Slow Violence is inspiring, innovative, and passionate. Nixon forces us to confront some of the most urgent issues facing the continued existence of humans on the planet. He re-energizes environmental literature, infusing the field with the transnational concerns of world literature, and creatively reinvigorates post-colonial studies. -- Hazel Carby, Yale University Nixon jumpstarts a conversation between the fields of eco-criticism and postcolonial studies, and the outcome is brilliant. A landmark achievement, directed with great care, lucidity, and no end of foresight. -- Andrew Ross, New York University How can we dramatize slow violence? This beautifully written book shows how writers have conjured the invisible environmental calamities that have come to be the hallmark of modern times. The damage in question is out of sight--and out of mind for the global elites who command center stage. Nixon's evocative prose redoubles the charge of the writers who fight to show us the central challenge of our era. Everyone should read this book. -- Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
Rob Nixon is Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, he is the author of Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy.
Slow Violence is an important contribution to the growing field of
ecocriticism… Nixon further broadens the scope of ecocriticism by
bringing postcolonial studies to the table… Nixon’s Slow Violence
is the first book in environmental literary studies to explore the
connection between natural resource extraction and
petro-imperialism… Slow Violence eschews dense prose and
indecipherable academic jargon for the rigorous, clear writing of
someone with the mind of a critic and the heart of a humanist. From
now on, thanks to this book, no discussion on environmentalism
would be complete without taking slow violence into account.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Slow Violence will, I think, become what it aspires to be: a
foundational text of an ‘environmental humanities’ that also
conjugates ecologism, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, to be
achieved through a ‘creative alliance’ between environmental and
postcolonial studies, two protagonists accustomed to ignoring each
other.
*Interventions*
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.’ 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.
*Research in African Literatures*
This is a fine book, disturbing and revealing in content, and
worthy of lengthy study.
*Times Higher Education*
I thought the book was worth buying for its introduction alone,
which presented the idea of slow violence and the practical and
political challenges behind fighting it. The chapters that follow
are a gallery of horrors: one scene of violence after another, each
seemingly insurmountable and somehow less surprising than the last.
Yet, remarkably, this is the least depressing environmental book
I’ve read in years. By presenting these disasters alongside the
writer-activists working to counteract them, Nixon leaves no room
for despair. Instead I’m left buoyed, hopeful and—after 300
pages—impatient to learn more.
*Waging Nonviolence*
The work is groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach
to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of
environmental health and social justice, as well as its
investigation of both the power and challenges inherent in creative
representation… Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
challenges readers to new modes of thinking through grave
realities. In so doing, it makes a fundamental contribution to
contemporary debates.
*World Literature Today*
Slow Violence is inspiring, innovative, and passionate. Nixon
forces us to confront some of the most urgent issues facing the
continued existence of humans on the planet. He re-energizes
environmental literature, infusing the field with the transnational
concerns of world literature, and creatively reinvigorates
postcolonial studies.
*Hazel Carby, Yale University*
Nixon jump-starts a conversation between the fields of
eco-criticism and postcolonial studies, and the outcome is
brilliant. A landmark achievement, directed with great care,
lucidity, and no end of foresight.
*Andrew Ross, New York University*
How can we dramatize slow violence? This beautifully written book
shows how writers have conjured the invisible environmental
calamities that have come to be the hallmark of modern times. The
damage in question is out of sight—and out of mind for the global
elites who command center stage. Nixon’s evocative prose redoubles
the charge of the writers who fight to show us the central
challenge of our era. Everyone should read this book.
*Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global
Connection*
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