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.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque”
In this chapter, Nixon details two literary works—American anthropologist Adriana Petryna’s (1966- ) nonfiction Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and British-Indian writer Indra Sinha’s (1950- ) fictional Animal’s People—to illustrate instances of slow violence in which a “foreign burden” (50) imposes itself on unsuspecting communities. Foreign burden takes on two meanings. The first has to do with the chemical and radiological impacts on the human body and the environment from two specific disasters. The second has to do with how foreign burden is an inheritance from an outside force.
Petryna’s Life Exposed is an “anthropological work on post-Soviet Ukraine” (49) that details the aftermaths of the Chernobyl disaster, a nuclear accident, in 1986. The disaster took place in what is today known as Ukraine. At the time of the disaster, however, Chernobyl was part of the Soviet Union. Nixon spends far less time on this work than on Animal’s People.
In Animal’s People, Sinha tells a fictional story based on the Bhopal disaster, a chemical accident at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984. He utilizes the literary form of picaresque. The book takes place in the town of Khaufpur (a stand-in for Bhopal). The main character, Animal, suffers a catastrophic injury as a child the night an industrial accident occurs in his town. After the injury, Animal, who is from a lower socioeconomic class, moves on all fours.
Sinha’s novel details how “the unfolding of slow violence across environmental time” negatively impacts the most vulnerable communities (51). In his novel, the people of Khaufpur have been in a 20-year battle with Kampani, the American corporation responsible for the pesticide plant. Mirroring real-world events, Sinha describes how the Kampani bosses refuse to attend the trial, citing the long distance between India and the US. The company also bribes key government officials to encourage further industry deregulation. Since the trial has taken so long, the company can claim amnesia over what happened on the day of the disaster. In Sinha’s story, the foreign burden is the absent corporation that caused the accident.
Nixon points out that Sinha cannot explicitly explain this relationship because it would compromise his story. Instead, Sinha devises “a narrator who is at best ambivalent toward the pursuit of justice, yet whose physical form serves as a bodily shorthand for Khaufpur’s transnational plight” (52). In the book, Sinha has Animal carry a child on his back, symbolizing the poisoned burden people in economically developing countries carry from environmental mismanagement by foreign entities. Sinha shows local and transnational forces at play through Animal’s experiences.
Nixon uses Animal’s People to illustrate the relationship between the environmentalism of the poor and time. Sinha depicts two key temporal elements. The first is the day the poisoning of the impoverished community began. The second is time’s role in camouflaging the environmental catastrophe. Companies use time to justify amnesia about the event, delaying compensation to impacted communities. They can also withhold details about what the factory is producing. This allows them to refute accusations of chemical poisoning, making it even more difficult for communities to access help. Even though the communities are living with the impacts from the catastrophe, corporations and other powerful entities can use time to render their predicaments invisible. In the case of Sinha’s novel, Kampani does exactly this.
Nixon adds that Union Carbide disappeared in a merger with Dow Chemical, something that Sinha does not reflect in his novel. Nixon mentions this detail because it shows how vulnerable communities continue to face the catastrophic impacts from chemical disasters even after a corporation ceases to exist. Time can wipe away the physical cause of the disaster (the corporation), but not the invisible effects (the biological impacts on human bodies).
Finally, based on his analysis of Animal’s People, Nixon insists that the picaresque tradition enables writers to document the impacts of slow violence. Through Animal, Sinha “exhumes from the forces of amnesia not just the memory of a long-ago disaster but the present and future forces of that disaster’s embodied, ongoing percolations” (67).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Fast-forward Fossil: Petro-despotism and the Resource Curse”
This chapter focuses on issues of oil exploitation, especially in the Persian Gulf, and the resource curse. Also known as the paradox of plenty, the resource curse is the phenomenon in which countries with an abundance of natural resources are often “undemocratic, militaristic, corruption riddled, and governed without transparency or accountability” (69-70). Residents of resource-rich countries generally face great injustices, including repression and forced displacement, and have lower incomes. Leaders do not care about their people, funneling the wealth from the natural resources to offshore bank accounts rather than to infrastructure and social investments.
