Slow Violence Research Articles

Walking atomic vegas: ritual, memorial, and toxic landscapes

ABSTRACTThis article proposes the use of ritualized walking to mark and remember invisible threats and the ‘slow violence’ of contaminated landscapes undergoing gradual change. To exemplify the idea, the article describes our proposal for a Plutonium Memorial design, which would be a mnemonic device for marking the location of a proposed nuclear waste storage facility buried under the iconic Las Vegas Strip. Supported with evidence that ritual is commonly used to reinforce collective conscience and memory outside the sacred realm, the core of this memorial design would be regularized and ritualized pilgrimages from one of the most important and symbolic American landscapes, Las Vegas, through the equally prominent Grand Canyon to the less well-known uranium mines in Arizona (the source of nuclear power). Though hyperbolic, the Plutonium Memorial demonstrates how an active cultural-based memorial has potential to preserve narratives around contaminated landscapes. To expand beyond this radical example we schematically speculate on other scenarios that could incorporate more representative (less extreme) haptic rituals around memorials marking slowly unfolding environmental disasters. The intention is to provide new visions for durable memorials built around culture rather than structures, which are engaged with not only the past, but also the future.

“We are like bubblegum”: underground narratives of tuberculosis among South African miners

Miners working on South African mines suffer from the highest rate of tuberculosis (TB) in the world. The prevalence of tuberculosis among miners is four to seven times higher than for the general population of South Africa, a country with the second highest rate of tuberculosis in the world. It is against this background that we explore ideas about tuberculosis infection and management among gold and platinum miners in two South African mineworker communities. Using ethnographic methods, we explore the key organising metaphors used by miners to understand TB in relation to infection and the impact it has on their lives, among them “dust” and “we are like bubblegum.” Drawing on Robert Nixon’s (2011) model of “slow violence,” we argue that miners understand TB less in terms of a bacterial infection and more in terms of conditions of life underground. Their concept of “dust” demonstrates that there is an inter-relationship between tuberculosis and dusty working environments regardless of the mineral that is being extracted. Miners’ anxiety of being discarded, like a bubblegum that has lost its flavour, reflects their relationship to the capitalist system in which they are caught.

The Colonial Hotel: spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique

In spite of its dereliction, the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, has emerged as an iconic African building. The dissonant meanings of this site, offer multiple opportunities to investigate the intersection of space and colonialism. We focus upon the cultural and political topologies of the hotel, and of colonial hotels generally, and make the proposition that they were a particular kind of violent colonial institution. By converging a relational reading of both violence and architecture, we reconstruct through the excavation of archival and related materials, the processes present in the histories of the hotel and city at large, to unmask how they acted as spaces of slow violence. White settler’s activities and rationales were underpinned by deliberative strategies of unknowing, forgetting, disavowal which together formed a kind of cultural agnosia that insulated them from the foundational violence that supported the colonial condition. We use a dispersed concept of violence, understood as a tactical and mutable process, which moves between physical, symbolic, embodied and performative domains. We address these domains in the paper through an analysis of the ways the city of Beira was planned, its architecture shaped and represented, and in the recreational and social performances within the hotel.

Embodied and entangled: Slow violence and harm via digital technologies

As embedded systems, Internet and communications technologies not only have material footprints, they exist within and maintain historically specific societal structures and power dynamics. Despite growing awareness of the ubiquity of online harassment and bullying, there remains a disconnect between the embodied experiences of technology facilitated violence and legal and social recognition of harm. Looking at a notorious case out of Nova Scotia and the anti-cyberbullying legislation it inspired, I consider the ways such violence is made visible and invisible, looking specifically at the persistent cognitive disconnect between the virtual and the corporeal, and the language that enacts or justifies such distinctions. Formed within and against persistent ontological perceptions about technology and the nature of the virtual, I elaborate on slow violence in two different registers: the differentially experienced and embodied slow violence of persistent online threats and abuse, and the slow violence of responses to those communications.

