Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

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...

This study aims to seek the ecocritical perspectives as portrayed in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by literary theorist Rob Nixon. Nixon depicts the threats and changes that brought to the environment which are difficult to discern. He proposes the problems and difficulties via attention to the phenomenological structure of social problems. He explains the great threat of the environment to human society as well as the mother earth. He shows the violence brought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Nixon focuses on the dire consequences we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises. He explains how the misuse of natural resources which led to the violence and exploitation. The different circumstances just as the fossil fuel, war and ecological disaster are led the environment to drought and desertification. As a result, a new theory is aroused called Ecocriticism. It is a worldwide emergent movement which came into existence as a reaction to man's anthropocentric attitude of dominating nature. Ecocriticism represents a major tool of analyzing nature writing which is commonly associated with environmental criticism

Ecoartivism in Times of Climate Change and Toxic Waste Emergencies:A Theoretical Perspective through the Lens of ziREjA's Photography and Performance Art Rosita Scerbo The 21st century ecological crisis is a tragic reality. In recent years, contemporary artists have become advocates for climate change solutions and environmental activism, addressing issues like ecological practices, toxic waste, sustainability, loss of biodiversity, and pollution. In this context, this study aims to explore and analyze the photography and performance art of Irene Sanfiel (ziREjA), an award-winning contemporary artist based in Tenerife, a Spanish archipelago located in the Atlantic Ocean. The different sections of my investigation will introduce a selection of theoretical approaches that will attempt to conceptualize some fundamental notions such as eco-art, ecology, and ARTivism (Buckland 2010; Bunting 2014; Cheetham 2013; Andrews 2004; Lippard 2007; Morton 2010). On the one hand, one of the main focuses of this essay will be her trash art images that include the human figure, different representations of climate change, and trash accumulation's exponential effects, and its related problems. Some of her activist projects' objects of my study, such as "La maga vestida", gather photographs of ziREja wearing the traditional Tenerife folkloric dress in the insular garbage management service. The female subject is always surrounded by a waste mountain that shows the reality of the island and a side that is not often shown to the public. The Spanish artist plays with concepts related to gender, body, tradition, trash accumulation, and responsibility, thus turning her activist work into a powerful weapon against our destructive treatment of the earth. Other photographic projects, such as "itrash coreografías con la basura" and "yesWetrash", play with the image of the body adjacent to trash and sometimes use irony and comedy employing contradictory and oxymoron illustrations to engage the viewers and provoke them to think about the consequences that our actions and decisions have on the future of the planet. On the other hand, another center of attention of this research will be ziRejA's performance art and how it dialogues with ecological and social problems. Her eco-art installations show the disposition of the garbage in different parts of the city to make the spectators reflect on how much waste is produced by an average citizen ("Trash comes back to the city") or make the viewers contemplate the relation between trash and [End Page 141] the body through contemporary experimental dance performances ("iTrash"). Ultimately, this investigation will consider how these different uses address environmental issues and connect with her audiences and how they engage with her activist goals. The entirety of the art pieces analyzed in this study was produced on the famous island of Tenerife, ziREjA's own native land and well-known location of mass tourism and damaging socioenvironmental processes. As the most populous island of the Canary Islands, Tenerife receives about 5 million tourists each year (Andrews 2004) who contribute drastically to the increase of the toxic waste emergency. This large island in the Atlantic Ocean represents perfectly the innovative concept of "slow violence" introduced by Rob Nixon as the violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, and other environmental emergencies that take place gradually and often invisibly. Nixon highlights the inattention we have paid to the lethality of many environmental crises, and we will see how this approach resonates with ziREjA's activist work. Historical Overview Ecological art or Eco-art is a practice in the art world that aims to preserve and repair the different life forms and resources of the earth. This approach to art applies the principles of ecosystems to living species and their environment and it includes wilderness, rural, suburban, and urban locations (Weintraub 2012). It is essential to clarify that this is a distinct genre from Environmental art that instead focuses its attention on functional ecological systems-restoration. This genre takes part in socially engaged, activist, and community-based interventions. Another specific aspect of Ecological art is based on the fact that this practice deals with economics, ethics, politics, culture, and aesthetic values and the way these impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art brings together artists, scientists, philosophers, and activists who work in a collaboratively on restoration...