Western powers, including the US, play a major role in perpetuating the resource curse in non-Western countries by supporting corrupt leaders who cooperate with them and toppling rulers who do not. Transnational fossil fuel companies also fuel economic insecurity in these countries by bringing in foreign workers rather than hiring locals to help with resource extraction operations. This prevents the local communities from creating civic and labor organizations that could advocate for a better standard of living.
Nixon notes that “from a literary perspective, the idea of the resource enclave achieves a special resonance, for it depends on a profound act of imaginative disconnection” (71). Government officials, NGOs, and corporations in more economically developed countries separate economically developing countries into “the useful and useless bits” (71), depending on natural resource location and its profitability. Transnational corporations and the “collaborative local elites” (72) view natural-resource wealth as neither coming from the nation nor belonging to its people. Instead, it exists in a separate space, enabling these entities to control its extraction and profits.
To address the resource curse, Nixon suggests that writer-activists need to deal with the fairy tales surrounding natural resources. Unlike coal, oil is featured in the literary work of few writers. The exception is Saudi-Arabian novelist, cultural critic, and journalist Abdelrahman Munif (1933-2004). Munif wrote a series of petrofiction novels titled Cities of Salt that dramatizes the displacement of a poor Bedouin oasis community after the discovery of oil.
In the novel, Munif distinguishes between “the nomadic and the rootless” (76). Prior to the arrival of transnational oil companies, the Bedouin were a nomadic people, moving to and from various places in the Middle East without fixed habitation. Bedouin culture is tied to the people’s movement across their landscape. Oases are places where they can gather and trade. Thus, to destroy oases is to uproot the Bedouins. Over the course of Cities of Salt, Munif captures how the oil industry uproots their culture, beginning with the very first contact between the Bedouins and American oil pioneers. Munif details how the Bedouins view the oil probes as “unearthly machines” (82) and how these machines destroy the trees and plants that serve as anchor points for the community. The Bedouins are eventually displaced from their home in the desert to a coastal refinery town, where they face racial and class discrimination.
In Cities of Salt, Munif “dramatizes a less honorable tradition of writing as imperial technology of camouflaged intent” (95). He writes about the Americans wandering around the oasis during the day, probing for oil. At night, the Americans “retreat to their tents and stare with equal intent at paper, writing furiously” (94). The Americans do not communicate their intentions to the Bedouins, hiding them under the cover of dark. The act of masking their intent is another source of violence. The oil probes eventually lead to the destruction of the oases and the Bedouins’ roots. Once again, a foreign entity is imposing its “‘official landscape’ onto a ‘vernacular landscape’” (95). Once the Bedouins are displaced to the coastal refinery town, writing takes on another form of violence. The Bedouins now have identity cards that enable the Americans and collaborative locals to control the workforce with an iron fist.
To Nixon, Munif chronicles the excess of imperial petro-capitalists and petro-despots. Throughout his writings “runs an anxiety and a rage at the cultures of petro-amnesia that have erected cities of salt on a vast but delusory wealth, equally shallow in its social distribution and in its vision of inhabitable time” (101). Nixon considers Munif to be one of the most visionary writers of his time.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Nixon begins his analysis in Chapter 1 with two literary works that focus on the Bhopal and Chernobyl disasters. These two events are emblematic of the representational bias of slow violence. In both events, the impacts of the chemical and radiological materials on humans and the environment were slow and long-lasting. Nixon notes that:
the contested science of damage further compounds the challenge, as varied scientific methodologies may be mobilized to demonstrate or discount etiologies, creating rival regimes of truth, manipulable by political and economic interests. Moreover, the official dimensions of the contaminated zone may shrink or dilate depending on which political forces and which research methodologies achieve the upper hand (47).
Here, Nixon describes how those in power can manipulate biological citizenship—forms of belonging and access to medical care and other resources due to a shared state caused by a catastrophic accident. Powerful entities decide whom to classify as sufferers and nonsufferers. Nonsufferers either do not have the right narrative or the political clout to receive compensation for their injuries. Once again, those in power, who are often from more economically developed countries, control the narrative of environmental injustices done to the most vulnerable communities.
