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  • Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
  • Byron Caminero-Santangelo
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor BY Rob Nixon Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. xiii + 353pp. ISBN 978-0-674-04930-7 paper.

Like Rob Nixon's highly acclaimed Dreambirds (2000), his most recent book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, involves people ignoring ugly truths as they pursue material interests in the context of complex, uneven global relationships. However, if his earlier stories of entrepreneurs in the ostrich business (hiding their heads, ostrich-like, from forthcoming financial disasters) were often told with a light comic touch, the tales in Slow Violence are darker and more malevolent. They involve what Nixon calls "slow violence"—attritional, slow-moving environmental damage—caused by "resource imperialism inflicted on the global South to maintain the unsustainable consumer appetites" of the relatively affluent (22). The outsourcing of environmental crisis has resulted in a resurgent [End Page 175] "environmentalism of the poor," Ramachandra Guha's and Joan Martinez-Alier's term for the resistance by impoverished communities against the assaults on the ecosystems on which their lives depend "by transnational corporations; by third-world military, civilian, and corporate elites; and by international conservation organizations" (254).

Slow Violence focuses on writer-activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathai, Njabulo Ndebele, Arundhati Roy, Indra Sinha, Abdelrahman Munif, and Nixon himself who represent and bring urgency to slow violence in the global South and its causes. These authors reveal how international oil and chemical companies, the dam industry, wildlife tourism, agri-business, and the American military cause long-term environmental damage that undermines the health and livelihoods of peoples deemed disposable. This representational work is challenging because time itself, geography, and contemporary media (focused on the spectacular and immediate) can render slow violence invisible and decouple it from its causes; temporally disbursed and geographically distanced from their beneficiaries, the "external" costs of business and war can too easily be suppressed or ignored and responsibility for them too easily denied. As a result, tackling slow violence requires challenging the temporal and geographic order embedded in dominant, official discourses by generating representational forms with alternative time scales and spatial mapping. As Nixon suggests, the writer-activists must write back to a language that writes off (95).

The previously published sections of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor placed Nixon in the vanguard of a movement to make ecocriticism and environmentalism more attuned to imperialism (past and present), to related global injustices, and to postcolonial literatures. The book itself ensures his position among the most prominent voices of what has come to be known as postcolonial ecocriticism, part of a larger effort to open "up paths, inside the academy and beyond, to more diverse accommodations of what counts as environmental" (255). Yet, even by the standards of this field, Slow Violence is impressively interdisciplinary and activist. Not only does it draw extensively on environmental history, the social sciences, and various kinds of journalism, it also offers keen historical and sociological insight into pressing contemporary issues. Slow Violence will be engaging and accessible to all those working in academia and beyond who are interested in social justice and its relationship with environmental change. In fact, in his role as a public intellectual, in his clear and elegant prose, and in his commitment to anti-imperial scholarship and activism, Nixon effectively follows in the footsteps of Edward Said, even as he moves to address a blind spot in Said's writing and (until relatively recently) in postcolonial literary studies: the significance of slow environmental violence for understanding imperial relationships and the often repressed ways they have shaped and continue to shape the globe. [End Page 176]

Byron Caminero-Santangelo
University of Kansas
bsbsantang@ku.edu
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