Provincializing Ecocritism

In a world where even large-scale environmental catastrophes like the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster quickly fade from attention in popular media, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor represents an important engagement with the problem of making visible the uneven burden and long-term social, cultural, political, and environmental effects of such events. Slow Violence offers an engaging and nuanced examination of the stakes involved in coming to terms with the less dramatic—or what Nixon calls “spectacle deficient” (47)—environmental problems that often have their greatest, unacknowledged impact in the global South. Nixon’s book is structured around addressing three related concerns: first, the need to find more effective ways to recognize and draw attention to the “attritional violence” associated with “slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” (2); second, an interest in learning from the unique character of “a resurgent environmentalism of the poor” emerging out of the global South in response to slow violence (4); and finally, the literary, rhetorical, and visual challenges that confront the environmental writer-activists “who have deployed their imaginative agility and worldly ardor to help amplify the media-marginalized causes of the environmentally dispossessed” (5). While the title of the book does not suggest a focus on the challenge of resituating popular perceptions of environmental issues in terms of the history of imperialism, militarism, and resource extraction in the global South, these concerns are very much an organizing principle for the material Nixon takes on.

The field of American ecocriticism, to which this book is partially addressed, has to some extent neglected the specificities of global environmental concerns beyond the impact they might have in the U.S. national context. While numerous conferences and scholarly collections on ecocriticism continue to gesture at the importance of taking into account transnational and postcolonial engagements with environmental and related social justice issues, Nixon argues that ecocritical research has merely adopted what he describes as “an add-on solution to the challenges of diversity” (258). This approach, he suggests, leaves largely unexamined the way settler culture, nationalism, imperialism, and practices of consumption in the global North sometimes unwittingly inform different ways of imagining and acting on the environment. In the area of postcolonial studies, Nixon’s book shares intellectual kinship with recent monographs such as Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English.¹ While Mukherjee’s and Nixon’s books are both preoccupied with the current “greening” of postcolonial studies, Mukherjee’s book focuses more narrowly on the ways contemporary South Asian literature in English interrogates the entanglement of neoliberalism, the environment, and the postcolonial state in India. Nixon’s more broadly situated study (spanning multiple geographical and national literary traditions) is concerned with the formal and rhetorical strategies of activist-writers and the global audiences they engage. Chapter 6 of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor has also appeared in Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s collection Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, a book that seeks to bring the examination of aesthetic and formal strategies of postcolonial writing into dialogue with ecocriticism in order to provincialize its Eurocentric bias.² Works such as these renew the energy of postcolonial studies, which Nixon suggests in Slow Violence had “begun to stall” for a variety of self-generated reasons, in particular, what he sees as “an involuted turn toward an abstruse prose” in postcolonial scholarship that distances it from audiences outside the academy. I would argue that the decline in the prominence of postcolonial scholarship within literary and cultural studies is primarily the result of what Nixon also acknowledges as “a broader scaling back within the humanities and the social sciences of the kind of radicalism that anti-imperial and postcolonial work often enabled” (259). It is the alliance between ecocriticism and postcolonial studies and their overlapping scholarly and activist concerns that can, Nixon speculates, “help push back against administrative and disciplinary efforts to corral for narrow ends what scholars...