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

Human rights concerns in relation to the impacts brought forth by artificial intelligence (‘AI’) have revolved around examining how it affects specific rights, such as the right to privacy, non-discrimination and freedom of expression. However, this article argues that the effects go deeper, potentially challenging the foundational assumptions of key concepts and normative justifications of the human rights framework. To unpack this, the article applies the lens of ‘slow violence’, a term borrowed from environmental justice literature, to frame the grinding, gradual, attritional harms of AI towards the human rights framework.The article examines the slow violence of AI towards human rights at three different levels. First, the individual as the subject of interest and protection within the human rights framework, is increasingly unable to understand nor seek accountability for harms arising from the deployment of AI systems. This undermines the key premise of the framework which was meant to empower the individual in addressing large power disparities and calling for accountability towards such abuse of power. Secondly, the ‘slow violence’ of AI is also seen through the unravelling of the normative justifications of discrete rights such as the right to privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of thought, upending the reasons and assumptions in which those rights were formulated and formalised in the first place. Finally, the article examines how even the wide interpretations towards the normative foundation of human rights, namely human dignity, is unable to address putative new challenges AI poses towards the concept. It then considers and offers the outline to critical perspectives that can inform a new model of human rights accountability in the age of AI.

This paper investigates the mutual relationship between gender-based violence (GBV) and cyclone-related disasters. Evidence is sparse on this topic, especially in-depth research attending to the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of locality. The work reported here is based on a case study of a coastal district of Bangladesh (Barguna)-conducted shortly after Cyclone Roanu struck the country in May 2016-that aimed to shed light on the mechanisms linking GBV to cyclones through the eyes of survivors. The paper maps out the different forms, experiences, and impacts of GBV before, during, and after cyclones, and argues that such events lead directly and indirectly to GBV, and that GBV makes women and children more vulnerable to the effects of disasters. Climate change, economic losses, and poverty compound this cyclical relationship. A conceptual framing, drawing on the notion of 'slow violence', is developed to understand the layering of diverse types of violence that operate on seemingly different temporal and spatial scales.

Introduction:The Climate Issue Timo Müller (bio) and Michelle Yates (bio) Climate is emerging as the predominant problem of the twenty-first century. The existential threat posed by climate change, which has long been understood in the abstract, is beginning to take concrete shape for more and more people. Released by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Sixth Assessment Report (2021) shows that climate change is not only a dire present issue but also now irreversible for the next few hundred to a thousand years. The Sixth Assessment Report also documents an increased certainty that there will be more frequent and more intense severe weather and climate-related extremes. People are already experiencing the effects and "slow violence" of climate change through heat waves, heavy precipitation, sea level rise, wildfires, drought, flooding, tropical cyclones, and the rapid loss of marine fauna. Agriculture and yield production in the United States and around the world are negatively impacted by climate change, and this impact will continue in the future. Climate change threatens lives and livelihoods across the world. These developments have engendered a variety of cultural practices, discourses, and imaginaries that range from targeted demonstrations (e.g., People's Climate March, Extinction Rebellion) and lawsuits (e.g., Juliana v. United States) all the way to influential scenarios of future decline or renewal. These cultural manifestations in turn shape not only our moral, political, and economic responses to climate change but our very understanding of climate itself. As Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (2015) has pointed out, there is a dearth of scholarship within the field of American Studies addressing climate change even though the United States is a main driver of climate change. Schneider-Mayerson [End Page 9] notes that there are no special issues within the field of American Studies dedicated to climate, and that it is only in the past few years that there have been American Studies Association conference panels dedicated to the topic. Since the 2015 publication of Schneider-Mayerson's critique, there has been one special issue on climate in the field, "Cli-Fi and American Studies," edited by Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda for the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies (2017). As Leikam and Leyda note in their Introduction, the twenty-first century has seen a "remarkable burgeoning of a heterogeneous body of cultural texts, including literature, film, visual arts, and performances, and scientific works that take on the challenge of prompting global audiences to engage emotionally and intellectually with the implications of anthropogenic climate change" (109). They further note that "the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical frameworks of American Studies offer extensive expertise for analyses of the heterogeneous body of cultural texts engaging with anthropogenic climate change" (111). In 2020, American Quarterly published a special issue on "Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies," edited by Natasha Zaretsky, Michael Zizer, and Julie Sze. Though the special issue has important overlaps with an analysis of climate, it is focused on the also relatively underexplored topic of energy studies. Meanwhile, a variety of social science and humanities journals whose scope partly overlaps with that of American Studies have recognized the importance of engaging with climate. Some have published special issues that include case studies about the United States, for example, Theory, Culture & Society's 2010 special issue on "Changing Climates"; ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment's 2014 special issue on "Global Warming"; and Polygraph's 2020 special issue on "Marxism and Climate Change." Our aim with this special issue of American Studies is to expand the conversation around climate within American Studies, and to push the field toward a more robust dialogue and thorough engagement with all aspects of climate change. One of the things that an American Studies approach to climate can offer is an interdisciplinary perspective that captures the socio-cultural, political, and ontological dimensions of climate change, including experiential forms of knowledge that are frequently overlooked or not captured by scientific and quantitative methods. An American Studies approach can address issues that undergird or even shape such methods, for example, the impact of environmental activism, climate skepticism, or corporate greening strategies on the perception and negotiation of climate change in the...