Nixon uses Petryna’s work to highlight “the complex entanglements between environmental fallout and the socioeconomic fallout of being classified as a sufferer or nonsufferer” (49). The compensation for injuries sustained from the Chernobyl disaster was small. This compensation, however, rendered an individual an “official sufferer” (49). Following hyperinflation and mass unemployment in the early 1990s, this meager compensation could now determine whether a family had food or starved. Ukrainian officials developed over time a complicated system that distinguished sufferers from nonsufferers. For this reason, Ukrainians’ identities became wrapped up in the disaster. Nixon notes that people might introduce themselves in language such as “I am a mother of a child who is a sufferer. I am an evacuee from Zone Two. My husband is a Chernobyl worker, Category One” (50).
The locations of Chernobyl and Bhopal complicated even more the narrative monopoly surrounding these two disasters. Western media paid far more attention to Chernobyl than it did to Bhopal because the former was closer to Western Europe. For this reason, Western countries perceived the Chernobyl disaster as more of a transnational threat. Nixon notes that Western Europe thought of the Bhopal disaster “as an Indian problem, over there among the faceless poor of the third world” (47). In addition, Chernobyl was viewed as a communist threat to the West, since it was part of the Soviet Union at the time of the disaster. The chairman of Union Carbide alongside the company’s lawyers also placed blame on the local workers, despite the company’s removing safety protocols and decreasing the number of supervisory staff to save money.
Nixon also details why Sinha’s use of the environmental picaresque is so successful at detailing the unfolding of slow violence. This genre helps Sinha “ward off three threats to the dynamism of fictional eco-drama: predictability, sentimentality, and a political outrage or self-righteousness that supplants depth of character” (57). Animal is not particularly concerned about getting justice in Sinha’s novel. Yet Sinha characterizes him as a product of the chemical accident. The fact that Animal views the world at street level serves as a physical depiction of slow violence. A transnational organization literally caused his posture. He also serves as a vivid embodiment of the poison running through his community.
For Nixon, Munif’s Cities of Salt, like Sinha’s Animal’s People, can help people to “rethink the parameters of environmental literature, transnationally and across the frontiers genre” (73). Munif can better dramatize the slow violence inflicted on vulnerable communities in the Persian Gulf by transnational oil companies and their local collaborators because he writes from within the Persian Gulf. He also worked in the petroleum industry, lending him insider knowledge. Nixon also notes that “Munif himself was perfectly placed as a witness to displacement, for he was (to adapt Bertolt Brecht’s self-portrait) a man given to ‘changing his country as often as his shoes’” (75). He resided all over the Middle East and in several European countries. Saudi Arabia stripped Munif of his citizenship because of his highly critical viewpoint of the country’s leadership in Cities of Salt. Several countries in the Middle East also banned the book.
In Chapter 2, Nixon expands on his theme of Breaking the Narrative Monopoly on Accounts of Environmental Injustices. He describes how writer-activists trying to document the impacts of slow violence often face violence and even death from the dominant political power. Munif is one such example. In exposing the ways in which European and American powers and local collaborators created “his region’s oil-induced environmental and cultural upheavals” (76), he made numerous enemies. Despite the dangers he faced, Munif strongly believed that “writing could be a tool for change” (77), in part because of his disillusionment with political activism.
Nixon critiques how Munif “falls back on tropes familiar from postcolonial or neocolonial literatures to project an atmosphere of conjoined ecological integrity and cultural authenticity” (84). Munif romanticizes the Bedouin culture as harmonious prior to contact with the American oil pioneers. He also shows far greater sympathy for the Bedouins than for foreign workers, which Nixon finds problematic. Like the Bedouins, the foreign workers have also been displaced from their homes. Munif does not explore how displacement varies among the foreign workers, simply collapsing their experiences “into the figuration of loss” (84). Nixon suggests that Munif is more sympathetic to the Bedouins because he traded with them in his youth: “So Munif had profound familiar reasons for nostalgia and rage when he witnessed this tradition of traversal traduced (or at least unrecognizably transformed) by petrocapitalism’s dictates” (85).
