Slow Violence Research Articles

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.

Hazardous Aesthetics: A “Merely Interesting” Toxic Tour of Waste Management Data

This illustrated essay attempts to respond to the slow violence of the hazardous waste trade. We introduce and analyze common representational styles of hazardous waste: greenwashing, ruin porn, environmental justice toxic tours, and Ngai’s concept of the merely interesting. We argue that the first two styles tend to reproduce the status quo, but that the latter two are potentially more disruptive. We then turn to a data set about the transnational hazardous waste trade in North America to argue for and produce alternative representations of this waste, literally drawing from the data and figuratively drawing inspiration from toxic tours and the merely interesting. Our intervention is thus visual as well as conceptual: We argue against status quo representations of hazardous waste and then discuss and produce alternatives based on a novel data set we created.

<em>What Is Missing?</em> An Affective Digital Environmental Humanities

What Is Missing?An Affective Digital Environmental Humanities Jennifer K. Ladino (bio) The start of a new geologic epoch is as good a time as any to look backward. In this era of overwhelming species extinction and environmental degradation, a primary task for digital environmental humanities, or "EcoDH," scholars is to reimagine how to represent, cope with, and deploy loss in the service of a more just present and perhaps even a livable future. As a scholar of affect, I'm concerned not only with how we imagine and represent life in the Anthropocene but also with how we feel about it. If atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen's wish for the Anthropocene to be a "warning to the world" (cited in Kolbert 2011) is realized, then what affective registers should this warning take? Environmentalists have been sounding alarm bells for some time with minimal results, especially when guilt and shame have set the tone.1 An important project for the EcoDH, then, is to think more carefully about affect: the powerful, visceral, pre-or even non-cognitive feelings that arise and are transmitted in both virtual and actual environments.2 This essay considers affects about loss—especially nostalgia and solastalgia—as potential allies for environmentalism and as important subjects for scholars studying (in) the Anthropocene,3 an era some have characterized as a melancholy (Merola 2014) or anxious one (Merola 2018; Morton 2016, 232–33). Forward-looking genres like speculative fiction and cli-fi offer attractive data sets for scholars seeking to imagine a global future. But backward-looking texts also warrant attention. How to represent the past, how to learn from it, and how to remember it in ways that might [End Page 189] motivate a public that is often depressed, or apathetic, in the face of a dismal future are pressing concerns for the EcoDH. Influential digital humanities scholar Bethany Nowviskie calls on us to "draw ourselves together with compassion, solidarity, and smarts—as an international, multi-disciplinary, and self-consciously inter-professional community—mindful of everyday extinctions and of the complexities of contending with them, cautious of the darker sides and callings of our drive to communicate in deep time, and yet filled with benevolence and hope" (Nowviskie 2014). The Humanities for the Environment project is one ambitious and important response to this call. Another—and my focus here—is Maya Lin's What Is Missing? memorial, a project that moves "beyond big-data algorithmic analysis and visualization" to confront viewers affectively with the macro-and micro-dimensions of our "lossy everyday" (Nowviskie 2014). Memorials like Lin's raise interesting questions about affect in what Charles Travis terms the "digital Anthropocene"—a phrase he uses to describe our current epoch, which fuses the human, ecological, digital, and informational infrastructures and reconfigures how we perceive and interact with each other and with the environment (Travis 2018). In some sense, the "paper-thin" layer of the earth on which humans are writing the Anthropocene (Boes and Marshall 2014, 63) may be our most lasting memorial—a durable, if unintentional, geologic story for future generations to translate. Our intentional memorials matter, too, though. Geologically, culturally, and emotionally accretive, memorials are rich sites from which to theorize affects about change and loss in the Anthropocene. Whether located in physical or virtual environments, memorials invoke scale in provocative ways, often inspiring visitors to think across geological and anthropocentric time scales, sometimes both at once. Most memorials attend to discrete events, but What Is Missing? grapples with slow violence and global change that, while accelerated if represented geologically, doesn't typically feel fast at the scale of everyday human experience. The contemplation of deep time that many memorials encourage sidelines human agency, a useful tactic in an epoch in which humans are both exceptional, insofar as we self-identify as a force of nature, and just one species among many others, subject to geological forces in scary new ways. Erika Doss describes the contemporary US as being in a state of "memorial mania," marked by an "obsession with issues of memory and [End Page 190] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Listening Cone, photo by Bruce Damonte. Image courtesy of...

Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia by Michael L. Cepek

Michael L. Cepek, with photographs by Bear Guerra Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. 304 pp. Photographs, maps, references, index. $27.95 paper (ISBN: 978–1–4773–1508–8). The Ecuadorian Cofán are in a sense legendary in the popular imaginary of Indigenous Amazonia” (Davidov, 2014, p. 197). The cover of Life in Oil supports that legend: feathers in ears, noses, and crowns; mounded strands of beads and more feathers and scores of peccary tusks made into long necklaces. The legend of Indigenous Amazonia includes a culture inextricable from rainforest and rivers full of sustenance and danger, includes shamans drinking yaje (or ayahuasca) that they might learn to become jaguars or anacondas. It encompasses waves of proselytizing settlers seekingfortuneinthisworldand/orthenext. By the late-twentieth century, the Cofán legend incorporated hydrocarbon production and its vast consequences in Amazonia, and a Cofán-identifying-Caucasian son of missionaries occasionally called a “gringo chief.” The legend includes a decades-long, nineteen -billion-dollar,lawsuitagainstbehemoth Chevron, and multiple armed occupations of hydrocarbon industry sites by hundreds of Cofán people. A number of Bear Guerra’s black-and-white photographs accompany Cepek’s words in a telling of this legend with a focus on Cofán experience. Sometimes, stories of legendary Native survivalandimages ofauthenticallyadorned and stoic Natives under environmental attack—both suggested by this book’s cover—canbeproblematic(e.g.Kane,1995). Sometimes, such texts function—as they have for centuries across the Americas—to (un)intentionally reify Native peoples’ racialized socioecological marginalization, especially when a power disparity exists between the Native people being portrayed and those whose gazes shape portraits, often North AmericansorWesterners.Iwrite“sometimes” because we all know the old adage about judging a book’s cover. Cepek’s relationship with many of his Cofán collaborators spans more than two decades. He speaks fluent A’ingae, the Cofán language. The people on the book’s cover—Alejandro, Lucia, and Roberto—host Cepek during his fieldwork staysintheCofáncommunityofDurenoand considerhimfamily,afeelinghereciprocates accordingtothesharedkindnessesdescribed throughout Life in Oil. Those relationships are what make this book more than simply another example of a popular research genre that Cepek himself criticizes: something on the horrors of oil in Amazonian Ecuador written by a North American simply to improve their own lot in life with little concern foranyEcuadorian,Indigenousorotherwise (p. 190). Using the staple anthropological practices of applied linguistic proficiency and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Cepek conducted interviews, conversations, and observationsthatprovidemostofthesubject matter of Life in Oil. After relating the experienceofariverineoilspillin2014 ,chapterone succinctly states the book’s approach: “life in 3 book reviews oil is a form of slow, confusing, and ultimately unknowable violence” (p. 10). Cofán people are described as confident, suffering, and fearful “victims of history who [recognize that they] deserve material compensation for oil’s assault on their lives” (p. 11). A nod to Nixon’s (2011) appraisal of long-lasting socialandenvironmentaljusticeissuesas “slow violence,” Cepek’s theoretical framing of the hydrocarbonindustryanditssocioecological effectsconsistentlyemployswhatAppeletal. (2015) refer to as the “metonymic register” of “oil.” In this common social science approach, theterm“oil”variablyrefersto:thesubstance itself, sometimes considered an actant in the Latourian sense; the infrastructures, practices ,andconsequencesofitscommodification; and/or complex themes of hydrocarbon governance and politics such as modernity, money, power, and violence. That metonym is “performative” (Appel et al., 2015, p. 17), a compelling and expedient mode of framing the complex socioecological problems that constitute “oil.” Chapter two begins with background on Cepek’s relationship to Alejandro and his family, followed by an overview of Cofán spatial history focused on Dureno before and after the advent of the hydrocarbon industry . This chapter also introduces the reader to Cofán shamanism, explored further in chapter three. There, retellings of the life and death of a powerful shaman serve to guide an exploration of ancestral Cofán cosmology, andhowitsmeaningsanduseshavechanged over the last few decades. Chapter four explores the term “cocama“: an A’ingae word that marks the boundaries of Cofán-ness and also implies the propensity for violence Cofán culture attributes to non-Cofán: settlers , the state, certain missionaries, the hydrocarbon industry. A brief literature review on types and effects...