Structural Injustice, Slow Violence? The Political Ecology of a “Best Practice” Hydropower Dam in Lao PDR

ABSTRACTLarge areas of the rural Lao landscape are being rapidly transformed by infrastructure development projects. Arguably, it is hydraulic development that is contributing most significantly to rural socio-ecological change, due to the profound socio-political ruptures dams precipitate. The nationally iconic Theun-Hinboun Hydropower Project, commissioned in 1998 and expanded in 2012, provides an illustrative case of hydropower’s complex social-ecological outcomes. Proponents have argued that the project represents a best-case example of planned, sustainable development, through successful mitigation of negative impacts and benefit-sharing with affected communities, and implemented in accordance with international good practice. This article questions the narratives of sustainability. It is argued that while the project could be considered successful in achieving certain economic objectives defined by the government and investors, evidence of social and environmental sustainability is questionable, raising questions about other dam projects in the country with weaker standards and oversight. Given the extent of negative impacts and associated social trauma in the Nam Hinboun basin, the article considers whether and to what extent such hydraulic development processes under authoritarian rule may be framed as expressions of structural injustice and slow violence.

Toxic Space and Time: Slow Violence, Necropolitics, and Petrochemical Pollution

This article explores how time interacts forcefully with the experience of living within toxic spaces. Through ethnographic research and interviews with residents of a contaminated town in Louisiana, the article unpacks the uncertain temporalities of industrial pollution and potential means of resistance. Putting Mbembe's (2003) postcolonial treatise on necropolitics in conversation with Nixon's (2011) work on slow violence, the article examines the racialized, uneven, and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution in a former plantation landscape. By exploring the necropolitics of place, the article reveals how unjust exposure to toxic chemicals creates contemporary “death-worlds” that are experienced in temporally uncertain and constricting ways. The oppressive nature of uncertain temporality makes the material assemblages of petrochemical infrastructure daily environmental concerns. Yet by focusing on the lived experience of communities inhabiting this toxic geography, the article notes how witnessing gradual changes to the local environment has become a barometer for perceiving chronic pollution. The idea of “slow observation” is posited as a useful counterpoint to slow violence and the permanent wounding of toxic pollution. Slow observation is an important aspect of living with sustained environmental brutality and offers a potential means of political resistance and doing undone environmental justice.

Olhar lento e meio ambiente:

“Slow Violence” is the key concept in the ecocritical thought of Rob Nixon and it has been an inspiration for the documentary Beyond Fordlândia. Slow Violence is defined as “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” (NIXON, 2011).

Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri as Text/Image Activism and Cli-Fi

Using an ecocritical approach and discussing the theory of the graphic novel as it relates to Indian writing in English, this paper argues that In All Quiet in Vikaspuri Sarnath Banerjee blends the cli-fi genre with the medium of the graphic novel to illustrate “slow violence” that is perpetrated on nature in the name of vikas or progress. Through his text/image activism, Banerjee depicts India’s water wars at the community level, a corrupt political system, the shortsighted policies in politics and business, the detrimental effects of privatizing basic resources, the media’s lack of coverage of environmental issues, the paradoxical nature of the relationship that Hindus have with nature, and the inaction or silence that the average Indian maintains towards environmental concerns. These factors are forms of “slow violence.” Since there is no actual “violence” involved in any of these factors, the threat is difficult to translate. However, Banerjee responds to the challenge by intervening representationally to indicate “amorphous calamities” by (a) “devising iconic symbols” to illustrate the calamity and (b) by yoking popular objects to “amorphous calamities.” Personalizing the Anthropocene through an Indian cultural prism, Banerjee refers to popular sports, television dramas, Hindu mythology, and real environmental disasters. Ultimately, through his work, he holds up a mirror to his Indian readers to warn them of the dangers of keeping quiet in the land of progress.

Slow Violence and Water Racism in Sarnath Banerjee’s All Quiet in Vikaspuri

This paper claims that Sarnath Banerjee destabilizes the narrative of national economic progress in his graphic narrative All Quiet in Vikaspuri by highlighting ecological crises and destruction of communities in India. The graphic narrative makes visible the slow violence of ecological destruction and mass displacement triggered by neoliberalism. It shows that the sharp inequality in access to water in Delhi entails a denial of hydraulic citizenship to refugees and the poor. The only solution to this crisis, the text suggests, is water democracy and resistance against neoliberal monopolies. The working-class hero’s alliance with erstwhile water criminals – one which transcends ethnicity and class – is illustrative of how social justice may be achieved. However, I argue that the underrepresentation of women in the graphic narrative is a significant limitation of the text, especially since it inadvertently perpetuates the invisibility of women prevalent in development models.

