Media Mix, Nuclear Power, and Reconfiguring Literature in Cold War and Post–Cold War East Asia

Abstract

This dissertation argues that modern life is shaped by the entanglement of media systems and nuclear infrastructures. I call this formation the media–nuclear complex: a structural fusion in which nuclear technologies (weapons, energy, waste) and media technologies (broadcast, digital networks, circulation platforms) co-produce transformations in perception, temporality, and everyday experience. Rather than treating nuclear power as a discrete technological problem and media as a sphere of representation, the project shows how each materially conditions the expansion of the other. Nuclear infrastructures require mediation to render radiation measurable and narratable; media infrastructures depend on continuous, large-scale energy systems historically aligned with nuclear power. Together, they reorganize social life across scales—from real-time immediacy to geological duration. Focusing on East Asia from the Cold War to the present, the dissertation develops the concept of the media mix as a technopolitical system that integrates infrastructure, aesthetics, and ideology. Through case studies in China, Japan, and Taiwan, it traces four configurations: a socialist media mix that synchronized atomic power and ideological mobilization; a capitalist media mix shaped by Cold War technopolitics and energy density; a post-Fukushima critical media mix that retools circulation for civic speculation; and a decolonial media mix in Indigenous Tao resistance to nuclear waste on Pongso no Tao. Across these formations, literature emerges as a mode of thought capable of confronting infrastructural power. By reconceiving the media mix beyond industrial marketing, this project reframes it as a site of governance, contestation, and world-making within nuclear modernity.