historical and contemporary political reality. Nuclear testing is just one—albeit a most pernicious one—of the many colonial phenomena and processes that affect the Pacific region. In 1980 the United Nations reported that more than 200 nuclear bombs and devices had been detonated in the Pacific, but …