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A review by elerireads
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon
4.0
Well I may not have bought 100 toilet rolls, but in the week before lockdown started I did raid the university library to stockpile all the books that could conceivably be useful for my essay, just in case it had to close... Now I'm stuck with them indefinitely, I thought I might as well read some of them properly.
This wasn't quite what I was expecting. Although Nixon did define and give examples of this concept of 'slow violence', the book was less about the violence itself and more focused on its representation in environmental writer-activism, and the various literary forms this can take. Places the emphasis firmly on the global south and attempts to bridge the divide between postcolonialism and environmental studies, discussing a huge breadth of environmental writing from across the world. Examines the reasons why writing from impoverished communities in the global south whose lives are threatened by environmental slow violence maybe might not *quite* fit the American environmentalist literary mould and tradition of Thoreau etc., and is utterly damning of criticism on that basis. Unflinchingly critical of American foreign policy, and abdication of responsibility by transnational corporations was a recurring theme.
Didn't actually mention the UK all that much, but when he did, there was some switching between English and British where I wasn't totally sure if it was an intentional differentiation, or whether he was reverting to the American tendency to conflate the two (I think Nixon himself isn't American, but he is based and lives in the US). Interesting to find out that the Deepwater Horizon spill apparently inspired a whole load of xenophobic, anti-British sentiment and that Obama took to referring to BP as British Petroleum.
I had to Google a lot of stuff while I was reading this, some of it for background knowledge, but also many, many words I didn't know. Yes it was conceptually quite dense so some very specific vocab was necessary at certain points, but I did find myself rolling my eyes when I got to 'subaqueous' in the epilogue. Ffs just write 'underwater'.
This wasn't quite what I was expecting. Although Nixon did define and give examples of this concept of 'slow violence', the book was less about the violence itself and more focused on its representation in environmental writer-activism, and the various literary forms this can take. Places the emphasis firmly on the global south and attempts to bridge the divide between postcolonialism and environmental studies, discussing a huge breadth of environmental writing from across the world. Examines the reasons why writing from impoverished communities in the global south whose lives are threatened by environmental slow violence maybe might not *quite* fit the American environmentalist literary mould and tradition of Thoreau etc., and is utterly damning of criticism on that basis. Unflinchingly critical of American foreign policy, and abdication of responsibility by transnational corporations was a recurring theme.
Didn't actually mention the UK all that much, but when he did, there was some switching between English and British where I wasn't totally sure if it was an intentional differentiation, or whether he was reverting to the American tendency to conflate the two (I think Nixon himself isn't American, but he is based and lives in the US). Interesting to find out that the Deepwater Horizon spill apparently inspired a whole load of xenophobic, anti-British sentiment and that Obama took to referring to BP as British Petroleum.
I had to Google a lot of stuff while I was reading this, some of it for background knowledge, but also many, many words I didn't know. Yes it was conceptually quite dense so some very specific vocab was necessary at certain points, but I did find myself rolling my eyes when I got to 'subaqueous' in the epilogue. Ffs just write 'underwater'.