Over the Edge: Risk, Ecology, and Equivalency in Will Ferguson's 419

In Will Ferguson’s 419, apparent equivalencies between Canadian and Nigerian risk-taking characters are contradicted by the reality of an uneven global playing field—one in which risk and reward, sacrifice and suffering, and the autonomy and skill to navigate dangerous situations successfully are distributed following lines of privilege and wealth that derive from colonial history and the globalized economy’s North/South divisions. Drawing on risk theorists Mary Douglas and Ulrich Bech, I argue that, at the individual and interpersonal level, risk in 419 is more outsourced and offloaded than shared. Beyond individual risk, this novel of three locales—Calgary, Lagos, and the Niger Delta—details the ecological devastations of high-risk oil extraction in the Delta, links that activity briefly to Alberta oil, yet elides the local effects of Alberta’s oil industry. The novel’s lopsided ecological lens enables it to make vivid what Rob Nixon calls the globalized economy’s “slow violence” toward the poor, but its representation of oil economies and ecologies—like its treatment of individual risk—throws off-balance the very transcontinental equivalencies and correspondences it seems otherwise eager to establish. In the process, the novel compromises its treatment of the moral responsibility, justice, and accountability that Douglas sees as intrinsic to risk, while limiting its ability to explore themes of environmental justice comparatively across disparate local ecologies put at risk by oil.

El petróleo en México y sus impactos sobre el territorio ed. by Martín M. Checa-Artasu and Regina Henández Franyuti

Kane, J. 1995. Savages. New York: Knopf. Nixon, R. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Simpson, A. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press. Martín M. Checa-Artasu and Regina Henández Franyuti, eds. El petróleo en México y sus impactos sobre el territorio Distrito Federal, México: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2016. 268 pp. Maps, tables, introduction, bibliography, index. $235.00MXP paper (ISBN 978–607–9475–43–7). The apocryphal eagle with a snake initsbeakstandingatopanopalislikely the most recognizable symbol of Mexico. It is the central figure of the bandera nacional and serves as a statement of ethnic and cultural hybridity linked to deep (pre)historical roots. However, considering the developmentofMexicosincetheearlytwentiethcen tury —throughtheRevolution,the“Mexican Miracle,” the long PRI hegemony, the neoliberal turn, and now into the post-neoliberal era it may be entering—perhaps a gushing oil derrick would be a more fitting, if less aesthetically pleasing, symbol at the center of the flag. Oil has been central to Mexico’s revenues and the economic and social development it has paid for have created a general sense of national pride and self-determination around oil. Today, Mexico is the twelfth largest producer in the world of oil and eighteenth globally in natural gas. Despite declining production from the Cantarell and Ku-Maloob-Zaap superfields, oil and gas development remains a linchpin of Mexico’s financial bottom line and thus its political stability. The edited volume El petróleo en Mexico y sus impactos sobre el territorio takes this as a given fact and goes a step further, through geographical explorations of how oil has made itself spatially manifest, via the concepts of territory and landscape. The editors, Martin M. Checa-Artasu and Regina Hernández Franyuti, note from the outsetthatthisbookisthesummaryresultof a 2015 symposium of presentations concerning the clearly stated title of the book. The editorsmakethisbookmoreconceptuallyfocusedbyleadingitssixoriginalcontributions with well-written and deeply-researched introductoryandbibliographicchapters .What follows are an assortment of chapters that range from the theoretical to the methodological and empirical investigating the spatialities of hydrocarbons in Mexico. In the opening bibliographic chapter, Martin Checa goes through an impressively expansive epistemology of hydrocarbon extraction in Mexico. Aiming this work at scholars of hydrocarbon extraction in Mexico , Checa begins by framing the epistemology within the political-economic structures that produced it. He then organizes seminal works on the subject by theme and chronology . Later in the chapter, Checa narrows this broad literature to works that bear a “vinculo territorial,” rolling them out through their 6 Journal of Latin American Geography evolutionary stages or turns, geographic/ regional focus, and thematic categories, all which serve to create the broader context into which the following six chapters fit. The heart of the book begins with a historical examination on the potential ecological consequences of the 2013–2014 Energy Reforms in Mexico. Author Myrna Santiago, a preeminent environmental historian of oil, begins by providing a legal history of Mexican constitutional law related to hydrocarbons ,fromtheearlytwentiethcenturytothe 1938 expropriation and Pemex years, to modifications of Article 27 and the recent energy reforms. In a compelling narrative, Santiago showshowtheselegalchangestohow,andby whom, hydrocarbons can be extracted have affected people and environments in Mexico . The violent dispossession of campesinos and indigenous people amid ecological ruin that are associated with twentieth-century hydrocarbon development serve as a warning for the post-reform hydrocarbon regime in Mexico. The next chapter, again by Checa, positions itself at the thematic core of the volume . In it, he explores the concept of territoriality of hydrocarbon development in Mexico by showing how the interrelation of geology, infrastructure, and professional practice have produced the fundamental territorial unit of the Mexican energy sector , the campo or “field.” This in-depth and well-researched chapter illustrates how the hydrocarbon campo is defined as a legal entity , as a resource, and a container for the environmental and the demographic. In essence, Checa outlines the social and discursive production of space embodied in the Mexican hydrocarboncampo.Checa’stakehereisthat the campo is but a mere spatial construction that fundamentally hides a richer, more “real” understanding of Mexican hydrocarbon territoriality .Hethenproposesthattheconcept...