On May 10, 2024, The Times of India reported that Venezuela was the first country to lose all its glaciers due to climate change. Now, the question arises: Whom should we hold accountable for that? The obvious answer is the Anthropos, who are responsible for the Anthropocene to which the earth’s geology, ecosystem, and climate are subjected. The discourse of Anthropocene questions the idea of a singular Anthropocene as, according to Claire Colebrook, there is no singular Anthropocene, but there are many. It also questions who/what affects and who/what is affected. The “biopolitics” of the Anthropocene is interlinked to violence. This violence exercises exclusionary politics and results in the gradual degradation of the environment that affects not only humans but every other entity on the earth and leads towards a precarious survival, which, according to Elizabeth Povinelli, is the “anthropology of ordinary suffering”. Rob Nixon introduced the phrase “slow violence”, which includes environmental degradation, long-term pollution and climate change. Taking the cue from Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, this paper aims to relocate it within the discourse of the Anthropocene in John Brunner’s dystopian novel The Sheep Look Up (1972). The novel takes place in an unspecified year in the near future when human activities have resulted in the wholesale destruction of the environment. Therefore, this paper aims to use Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” along with John Galtung’s “structural violence”, Michel Foucault’s “making live and letting die”, and Georgio Agamben’s “bare life” to show how human activities guided by economic greed, power, anthropocentric worldview, and global capitalism results in the ecological and climatological destruction. It will also try to show how the dystopian narrative can significantly shape ecological consciousness.

This research aims to explore the experience of women by Batang Masumai river to slow violence. Limited access to water services and infrastructure in rural area affect women who bear the responsibility to meet household water need because they depend on the river as water source and sanitation facilities. Climate change as a form of slow violence that occurred gradual and attritional becomes a major threat to household water security. The method of this qualitative research is interpretative phenomenological analysis. The data is collected through an in-depth interview with four women from low-income households by Batang Masumai river and observation. The result of this reseacrh shows that floods and droughts that become more severe contribute to water availability, accessabiliy, and quality so that women by Batang Masumai river have to walk longer distances to meet clean household water, carry heavy burden load while also exposed to water conflicts in water points. As slow violence becomes more destructive in a long period of time, there is a need for government to fully implement Law 17/2019 regarding Water Resources to help women with limted sources to adapt and build their resiliency.

