Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon’s goal is to demonstrate the outsized impact on the world’s most vulnerable people of the kind of environmental violence that unfolds slowly over time and is easily overlooked.

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor has received awards including Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2011, the 2012 American Book Award, the 2012 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the International Studies Association, and the 2013 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Scholarly Book Award.

This guide refers to the paperback edition released in 2013 by First Harvard University Press.

Summary

Nixon confronts the idea that in an age dominated by social media and the internet, spectacles of violence often ignite activism. Because environmental catastrophes do not lend themselves to dramatic video footage, Nixon proposes the need to rethink the contemporary understanding of violence to include “slow violence.” To help readers understand slow violence, Nixon discusses writer-activists who are capturing, in various literary forms, the environmental injustices being committed against the most vulnerable communities.

Nixon has three main concerns in the book. First, environmental mismanagement is causing slow violence against people and nature. Second, people from lower-income backgrounds face two problems—their poverty and slow violence—that are largely invisible to people in more affluent circumstances. Third, writer-activists can shed light on these problems and thereby contribute to solving them.

Nixon highlights numerous literary works across many disciplines, including environmental and postcolonial studies. Both fiction and nonfiction books document “foreign burdens” that take hold of unsuspecting communities, highlight the widening divide between high-wealth and low-wealth countries, and explore the burden environmental mismanagement has on the most vulnerable.

Focusing on oil exploitation, Nixon cites Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, a series of novels that tells the story of a poor Bedouin community displaced from their ancestral land by a transnational oil company and their local collaborators. He then highlights Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fight to document the human rights violations by Shell and the military regime of General Sani Abacha on the Ogoni people. As with the Bedouins, the discovery of oil should have vastly improved the lives of the Ogoni people, but it actually had the opposite effect.

Nixon explores the relationships between poverty, gender, and environmental justice, focusing on Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement. Maathai used the practical and symbolic action of tree planting to overcome the invisibility of poor Kenyan women, especially in relation to their fight to protect forests and prevent soil erosion. Nixon addresses “unimagined communities” in India, especially those impacted by the construction of megadams. He highlights the work of Arundhati Roy, one of the first writers to present megadams as an example of violence.

Nixon discusses nature reserves in South Africa and their relationship to tourism and time. Drawing from four literary journeys—one autobiographical, two nonfiction, and one fiction—he illustrates how South Africa’s game reserves are entangled in issues of race, class, labor, wildlife, and livelihoods. He then turns his attention to the slow violence of precision warfare. Casualties do not end when the bombings stop; instead, precision warfare seeps into the essence of the environment and human bodies, leaving a legacy of death for generations.

Finally, Nixon wrestles with how to better capture the impacts of slow violence on vulnerable communities. He advocates for stronger connections between environmental and postcolonial studies. Assessing the impact of social media and the internet, he points out that these new media forms have shortened attention spans, but also enable people on the ground to document injustices in real time and share them with the global community. Nixon still believes that there is a role for writer-activists, political leaders, and grassroots organizers in documenting and fighting back against environmental injustices.

Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is a call to action for readers. Through numerous literary examples, Nixon shows that it is possible to make slow violence and environmental injustices visible, leading to a more peaceful, secure, and less stratified global community.