Obvious but Invisible: Ways of Knowing Health, Environment, and Colonialism in a West Coast Indigenous Community

AbstractThis paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence onIndigenousground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples' unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community's initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state's legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.

Wartime Forestry and the “Low Temperature Lifestyle” in Late Colonial Korea, 1937–1945

This article examines the emergence in colonial Korea of a command economy for forestry products following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). It does so, first, by tracing the policy mechanisms through which the colonial state commandeered forest products, especially timber, firewood, and charcoal. Second, through an analysis of the wartime promotion of a “low temperature lifestyle,” it offers a thumbnail sketch of the lived experiences and corporeal consequences of state-led efforts to rationalize fuel consumption. Considered together, these lines of analysis offer insight into not only the ecological implications of war on the Korean landscape, but also the bodily privations that defined everyday life under total war—what might be called the “slow violence” of caloric control.

Toward a Cinema of Slow Violence

Llamas-Rodriguez develops a “cinema of slow violence” as a framework for apprehending and critically assessing depictions of violence in film about narcotrafficking. Extending Rob Nixon's conception of slow violence, a cinema of slow violence proposes an orientation towards figuring violence in forms that use the distinct medium affordances of cinema. The author contests Nixon's assumption that cinematic depictions of violence will necessarily be spectacular by analyzing cinematic depictions of slow violence in the film Heli. This is achieved through a focus on cinematic figurations that are not strictly representational but rather avisual or affective. A cinema of slow violence requires an ethical orientation towards acknowledging, or doing something with the knowledge of, slow violence within the phenomenon of narcotrafficking. A cinema of slow violence emerges from the orientation of the filmmaker, the critic, and the audience, as well as the interconnections between each of these.

“It’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing”: Slow Violence and the Manipulation of Time

In recent years, scholars have developed a vocabulary for describing scenes of insecurity, precarity, and disorder too slow to achieve recognition as crises. Concepts such as slow violence, for example, depend on forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation whose ordinariness exacerbates suffering. But not enough attention has been paid to how those mired in the experience of protracted harm themselves use time to respond to this pernicious condition. In this article, I focus on the deliberate manipulations of time that characterize responses to slow violence by examining a campaign to halt the construction of a trash incinerator in south Baltimore. The incinerator—which posed toxic risk for residents in exchange for the promise of clean, green, renewable energy—was to be the latest in a steady stream of impositions that have plagued local bodies since the nineteenth century. Here, I scrutinize this history and the consequences of gradual industrial incursion on risk perceptibility. I then analyze the ways in which time has been slowed, sped up, reordered, and strategically punctuated by parties on multiple sides of the incinerator campaign. In the process, this article offers up a set of tools that, beyond depicting time as a medium of violence, also specify temporalities of resistance and refusal. Taken together, they suggest that slow violence, rather than merely obstructing response, invites creative forms of temporal orchestration and moral punctuation.

The Reshaping of Landscapes: Systems of Mediation, War, and Slow Violence

John Lee's, David Fedman's, and Lisa Brady's essays persuasively show the value of studying environmental issues on the Korean peninsula. Each of the essays carefully explains how drives led by individuals and entities, such as the state, engineered nature for human needs, security, and later economic growth. In so doing, they show how these drives simultaneously altered nature and remade institutions, systems, and cultures that influenced people's agency and identity and reshaped forms of consciousness. By judiciously making visible the agents and social forces behind the reconstitution of nature, the essays collectively introduce diverse approaches to the study of environmental issues in Asia and elsewhere. Most of all, they demonstrate that transnational environmental history on the Korean peninsula can no longer be overlooked when dwelling on and debating major historical and theoretical issues in Korean, Asian, and environmental studies.