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Time and the Environment: “Slow Violence” in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Doña Perfecta and Marianela Sarah Sierra In “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” Foucault writes that the great obsession of the nineteenth century was history, or time. Evidence of this obsession abounds in Western literary representations that portray human behavior adjusting to both its historical consciousness as well as the daily measured and rhythmic time of the clock indicative of industrial societies. In spite of this fascination with mechanized rhythms, the nineteenth century marks the beginning phases of a perceptual crisis regarding other temporal horizons, a crisis that has only become more acute during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One of the great conflicts confronting humanity--and indeed the entire planetary well-being--is the abstraction of human temporality from Earth’s rhythms. As Richard Irvine explains, in contemporary Western-minded societies the changes brought about by industrialization had profound effects on time-reckoning. This term, as Nancy Munn explains, identifies prevailing methods within a society used for temporal orientation: “Strictly construed, ‘time-reckoning’ refers to the use of selected cultural categories, or contingent events […] to “tell time”- to ask “when” something happened, will or should happen- and to “measure” duration- to ask “how long” something takes, or to “time” it (8). Measuring time forms an integral part of society that extends from larger socio-cultural structures to individual perceptions of time. Filip Vostal writes that “not only does transformation of the temporal structures of modern society reconfigure our relationship with each other and with ourselves, but it also affects how we relate to the physical and natural world” (236). Changes in time-reckoning occur in slight ways that can adjust how one organizes and segments activities in daily life; however, industrialization contributed to an extensive time revolution that profoundly altered human thought. While initially localized to industrialized nations in the late-eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, globalization has implemented these temporal changes imposing what Halmut Rosa calls social acceleration. It transforms human perception of time and profoundly affects, as Vostal notes, how we relate to the external world. Contemporary technological societies have been experiencing an unprecedented acceleration of time that has had direct consequences on how these same ‘advanced’ [End Page 41] cultures perceive the extremely slow rhythms of nature. In fact, many theorists now identify that modern technology imposes a perceptual blindness to causal processes in the natural world.1 This blindness is particularly alarming as it hinders the ability to see the effects of human activity on the biosphere. In Rob Nixon’s provocative study Slow Violence, he sustains that in the modern technological age, human cognitive processes increasingly struggle to recognize a connection when prolonged periods separate an event from consequences. As social acceleration increases, perceptual blindness of slow causal events portends frightening consequences for the global ecosystem. In spite of growing alarm over the destabilized biosphere, detractors of climate change accuse scientists and cultural critics of politicizing the environment. The dismissal of an environmental crisis is often traced back to the increasing disconnect between the human and non-human worlds. In essence, modern societies rooted in an ideology of progress engender convictions of humanity’s domination of the natural world, which perforce ignores that humans are deeply reliant on natural affordances. In a counter effort to redress the increasing disengagement of human beings from the environment, literary and artistic expressions have sought to draw attention to the human factor in the environmental crisis such as Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring. Contemporary efforts in literary and cultural productions attempt to redirect attention to humanity’s integral role in the condition of the biosphere as Nixon has shown in his analyses of ecocritical texts. Earlier works, however, offer insight into the social conditions that altered humanity’s understanding of the Earth and its processes. As modernization and technology reconfigured human experiences of time with an ever-accelerating tempo, the Earth’s slower rhythms fell beyond the scope of cognitive processes. This essay seeks to explore earlier representations of the time revolution and social acceleration that altered perception of the environment in two of Galdós’s novels, Doña...

Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change

‘Slow Violence’ was the name give to a social dreaming matrix conducted in the context of an art and climate change exhibition and conference. I present a case study of the matrix that illustrates with quotations form the transcript of the event the theories discussed in previous chapters.

This article traces debates within international climate regime on loss and damage from climate impacts. Impacts from climate change should be understood as incremental violence structurally over-determined by international relations of power and control that affect most acutely those who contributed least to dangerous levels of anthropocentric greenhouse gas emissions. Calls for compensation or reparation for ‘loss and damage’ are therefore a demand for climate justice. This article shows how questions of loss and damage were initially avoided within the climate regime. At the nineteenth Conference of the Parties in December 2013 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Warsaw International Mechanisms for Loss and Damage (WIM) associated with climate change. However, even then questions of compensative or reparative justice were persistently evaded. The institutionalisation of the WIM focused on questions of comprehensive risk assessment and disaster risk reduction and the promotion of privatised, insurance-based and financialised approaches to financing loss and damage. These operate in different ways to displace responsibility away from historical polluters, by nationalising responsibility to anticipate and prepare for disasters and seeking to responsibilise the vulnerable and risk-exposed subject.

This study places toxic pollution incidents within the theoretical framework of “slow violence” and “necropolitics,” revealing that environmental injustice can be overlooked, or even concealed, leading to greater damage. Additionally, ways to counter slow violence are explored. Each point is illustrated in Susanne Antonetta’s environmental autobiography Body Toxic, which talks about the author and her neighbors’ experience with the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals, analyzed here as a form of slow violence. As a result, it becomes apparent why long-term exposure to toxic substances should be deemed slow violence, and the exact way in which this kind of violence exerts itself. Slow violence is structural and gradual, and has historically been the result of economics dictating government policies, often at the cost of health. Therefore, the process of causing slow physical and mental harm to those living in ethnic and deprived areas, as in the case of Antonetta and her neighbors, needs to be examined within the theoretical framework of necropolitics. Slow violence is an environmental injustice that is intensified and perpetuated by racial and social inequality, and this study considers how it can be countered and overcome.