56 pages • 1 hour read
Rob NixonSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Preface-IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
In the Preface, Nixon points to Edward Said, Rachel Carson, and Ramachandra Guha as his sources of inspiration for writing Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. To him, “all three exemplify an ideal of the public intellectual as someone unafraid to open up channels of inquiry at an angle to mainstream thought; unafraid moreover to face down the hostility that their unorthodoxy often prompted” (ix).
Said, a Palestinian-American professor of literature and founder of postcolonial studies, utilized “historical, political, and biographical context” and diverse literary styles to reach a broad array of audiences. He was extremely critical of traditional academic writing. While he was not “environmentally-minded” (x), he believed deeply in human rights.
Carson was also skeptical of academics and so-called experts. She believed that “the mission of the public intellectual included exposing the euphemisms and bromides promulgated by cold-war America’s military-industrial complex” (xi). Carson was the first to document the harm that pesticides cause to all forms of life for the American public. While her writings did not touch on race, class, or colonial powers, Nixon argues that they were clearly concerned with the environmentalism of the poor because of how she discussed the role of the US military in covering up the harm caused by toxic chemicals. Caron’s writing, which primarily consisted of public essays and books, helped launch the environmental justice movement.
Guha, like Carson, had a career mostly outside the university. His writings have dispelled “the myth that environmentalism is ‘a full-stomach phenomenon’ affordable only to the middle and upper classes of the world’s richest societies” (xii). He helped demonstrate how people in non-Western societies have long thought about protecting the environment and activism. Guha, along with other collaborators, coined many of the key terms Nixon uses in the book, including “the environmentalism of the poor” (see Index of Terms).
Introduction Summary
Nixon opens the Introduction by recounting how Lawrence Summers, when he was president of the World Bank (1991-1993), “advocated that the bank develop a scheme to export rich nation garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa” (1). Summers argued that this scheme would correct the imbalance in pollution and toxic waste between more economically developed and economically developing countries. Moreover, Summers noted that it would enable leaders in more economically developed countries, such as the United States and Europe, to appease environmentalists who were campaigning against pollution because of both its adverse health impacts and its ugliness in the landscape. Since Africa was out of sight for most citizens in more economically developed countries, Summers believed that environmentalists from these countries would not care about pollution on the continent.
Nixon underscores that Summers discounted people living in Africa in three ways: first, as political agents who should have a voice in what happened where they lived; second, as casualties caused by the slow violence of environmental mismanagement; and third, as people who had their own concerns and advocacy around the environment. He uses this example to launch the three primary concerns found in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
The first concern is the slow violence of environmental mismanagement. Slow violence occurs slowly over time and is relatively invisible. Global warming or climate change (Nixon uses the terms interchangeably) is an example of slow violence. The events or actions surrounding global warming, including rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, occur over time and are not instantly visible to people. However, global warming causes many adverse impacts on generations of people. The major challenge to addressing slow violence as a global community is its lack of visibility. Given that global warming represents the most critical challenge of the 21st century, Nixon argues that it is necessary to visually represent slow violence to arouse environmental advocacy and intervention, especially in countries that have caused the climate crisis.
Nixon’s second concern is “the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence” (4). The slow pace and invisibility of slow violence compounds the invisibility of poverty. People in economically developing countries have begun to push back and advocate against the perpetrators of slow violence (i.e., more economically developed countries).
Nixon’s final concern is the role of the “environmental writer-activist” (5) in exposing the environmental injustices of slow violence. Nixon focuses on writers who fight against “the normalized quiet of unseen power” (5). Sustained research into the impacts of slow violence as well as corporate media attention are least likely to occur in vulnerable communities. Thus, writers, digital activists, photographers, and filmmakers can help make the invisible violence that permeates these communities visible.
The writers showcased in Nixon’s book often call attention to government mismanagement of the environment. However, governments are not the only entities at fault here. Nixon also notes that many transnational corporations, such as BP and Walmart, perpetuate environmental injustices on vulnerable communities. Lobbyists help support these corporations by advocating for environmental deregulation. Governments, corporations, and lobbyists sow doubt around science and research to hide their mismanagement of environments in developing countries, further enabling slow violence. This doubt inhibits activists’ attempts to change the environmentally catastrophic policies and practices.
