Radiation and the Question of Power

In the late colonial British West Indies, movements for independence launched demands for the democratic control of land and natural resources. In petroleum-rich Trinidad, however, oil was not the only theater in which energy matters fueled anticolonial agitation. In 1959, public fears mounted over a secret missile tracking station built by the US military at its Chaguaramas base on Trinidad’s northwest peninsula. Subsequently, rumors of hazardous radiation generated demands for the return of the base and the establishment of a federal capital at Chaguaramas. Turning to the neglected writings of the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James on the radiation issue, this essay meditates on the dual meaning of power—radiant power and political power—that surfaced in the anticolonial struggle for Chaguaramas. For James, the scientific fact of radiation remained secondary to the political fact of radiation as a basis for working-class power and self-organization.