Rating: 9
Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon | 2011
Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor is easily one of the more insightful and unique books I’ve read. Rob Nixon opens with a discussion about how climate change and environmental degradation disproportionality inflict a new form of insidious violence on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. However, the book’s focus shifts to the difficulty associated with communicating this slow violence that occurs over large temporal and spatial dimensions. Nixon, a professor in Humanities and the Environment, questions how artists can “devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects.” To this degree, Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor engages with this subject within a literary framework. Nixon discusses environmental justice by placing writer-activists from affected areas in the global South at the forefront of the book’s focus. It’s a compelling method of addressing the egregious behavior of oil companies and certain countries (operating under postcolonial and neoliberal creeds) while highlighting the necessity of broadening the scope of voices within this field. Besides his innovative literary approach, Nixon’s writing is accessible and refreshing. It took me longer than normal to read simply because I spent so much time collecting quotes and passages. The goal of this book is ambitious, and although some questions remain unanswered, it’s a mandatory read for those interested in environmental justice.
“By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.”
“Both Carson and Sinha give the absence wrought by toxicity a sensory density; in so doing they strike a complex temporal note, through blended elegy and apocalypse, lamentation and premonition, inducing in us a double gaze backward in time to loss and forward to yet unrealized threats. Through this double gaze they restage environmental time, asserting its broad parameters against the myopic, fevered immediacy that governs the society of the catastrophe-as-spectacle.”