Abstract
Rob Nixon opens his new book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor with Lawrence Summers’ now infamous comment that ‘countries in Africa are vastly under polluted’. In a 1991 confidential memo, written while he was president of the World Bank, Summers argued that the ‘economic logic’ of the West exporting its contaminated wastes and heavily polluting industries to Africa (or other ‘lowest wage’ places) is ‘impeccable,’ a necessary correction to the global imbalance of toxicity. In many respects, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is an answer to Summers: a study of how writer-activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, Arundhati Roy in India and others have resisted Summers’ neoliberal logic by bearing witness to the environmentalism of the poor in the Global South.
Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, and his work straddles postcolonial and environmental themes, from a study of V.S. Naipaul (London Calling; 1992) and the essays on South Africa in Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood (1994) to the marvelous memoir/travelogue Dream Birds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune (2000). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor takes its readers to environmental hotspots, often at the periphery of the world system, where the local and transnational collide in resource rebellions and environmental justice movements which have arisen on behalf of grassroots communities, the health and ways of life of which are threatened by long-lasting environmental catastrophes such as the chemical disaster at Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant or Shell’s oil spills in the Niger delta.
Nixon makes clear that the environmentalism of the poor, as outlined in the work of Ramachandra Guha (2000) and Joan Martinez-Alier (2003), is distinct from the cult of wilderness and green politics of sustained development that have characterized environmentalism in Global North metropolises. Nixon wants his readers to link environmentalism to the fate of the world’s poor, to make visible the multitudes of empire dispossessed, displaced, and largely erased from memory as their lives and future livelihoods are put at risk by the short-sightedness of deregulation and the privatizing motives of the Washington consensus Summers so aptly represents.
To be sure, what Nixon calls the ‘slow violence’ of environmental destruction endangers all of us on the planet. Nonetheless, the social, political, and economic conflicts that environmental disasters both result from and precipitate are distributed unevenly, with the risks falling disproportionately on the poor, in line with the heightened social and economic inequalities of globalization.
The environmentalism of the poor is an effort on the part of writer-activists to occupy the public’s attention in an age of distraction and shortened concentration spans, to interrupt for a moment the spectacular violence of events – the Boston marathon bombing, the fatal stabbing on the streets of London, mass shootings in Aurora and Sandy Hook – in order to represent a different order of time, the slow violence of environmental destruction that unfolds only gradually in dispersed and often invisible forms. For Nixon, slow violence signifies a temporal velocity that can all too easily go unnoticed, the longue durée of climate change, toxic contamination, megadams, deforestation, biomagnification, and the radioactive aftermaths of war and nuclear accidents. Most of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor consists of case studies of writer-activists, focusing on questions about the literary and rhetorical means of representing the variable and uneven measures of time – from the geological to the historical to the cellular – that constitute the workings of slow violence in the landscape and in people’s bodies. One of the great strengths of the book is the sense of urgency Nixon brings to the matter of representing such ‘temporalities of place’ in an ‘age of onrushing turbo-capitalism’ with it Animal’s People, limited economies of attention and its erasures and amnesias.
Another strength is how Nixon’s case studies connect to wider intellectual and political frameworks, providing potent accounts of the usefulness of an environmental perspective in transnational literary and cultural studies. For example, the first of the case studies, Nixon’s chapter on Indra Sinha’s novel Animal Dreams, a fictional reworking of the Bhopal disaster, raises the notion of ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna, 2002) and the meaning of compensation in the era of globalization. In the next two chapters, ‘petro-despotism’ is first dissected in Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt series of novels, set in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and then appears as the antagonist in the Ogoni minority’s grassroots struggle against the transnational oil giants that ultimately led to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s execution in Nigeria. In the chapter on Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement of reforestation in Kenya, Nixon links gender, authenticity, and collective activism both to the literary genre of the memoir, with its historical focus in the Global North on the individual personality, and to the figure of the forest as simultaneously a bastion of anticolonialism, where the Mau Mau gathered, and a symbol of warrior masculinity that stands in a complicated relationship to Maathai’s unarmed female ‘foresters without diplomas.’
The next chapter examines the displacement of ‘surplus people’ and the ‘monumental modernity’ of megadams in Arundhati Roy’s essays on ‘destructive hydrological regimes’ which divert not only water and land from the powerless to the powerful but also attention, keeping flooded people out of sight, hidden in the blinding light of the dam’s technological enchantment. Then Nixon treats the neocolonialism of tourism and the antihumanism of conservation doctrine in the Global North as interlinked forces in the racialized ecologies of the Caribbean and South Africa, drawing on writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, June Jordan, and Njabulo Ndebele. The last case study examines the ecological aftermaths of war, such as Gulf War syndrome and the persistent presence of land mines, cluster bombs, and ‘depleted’ uranium used in ammunition that remains radioactively powerful.
In the final chapter, Nixon considers what it would mean to ‘bring environmentalism into a full, productive dialogue with postcolonialism.’ He begins by noting the limits of environmentalism and ecocriticism in American studies as part of a long history of American exceptionalism, with its notions of ‘virgin land,’ ‘nature’s nation,’ and ‘errands into the wilderness’ on the part of an ‘American Adam.’ For Nixon, this legacy of the purity of the local and regional, in the Americanist environmental canon of Thoreau, John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Gary Snyder, is quite simply a sign of superpower parochialism, a flashpoint next to the hybridity, sense of uprootedness, and cosmopolitanism in postcolonialism. American environmentalism, in other words, is in desperate need of rethinking its troubled combination of isolationism and global hegemony. As Nixon notes, this is not just a matter of opening the national borders and diversifying the reading list to include environmental writer-activists from the Global South. It also means dismantling borders, at least conceptually, to reveal the fraught relationship between center and periphery, the inequalities and asymmetrical distribution of economic, political, and rhetorical power, and the need for transnational alliances and globalization from below. In turn, postcolonial studies, with its abstruse prose and ironies of exile, could use ‘an infusion of the regenerative public urgency’ that such a newly imagined environmentalism might provide. What we should aspire to, Nixon says, is a ‘more historically answerable and geographically expansive sense of what constitutes our environment and which literary works we entrust to voice its parameters’ (p. 262).