Abstract

As is made evident in Rosalyn Deutsche’s recent book, Hiroshima After Iraq, Hiroshima keeps returning through the way diverse artistic genres evoke parallels between the bombing of Hiroshima and subsequent atrocities. After contrasting US and Japanese perspectives on the event of the bombing and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of temporal plasticity, this essay ponders the future anterior of Hiroshima, its continuous will-have-beens, as new films and re-analyses of older ones continue to restage its significance.