Abstract
We live in an era of media ‘spectaculars’. It could be the images of the Twin Towers falling in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the plight of refugees seen fleeing conflict zones in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Syria, or any number of natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti or the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013. Thanks to the communications technology in our homes, offices, and hip pockets the 24/7, instant-gratification, information society we live in enables the dramatic events of the day to enter our psyche from throughout the world.
The images are intended to evoke emotional reactions, particularly when they depict violence itself or its direct or indirect consequences: the destructive storm surge, the wounded warrior, or the tangled remnants of a car bomb explosion. In this sense, the violence and its aftermath are blatant and immediately felt; the destruction and its spatial dimensions are quite clear.
This is not what Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is about. Although having destructive consequences in common with violence in its more immediate and obvious form, Nixon presents an intimate understanding and unique approach in formulating the concept of ‘slow violence’ that is the focus of his study.
Nixon defines slow violence as that which ‘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’ (p. 2). In developing this conceptualization, Nixon contests conventional wisdom regarding what even counts as violence to begin with. He takes on ‘if it bleeds it leads’ journalism and the ‘info-whelming’ nature of the digital age, alerting us to refocus our attention so as to make slow violence more visible and the emotional reaction to it as equally powerful as our response to encounters with various ‘spectaculars’.
Slow violence comes in many forms, including climate change, deforestation, the ecological and health consequences of war, fertilizer and pesticide use, nuclear and industrial accidents, oil spills, resource extraction, and toxin releases among others. Its harmful and deadly effects linger and may be felt long past the actual actions or event that unleashed what potentially could be years of suffering.
Nixon hearkens back to important work by Johan Galtung and his concept of ‘structural violence’ that was pervasive in many forms at the time of his writing and which remains pertinent today. Seeing violence and its impacts as more covert and less familiar or obvious than more personalized types people experience, structural violence is reflected in systemic and institutionally driven processes that might include corporate outsourcing, debt dependency and structural adjustment policies, global food aid regimes, the unintended consequences of population control, and widening class or global inequalities among others. Nixon builds on what he views as Galtung’s ‘static’ approach to violence by taking a temporal view that incorporates social change processes – even if the impacts are slow across time. He therefore ‘stretches out’ structural violence in a way that takes advantage of the technological and scientific advances of our time that enable the perception of seeing violence as a slow process and its root causes existing potentially generations prior to the present.
To develop slow violence and present the importance of eliciting a broad understanding of the concept, Nixon analyzes the works of numerous writer–activists who have contributed widely to contemporary awareness of the abundant ecological crises confronting the planet. Through works of environmental fiction, poetry, and other writing forms these authors reach their audiences in multiple ways, on the whole making for an interesting source of data for analysis by Nixon. Persons of interest include but are not limited to Rachel Carson, Nadine Gordimer, Ramachandra Guha, June Jordan, Jamaica Kincaid, Njabulo Ndebele, Wangari Maathai, Edward Said, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Using texts both written by and about these pioneering individuals and the movements, perspectives, and ideologies they reflect in their work, Nixon taps into a bountiful source of insight and intellect. He questions just why the contributions of these individuals have surprisingly not been incorporated more fully into ecological dialogue (perhaps with the exception of Carson) as he does in Slow Violence, particularly with regard to confronting issues in a post-colonial fashion that engages the wisdom offered from non-Western traditions or voices in the Global South. He notes that his own area of American Studies could benefit greatly from discussions such as that which he presents, and I would argue the same regarding sociology, the other social sciences, and beyond. The global-comparative perspective he offers up transcends disciplinary boundaries and speaks with great urgency towards altering current patterns of ecological harm.
It has been well established that the burdens of the climate crisis, ecological disasters, and resource scarcity fall disproportionately on the powerless and poor. Furthermore, it has been widely studied how this manifests itself through inequality in many forms be it ethnic, gender, North–South, spatial, or any number of other dimensions.
Nixon’s work expands this research, making one keenly aware that those who are in positions of intimate dependence on the planet for survival are particularly vulnerable to slow violence and its repercussions. The ‘environmentalism of the poor’ thus reflects slow violence in a way that accounts for inequality across multiple dimensions of social change and the role of power within them in determining those inequalities and the pervasiveness of colonialism in its past and present forms. Colonial legacies and continuing ecological impacts are both the inspiration for the writers Nixon examines as well as the seeds of political discontent for raising awareness of or confronting the ecological burdens experienced by the world’s poor and disenfranchised. Whether it is the tree-hugging Chipko movement challenging deforestation in the Himalayas, protests by those suffering from the Bhopal, India Union Carbide explosion, or demands made from citizens negatively affected by the destruction of the resource extraction practices of big oil among other important vignettes, Nixon connects the patterns of wrongdoing and whom they impact the most as part of the political economy of globalization and inequality.
In this sense, Nixon’s work becomes an important and fascinating study of environmental injustice for that is what slow violence ultimately is. The contribution on this front comes not in the typical form of presenting a single important case study or analysis of comparative cases. Instead, his approach speaks to the pervasiveness of environmental justice which like violence may not always be obvious and whose effects are not immediately known. In engaging with the works of the writer–activists that he does, Nixon thus presents the reader with environmental injustice in forms not before considered, or enables seeing familiar cases in new ways and with additional insights.
Readers of International Journal of Comparative Sociology may not be as familiar with the environmental humanities literature or the approach Nixon takes in Slow Violence. Although perhaps aware of the writings by or activism of the subjects of his study, readers may similarly not be widely versed in the literary analysis he performs or its place in post-modern ecological criticism his work serves as. This is all the more reason to embrace the book and its important contributions, enabling an appreciation of the crossover discussion regarding environmental justice, sustainable development, and poverty that could ensue from a work such as this. Because it connects with a broad range of disciplines and ecological concerns the influence of Slow Violence is certain to be widespread, both in and out of academic circles.
To summarize, Nixon provides a pristinely written account in the environmental humanities that one will find to be of equal significance in the social sciences and beyond. His presentation and analysis of the works of numerous writer–activists and conceptualization of slow violence and its impact on poor societies and individuals generates a wealth of ideas pertinent to globalization, development, sustainability, and the climate crisis. Although written in an academic style, its accessibility will enable spillover into public and policy-making discussion with hope that these latter constituencies will take action to address the concerns he presents. Sociologists often have only tangential exposure at best to the richness of the humanities and Nixon’s work may potentially open new pathways for research on topics clearly interdisciplinary in nature but currently missing out on shared theoretical and methodological insights from collaboration of this kind. Environmental sociologists in particular will find Slow Violence to be of certain importance but limiting exposure by Nixon to only that subfield of the discipline is an injustice both to the value of the book and the need for understanding its message for sociology more generally.