The Hot War: Climate, Security, Fiction

This paper examines a set of recent novels in which the problem of climate change is explicitly linked to global war and the security state. The next theater of war after or alongside the war on terror, they suggest, may well be an environment grown unpredictable because of human intervention. Drawing on Robert Marzec’s work on “environmentality,” it describes how novels like Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising (2012), Mark de Silva’s Square Wave (2016), and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) represent the future, past, and present of a world shaped by an “ecosecurity imaginary.” Additionally, the analysis links these narratives to scenario planning, nuclear dread, and slow violence to suggest, first, that we should expand a limited category like ‘cli-fi’ to include less obvious examples and, second, that we should consider fiction’s complicity with as well as critique of this militarized environmentalism. What is more, the analysis reveals the strong ties between this new, “hot war” and the Cold War, and identifies a shared suspicion of geo-engineering projects among contemporary writers.

Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change

Fiction writers who try to do justice to the vast temporal and spatial scales and the enormous complexity of climate change are faced with the problem that the phenomenon exceeds human perception and that it is not dramatic in the traditional sense. In this article we explore the formal challenges that arise when fiction takes on the temporality of climate change by examining three very different novels that seek to capture the geological timescale. We analyze Richard McGuire’s time-bending graphic novel Here (2014), Dale Pendell’s fictional future history The Great Bay (2010), and Jeanette Winterson’s cautionary science-fiction tale The Stone Gods (2007) through the lens of Barbara Adam’s concept of the timescape, Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, and Timothy Clark’s notion of destructive doubles to see what kinds of literary innovations and translations the timescale of climate change has provoked. In doing so, we ponder Clark’s question, posed in his recent book Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), whether humans are constitutionally incapable of imagining the Anthropocene—the new geological epoch defined by the action of humans of which climate change is the most salient manifestation—or whether authors can adequately depict and convey it by disrupting conventional modes of representation. We conclude that while each of the three novels ultimately falls short in this regard, collectively they do chart possible pathways for successful literary treatment of the most pressing ecological threat of our time.

