Radiation and the Question of Power: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for Chaguaramas in Trinidad

• In Event: Navigating the Currents: Ecologies of Land, Labor, and Liberation

Description for Program

In 1959, the secret construction of a ballistic missile tracking station by the US military at Chaguaramas, Trinidad sparked rumors of hazardous radiation emanating from the naval base. C.L.R. James, in his capacity as editor of the People's National Movement newspaper under the premiership of his former student, Eric Williams, covered the radiation issue for The Nation. Historical accounts of the anticolonial struggle to reclaim Chaguaramas from the Americans, however, only mention the protracted radiation scare in passing or omit it entirely. Returning to James's neglected writings on radiation and the U.S. military occupation of Trinidad, this paper offers a synthesis of a Jamesian perspective on the question of power (that would later take form in his speeches, "Seizure of Power" and "Walter Rodney and the Question of Power." For James, the power of radiation emanating from the U.S. Naval Base sparked a collective consciousness of the power wielded by West Indian people themselves. The scientific fact of hazardous levels of radiation by technical observers remained secondary to the political fact of radiation. Accordingly, this paper meditates on the Jamesian concept of the political fact and its implications for radical history and the question of power in the colonial archive.

Author

• Ryan Jobson, The University of Chicago