Nixon concludes the Introduction by describing how writers are working in an unprecedented time. Never before in human history have technology and the geopolitical climate changed at such a rapid pace. To continue to act, writers must embrace “incessant compromise and incessant reinvention” (42).
Preface-Introduction Analysis
Taken together, the Preface and Introduction serve as an important overview of Nixon’s perspective. His goal is to:
[A]ddress our inattention to calamities that are slow and long-lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. (6)
To achieve this goal, Nixon highlights writer-activists from around the world who are bridging the gap between environmental and postcolonial studies to expose the “slow and long-lasting” harm caused by environmental mismanagement on vulnerable communities.
Nixon highlights research and writings that combine environmental literary studies and the social sciences. He finds the interdisciplinary possibilities extremely energizing, especially given some of his critiques of environmental literary studies on their own. One such critique is that this branch of work, particularly by American writers, does not address the environmental catastrophes caused by American foreign policy and wars. American writers still tend to focus on “nation-bound scholarship that is at best tangentially international and, even then, seldom engages the environmental fallout of U.S. foreign policy head on” (34). This superpower parochialism deeply concerns Nixon, a point that he reiterates throughout his book.
To prevent the further “narrowing of literary studies that pulls back from the wider world” (37), Nixon argues that writers need to engage with postcolonial studies. The postcolonial perspective helps writers shed light on continued imperial practices by more developed countries on developing countries.
In these two opening sections, Nixon also details how he features both fiction and nonfiction works in his analysis, although he slightly favors the latter. The three writers who most inspired Nixon—Said, Carson, and Guha—all wrote in various nonfiction mediums, showcasing the versatility this genre offers writers. Writers often marginalize nonfiction writing in favor of so-called “‘real literature’ like the novel or poetry” (25). Yet Nixon notes that he is “drawn to nonfiction’s robust adaptability, imaginative and political, as well as to its information-carrying capacity and its aura of the real” (25). He showcases different types of nonfiction work, including essays, memoirs, public science writing, and investigative journalism.
Nixon also introduces three key claims that he returns to frequently throughout the book. The first is that the Impact of Slow Violence on the Most Vulnerable People is greater than on other populations. Spectacular images, like volcanoes or burning towers, move people politically and emotionally, especially in the current age of social media and the internet. These new media forms have increased demand for instant gratification and shortened attention spans. It is difficult to find such visually arresting images related to the slow violence of environmental mismanagement. This is especially true for vulnerable communities that may already be invisible to those in power.
The second key claim is the importance of Breaking the Narrative Monopoly on Accounts of Environmental Injustices, which currently belongs to writers in more economically developed countries. In the past, people in economically developing countries regarded environmentalism as something imposed on them “by rich nations and Western NGOs” (5). While these suspicions have not been completely dispelled, there have been a growing number of environmental activists in the Global South. These activists are trying to dispel the myth that environmental activism is just for wealthy Americans and Europeans. They want to bring attention to the environmental injustices that more economically developed countries have inflicted on their communities for years. Part of the reason that Nixon focuses on non-American writer-activists is to help break the American and European writers’ narrative monopoly and highlight writer-activists who “offer […] a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen” (15).
Writer-activists have never been more important, especially where misinformation and doubt around the science of global warming dominate mainstream media. Nixon argues that there are “doubt producers and doubt disseminators whose job it is to maintain populist levels of uncertainty sufficient to guarantee inaction” (40). These “new bewilderers” are funded by powerful entities. Writer-activists can help break through these narratives and even make visible the funders, who typically operate clandestinely.
The final key claim that Nixon makes concerns Short-term Self-interest Versus Long-term Selflessness, which Nixon proposes are in competition in relation to environmental injustice. The groups with these conflicting perspectives view the environment and time differently, with the latter being much more attuned to the long-term impacts of injustices on their communities, land, and bodies.
