Self-Portraits of Coral: Visual Archives and Radiation Ecologies in the Anthropocene

Abstract: How might we approach the question of the “human” in the naming of the Anthropocene from the perspective of nonhuman labour? Media histories of coral reef science and resource extraction in the Pacific are intimately connected to the territorial expansionism of the Japanese and U.S. empires. In the 1930s, Japanese marine biologists began studying the living habitats of coral reefs at the Palao Tropical Biological Station on the island of Koror in today’s Republic of Palau, which was then occupied and governed by the Japanese Empire. Their research on the symbiotic relationship between coral polyps and algae laid one of the foundations for the American science of nuclear ecology that developed out of the study of the irradiated atolls of the Marshall Islands, which the United States infamously used as a site of nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. Focusing on the technology of radioautography that American scientists used to visualize radiation, I connect this transpacific history of nuclear waste to the colonial histories of coral reef science and guano mining. In doing so, I examine how this extractive process of image-making mediated by irradiated coral specimens invites us to reflect on the ethical and theoretical limits of nonhuman labour. Thinking about the work of nonhuman agents, such as coral, in the scientific knowledge production allows us to critically reflect on what I call the underside of the Anthropocene.