A Body Downwind of the Atomic Attack at Trinity: Mediations of Atomic Coloniality in Nuevo México

Abstract

Early atomic media, infrastructures, and the atomic attack (a phrase I take up instead of the ambiguous and occluding term atomic test) at the Trinity site in Nuevo México remain surprisingly unexamined through the lens of coloniality (Quijano 2000). This essay proposes “mediations of atomic coloniality” as a “creative mediation” (Kember and Zylinska 2012, 200) to investigate the public facing discourses around the world’s earliest nuclear infrastructures at Trinity. This critical approach is multimodal and (1) uses a site visit by the author to highlight the public discourses that circulate at the Trinity landmark; (2) explores early atomic documentary cinema and their spatialization of Nuevo México; and (3) looks at the emergence of what the author terms downwind media as taken up by local community activists in the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. Mediations of atomic coloniality as an approach engages with mediation as composed of dynamic processes that interlink diverse forms of media ranging from radioactive bodies to lands, films, and current regional media activism stemming from Trinity. This approach moves beyond notions of the first atomic bomb as exceeding traditional forms of mediation. Instead, it both sheds light on the role of media objects in the bolstering of dominant Eurocentric discourses of the early atomic age in Nuevo México and follows the dispersed accounts of radioactive and racialized “slow violence” (Nixon 2013) articulated by local communities of color. Ultimately, this essay explores what is gained in understanding the nuclear infrastructures at Trinity through a broader media ecology and, relatedly, how mediation might also function as a praxis in environmental justice efforts.