Radiant Ecologies: The Biopolitics of Animal Photography in Exclusion Zones

Authors

• Paromita Patranobish Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mount Carmel College (Autonomous), Bangalore, India
• Maria Camino-Troya PhD Candidate, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
• Tanya Wyatt Professor of Criminology, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK

Abstract

This article wishes to examine photographic representations of animal life in the postdisasterlandscapes of Chernobyl and Fukushima. It seeks to articulate how documentary andinvestigative modes employed by a visual repertoire developed in relation to these disaster zones,intersect with a biopolitical imaginary, which, by creating an ontological collapse and interchangeabilitybetween radioactive spaces and nonhuman materialities – including the matter of animal lives– enactsan exclusionary paradigm that is rooted in speciesist violence. A common trope used to frame animalsin these sites of nuclear disaster is that of resilience and rewilding. This framing has been deployed inrecent times by scientific analyses (James Smith, Nick Beresford et. al., 2019, 2005; Lyons et. al., 2020)as well as popular discourses to depict animals, particularly wildlife, as prolific and invasive, governedby an inhuman excess that allows them to thrive in environments otherwise hostile to humans. Thisnarrative of an alien affinity towards forms of toxicity, while positioning animals on a common spectrumof danger and alterity in which they share attributes of anarchic and uncontained growth, dispersal, andmutation with nuclear waste and the action of radioactivity, simultaneously obscures other narrativesof precarity and harm accruing to nonhuman lives and habitats through their proximity to nuclearpollution, and pollution's ties with anthropogenic, military-industrial regimes. (Sohtome et. al., 2014;Itoh 2018). Drawing on recent work by Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, and Kate Brown, my paper explores thefiguration of animals in disaster zone imagery in relation to questions of ruination, haunting, decay, andwaste as constituting what Tsing calls "disturbance regimes." (2015) The nexus of toxic exposures andecocidal effects of nuclearization of environments not only impinges on existing ecological relations,altering and corroding these, but also enforces new and saturated chemical ecologies. Through a closereading of the works of Julia Oldham, Yasusuke Ota, and Pierpaolo Mittica, my article engages with theimplicit dialogue between such radioactive ecologies in post-disaster sites in the wake of evacuation andabandonment, and the ways in which visual media, particularly photography, participate in theseecological (dis)arrangements by encoding animal life and its survival in the post-human aftermath ofhuman departure, within various symbolic and semantic codes, codes whose stability is furtherchallenged and complicated by what Daniel Burkner (2015) identifies as the material politics ofphotographing radioactive spaces.