Anthroposcenes: Towards an Environmental Graphic Novel

In this article, I consider how two contemporary graphic novels, Richard McGuire’s Here (2015) and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive (2010), take up the challenge posed by the Anthropocene to represent both geologic and human scales. I argue that graphic novels prove a fruitful site for investigating the capacities of both visual art and literature to respond to such a refiguring of the boundaries of the human subject and narrative. While the most commercially popular and frequently studied texts in climate fiction tend to be novels or films, I turn from considering the patterns of genre fiction to the affordances of form. I explore how the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of the graphic novel form encompass environmental phenomena that are often difficult to visualize elsewhere, stretching beyond human perspectives. In particular, I show how the aesthetics of temporality, or visual time, in graphic novels encourages readings that take notice of the nonhuman presence in plots and narrative events. In arguing for the environmental, more-than-human implications of visual time in the graphic novel form, I focus on how representations of domestic habits and daily routines in Here and Radioactive are articulated within and implicated by unruly scales of time and space (too small and too large to contain). I argue that the aesthetics of time in the form of the graphic novel address representational challenges central to the Anthropocene, environmental justice, and slow violence, in particular, the mediation between the planetary and the domestic.

The slow violence of corporate social responsibility: the case of mining in Peru

Drawing on fieldwork in three Andean regions of Peru, this article analyses the capacity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to reduce mining-related violence in rural communities in developing countries. Within Peru, to some extent CSR has stabilised short-term relationships between mining corporations and nearby communities, although tensions remain high in others. While effects are varied and locally-contingent, the findings support a theoretical understanding of CSR as deeply embedded in legitimising the violence of capitalism, including the slow violence from degrading local environments.

The UN World Water Development Report 2016, Water and Jobs: A Critical Review

The UN World Water Development Report 2016, <i>Water and Jobs</i>: A Critical Review

ECOCRITICISM AND MAGICAL REALISM IN KAREN TEI YAMASHITA STHROUGH THE ARC OF THE RAINFOREST

In her novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) Karen Tei Yamashita deploys magical realist narrative technique to offer a globally-embracing ecocritical criticism that unfolds global connectivity of peoples, places, and their destinies. As such, she uses a deterritorialized environmental approach, which favors eco-cosmopolitanism over bioregionalism, drawing our attention to the shortcomings of locally-based ecocritical studies that overlook the inextricable political, social, and cultural connections between the local and the global in an age of unprecedented mobility and global modernity. Another environmental issue Yamashati sheds light upon is the fact of slow violence, a violence, as Rob Nixon argues, appears out of sight, and over time. To render this invisible violence visible, she employs magical realism. The intersection between magical realism and ecocriticism in Through the Arc fuels a representational void by giving shape not only to the insidious workings of global capitalism masquerading as “scientific development,” and/or “progress” but also to the slow, invisible environmental violence whose long-term effects bring about human and environmental cost.

Becoming Bog Bodies Sacrifice and Politics of Exclusion, as Evidenced in the Deposition of Skeletal Remains in Wetlands Near Uppåkra

ABSTRACTThis paper is inspired by new materialist gender theory and the way it reconfigures the analysis of bodies and the environment. Here the relationships entangled in wetlands and bogs through depositions are in focus. More specifically, it deals with the placing of bodily remains and artefacts in wet contexts around the political and religious centre of Uppåkra in Scania, South Sweden. The aim of this paper is to map some of the processes that led to those people ‘becoming bog bodies’ and investigates their role in a situated political ecology. By examining who these people were and became during the life course and in death, it will open up a discussion on precariousness, vulnerability and masculinity, where victims of sacrifice were perhaps not only selected, but also possibly made. The paper brings a neglected dataset of skeletal remains from bogs to the attention of research and present new radiocarbon dates as well as osteological analysis of these remains. It engages with concepts such as slow violence and necropolitics derived from discussions within the environmental humanities.

The Architecture of Slow, Structural, and Spectacular Violence and the Poetic Testimony of War

This research observes the architecture of the lived built environment in Lebanon as a material sensor of risk, produced through an evolving integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism. Forcing its impact through slow, structural, and spectacular modes of enacting violence, this article traces an historic inscription of these technologies of governance, read through an intersectional observation of international law, architecture, and the human bodily experience of affect. Framing the often chaotic or hysteric nature of voicing evidence as poetic testimony, this article questions dominant methods of producing evidence that often exclude or render the human body invisible.