Critical adult education and the art gallery museum

Although burdened by legacies of elitism, exclusion and paternalism, some public museums are attempting to respond to the socio-environmental problems currently facing our planet by developing critical non-formal educational activities to foster consciousness and change. This article explores one such response; a six-week non-formal course entitled Art and Slow Violence hosted at Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London. The course was centred around a variety of artworks and multimedia representations aimed to stimulate dialogue, reflections and meaning making about the social and ecological impacts of the aftermaths of climate change, war and conflict. As a participant researcher, I gathered data through observations, journaling, and interviews. Findings show tensions between learning and education, expert-teacher and novice-learner, audience wants and knowledge assumptions, instructor and organisations expectations and challenges vis-à-vis self-direction around the artworks. Yet the course was powerful, particularly the informal gatherings following each class and the stories the artworks told and represented. Together, these served as means to question critically, reflect, debate and comprehend differently, the complex, contentious, but often ‘invisible’ socio-environmental challenges of our time.

Racial coastal formation: The environmental injustice of colorblind adaptation planning for sea-level rise

The United States’ deeply racialized history currently operates below the surface of contemporary apolitical narratives on vulnerability mitigation and adaptation to sea-level rise. As communities, regulatory agencies, and policy-makers plan for rising seas, it is important to recognize the landscapes of race and deep histories of racism that have shaped the socio-ecological formations of coastal regions. If this history goes unrecognized, what we label colorblind adaptation planning is likely to perpetuate what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of environmental racism, characterized by policies that benefit some populations while abandoning others. By colorblind adaptation planning, we refer to vulnerability mitigation and adaptation planning projects that altogether overlook racial inequality—or worse dismiss its systemic causes and explain away racial inequality by attributing racial disparities to non-racial causes. We contend that responses to sea-level rise must be attuned to racial difference and structures of racial inequality. In this article, we combine the theory of racial formation with the geographical study of environmental justice and point to the ways racial formations are also environmental. We examine vulnerability to sea-level rise through the process of racial coastal formation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, specifically analyzing its deep history, the uneven racial development of land ownership and employment, and barriers to African American participation and inclusion in adaptation planning. Racial coastal formation’s potential makes way for radical transformation in climate change science not only in coastal areas, but other spaces as situated territorial racial formations.

Ecogothic Dislocations in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees

This essay reads Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel as an example of postcolonial dark archaeology. Drawing from Timothy Morton’s dark ecology and Rob Nixon’s slow violence, I argue the figure of sexual abuse and exploitation complicates notions of pristine indigeneity and corrupt anthropology, critically confusing notions of cultural, physical and ideological pollution, contamination, discovery and knowledge.

Slow Violence in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Rob Nixon on Communication, Media, and the Environmental Humanities

The following interview addresses the themed issue, “Environmental Narratives,” and some of the questions that the collected articles raise. Despite the increasing presence of various environmental...

‘I haven’t lost hope of reaching out … ’: exposing racism in sport by elevating counternarratives

ABSTRACTThis paper tells the ‘back story’ to the development of a local soccer hub, which focuses on the experiences of a predominantly South Sudanese team called the Western Tigers. We use a counter-story telling approach anchored in critical race theory, to develop a composite story that brings together biographical and autobiographical accounts gathered during an ethnographic study. These accounts are narrated from the vantage point of David, a player/coach, whose experiences expose everyday racism and its effects, while also illuminating responses to racism in the context of sport. This composite story challenges dominant narratives about sport in Australian society particularly those that position sport as the great equaliser and a pathway to ‘integration’ and belonging. Our analysis sheds light onto how the dynamics of racialisation and exclusion take the form of a slow violence for young people of refugee background, shaping their experiences and trajectories on and off the field. We discuss the paradoxical role of settings such as the Western Tigers and the Community Soccer Hub as important ‘public homeplaces’, that can also be understood as marginalised and marginalising for young people of refugee background.

Micro disasters: Expanding the social work conceptualization of disasters

Environmental problems, like environmental disasters, mirror oppressive structural forces in society, as the primary victims of environmental degradation are also the main victims of other injustices. However, scholarship is lacking on the impacts of environmental disasters in these populations. Using a participatory phenomenological approach from a social work standpoint, this study uses the concept of slow violence to explore disasters in several poor communities in Kenya. Findings include the development and operationalization of a new term, micro disasters. Micro disasters are everyday problems that are linked to development and have no formal aid support for survivors, which deepens poverty.

