Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon

Abstract

78 World Literature Today reviews daydreams about the literature he left behind, his beloved library, and how texts changed and adopted new meanings in his memories. He recounts his fury that a Chilean guilty of horrific war crimes relished a classical symphony that Dorfman loves. The same song both connects him and distances him from his enemy. Later in life it helps Dorfman recognize the enemy’s humanity. Language itself is as fluid and interconnected as the author’s elusive sense of identity throughout the memoir . It is written in English but includes phrases in Dorfman’s native Chilean Spanish and various European languages as he vagabonds through Paris and Amsterdam. Dorfman called this book “my therapy, mi última palabra [my last word] . . . to look back so I can stop looking back.” Working through the collision of multiple identities and syntaxes, he ultimately resolves to identify as both American and Chilean. Dorfman’s “confessions of an unrepentant exile” fluctuate between locations, tenses, and years. Although a timeline is included in the back, he discourages relying on it. He inhabits multiple, at times overlapping, identities : a Latin American communist revolutionary, an American intellectual , the star of an award-winning film, a writer, and a refugee. Throughout it all the only constant is his love of literature. This memoir is testament to Arial Dorfman’s unique talent for exceeding the boundaries of genre and his ability to turn an array of confusing events into meaningful prose. Leigh Cuen Qiryat Bialik , Israel Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2011. isbn 9780674049307 Rob Nixon is a prolific writer who contributes frequently to the New York Times and has penned work for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Guardian, and more. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is Nixon’s fourth book exploring relationships to the natural world in the postcolonial era. The work investigates the notion of what he calls “slow violence,” the often invisible, ephemeral, slow-leak effects of environmental crises such as nuclear fallout, oil spills, deforestation , and war. It is primarily concerned with the effects of such violence on peoples of the global South, and the ways in which such effects are largely ignored by mainstream environmentalist rhetoric. The book begins with a clear and thorough introduction in which Nixon lays out his primary concerns. He aims to rethink the slow violence of environmental destruction, confront the representational challenges posed by doing so, and consider an environmentalism of the poor, the primary victims of slow violence. At the same time, he celebrates those environmental writers and activists who use their own work to decry the environmental degradation wrought upon underrepresented groups. In eight dense chapters, Nixon investigates the literary tradition of the picaresque as a tool for reading time; neoliberalism and the urban poor; oil despots and the tricky notion of “resource curse”; minority water rights and the plight of the Ogoni; the particularities of gender oppression and environmental violence; modernity, imagined communities and the megadam; race and tourism; precision warfare; and the complicated relationships between environmentalism , postcolonialism, and the narrow field of American studies. Throughout, Nixon gracefully incorporates a literary framework provided by the texts of authors such as Indra Sinha, Rachel Carson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, June Jordan, Njabulo Ndbele, Arundhati Roy, and others. While Nixon has long been an important voice in the meeting of environmentalism, the humanities, and postcolonial studies, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor raises the volume. The work is groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice , as well as its investigation of both the power and challenges inherent in creative representation. Furthermore, it is unique in its push beyond the local and national confines so often applied to environmental writing and literary criticism. Adamantly transnational in his approach, Nixon is able to pay due respect to the local in terms of individual social structures and geographical particularities while also crossing geopolitical boundaries . In its attention to “unforeseeable imaginative connection,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor challenges readers to new...