Seeking stability in Chicago: School actions, (c)overt forms of racial injustice, and the slow violence of neoliberal rationality

During the 2012-13 school year, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) reported 18,669 students were enrolled in the Students in Temporary Living Situations (STLS) program. In this paper, we seek to discuss school closings in relationship to their impact on poor, unstably housed, black students in Chicago. Critical race theory (CRT) constructs of (1) whiteness as property (Harris, 1995), (2) racial realism (Bell, 1992; Buras, 2013), and (3) white supremacy as education policy (Donnor, 2013; Gillborn, 2005) will be the frames in which we situate and analyze the school actions that have resulted in the recent closure/consolidation of 49 Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We contend that these constructs related to race, when mixed with neoliberal rationality (Brown, 2015) conspire to foster disastrous school policy that unduly impacts vulnerable populations and de-democratizes Chicago in profound ways. For this project, the CPS STLS program manager overseeing STLS transitions during the 2012-13/2013-14 school actions, and civil rights lawyers-advocates who have spent over two decades working to enforce McKinney-Vento implementation in CPS were interviewed. Document analysis of court records regarding three cases through which the Chicago Public Schools were named as Defendants in litigation brought forth by families (parents and students) impacted by CPS’ school actions; Chicago Teacher’s Union data and IL General Assembly’s Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force were completed. Findings reveal in order to promote equitable, and effective education policy for students of color experiencing housing instability means working against white supremacy and slow violence found throughout the US and world.

Bodies That Should Matter

Cherríe Moraga’s 1992 play Heroes and Saints remains a critical dramatic work for both environmental studies and Chicana/o studies. The play mirrors and shapes the lived historical reality of Chicana/o farmworkers and pesticide poisoning in the San Joaquin Valley of Southern California, where a disproportionate number of children were born with birth defects or diagnosed with cancer between 1978 and 1988. This paper examines Moraga’s representation of “slow violence” in the play, which uses arresting images to defy the invisibility of a subaltern Chicana/o community. “Slow violence” is a term coined by environmental scholar Rob Nixon; in contrast to spectacular violence, which is characterized by time- and body-boundedness, slow violence occurs gradually and often invisibly. The theoretical lens of slow violence opens up a space in which to discuss the political, temporal, and activist dimensions of Moraga’s play as well as the significance of the relationship between environmentalism and subalternity. This paper strategically rethinks environmental violence on the body and land as well as the politics of (in)visibility.

The destruction of the Islamic state of being, its replacement in the being of the state: Algeria, 1830–1847

ABSTRACTIf settler colonies are driven by the impulse of destroying to replace, what was destroyed and how was it replaced in Algeria? This article shows how an Islamic state of being was replaced by the being of the state in the 1830s and the 1840s; a transformation largely achieved through complementary strategies of spectacular and slow violence, ranging from annihilatory massacres to the seizure of the productive capacity of peoples and their lands. By listening attentively to indigenous writers such as Hamdan Khodja and Ahmed Bey, alongside the banal details of the making of empire found in archival documents, a new picture of the development of ‘Algeria’ emerges, along with its significance in world history.

Sensory siege: dromocolonisation, slow violence, and poetic realism in the twenty-first century short story from Gaza

Since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the subsequent siege, and Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip, including ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008/2009 and ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in 2014, it has become difficult to convey the normality of life in Gaza, a normality that is often elusive in a situation that is increasingly defined by the accelerated and technological violence of dromocolonisation, at the same time that it is marked by what Rob Nixon has termed ‘slow violence.’ To make these forms of violence visible and apprehensible, recent short fiction from Gaza has turned to poetic realism and the use of the sensory experience to represent life under siege. Contrary to visceral realism, which promotes a focus on the body as a site of victimhood and suffering, poetic realism allows the short story writers discussed in this article to reclaim agency and to define a Gazan identity that resists the subjection and subjectification of human rights discourses and of the Anglophone media by focusing both on the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of living in Gaza in the twenty-first century.