Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Rob Nixon

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780674072343, 9780674049307
• eBook ISBN: 9780674247994
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Biological Sciences

"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." —World Literature Today

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.

In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

1

Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque

It is only right, to my mind, that things so remarkable, which happen to have remained unheard and unseen until now, should be brought to the attention of many and not lie buried in the sepulcher of oblivion.

—Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes

A quarter century ago, Raymond Williams called for more novels that attend to “the close living substance” of the local while simultaneously tracing the “occluded relationships”—the vast transnational economic pressures, the labor and commodity dynamics—that invisibly shape the local.¹ To hazard such novels poses imaginative challenges of a kind that writers content to create what Williams termed “enclosed fictions” need never face, among them the challenge of rendering visible occluded, sprawling webs of interconnectedness. In our age of expanding and accelerating globalization, this particular imaginative difficulty has been cast primarily in spatial terms, as exemplified by John Berger’s pronouncement, famously cited in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies: “Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space and not time that hides consequences from us. To prophesy today it is only necessary to know men [and women] as they are throughout the world in all their inequality.”²

Yet the legitimate urgency of spatial prophecy should not, in turn, distract us from the critical task—especially for environmental writers—of finding imaginative forms that expose the temporal dissociations that permeate the age of neoliberal globalization. To this end, Animal’s People, Indra Sinha’s fictional reworking of the Bhopal disaster, offers a powerful instance of a writer dramatizing the occluded relationships of transnational space together with time’s occlusions. Sinha’s novel stands (to adapt Williams’s phrase) as a work of “militant particularism,” yet it discloses through that radical particularity temporal and spatial webs of violence on a vast scale.³ Sinha’s approach to the aftermath of the catastrophic gas leak at Union Carbide’s Bhopal factory in December 1984 throws into relief a political violence both intimate and distant, unfolding over time and space on a variety of scales, from the cellular to the transnational, the corporeal to the global corporate. Animal’s People can be read as a novel of risk relocation, not just in Susan Cutter’s spatial sense but across time as well, for the transnational off-loading of risk from a privileged community to an impoverished one changes the temporal topography of fear in the long term.

The power of Animal’s People flows largely from Sinha’s single-handed invention of the environmental picaresque.⁴ By creatively adapting picaresque conventions to our age, Sinha probes the underbelly of neoliberal globalization from the vantage point of an indigent social outcast. His novel gives focus to three of the defining characteristics of the contemporary neoliberal order: first, the widening chasm—within and between nations—that separates the megarich from the destitute; second, the attendant burden of unsustainable ecological degradation that impacts the health and livelihood of the poor most directly; and third, the way powerful transnational corporations exploit under cover of a free market ideology the lopsided universe of deregulation, whereby laws and loopholes are selectively applied in a marketplace a lot freer for some societies and classes than for others.

A neoliberal ideology that erodes national sovereignty and turns answerability into a bewildering transnational maze makes it easier for global corporations like Union Carbide to sustain an evasive geopolitics of deferral in matters of environmental injury, remediation, and redress. Thus, among the many merits of Sinha’s novel is the way it gives imaginative definition to the occluded relationships that result both from slow violence and from the geographies of concealment in a neoliberal age.

Slow Violence, Chernobyl, and Environmental Time

Maintaining a media focus on slow violence poses acute challenges, not only because it is spectacle deficient, but also because the fallout’s impact may range from the cellular to the transnational and (depending on the specific character of the chemical or radiological hazard) may stretch beyond the horizon of imaginable time. 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. What emerges, then, is a contest over the administration of difference between those who gain official recognition as sufferers and those dismissed as nonsufferers because their narratives of injury are deemed to fail the prevailing politico-scientific logic of causation; or for that matter, because they lack the political contacts to gain admission to the inner circle of certified sufferers and thus to potential compensation. These unstable, complex procedures—and hierarchies—of toxic recognition may create novel forms of biological citizenship, as in the long aftermaths of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and the 1986 Chernobyl explosion.⁵

The varieties of biological citizenship that emerged in the aftermaths of Bhopal and Chernobyl were distinct in certain ways, as were the media responses. Chernobyl received far more sustained attention in the Western media for several reasons. First, because of Chernobyl’s proximity to Western Europe, it was perceived as an ongoing transnational threat to “us” rather than a purely national threat that could be imaginatively contained as an Indian problem, over there among the faceless poor of the third world. Moreover, during the rise of Reagan’s and Thatcher’s neoliberal orders, Chernobyl could be directly assimilated to the violent threat that communism posed to the West, a threat that increased calls for heightened militarization and, ironically, for further corporate and environmental deregulation in the name of free-market forces. Bhopal, by contrast, was easier to dissociate from narratives of global violence dominated by a communist/anticommunist plotline, thus obscuring the free-market double standards that allowed Western companies to operate with violent, fatal impunity in the global South. Indeed, Warren Anderson (then Union Carbide’s chairman), company lawyers, and most of America’s corporate media argued in concert that blame for the disaster was local not transnational in character, ignoring the fact that in the run up to the disaster, the parent company had slashed safety procedures and supervisory staff in an effort to staunch hemorrhaging profits.⁶

In reading Animal’s People as, among other things, an exposé of these neoliberal double standards, we can recognize Khaupfur as both specific and nonspecific, a fictional stand-in for Bhopal, but also a synecdoche for a web of poisoned communities spread out across the global South: “The book could have been set anywhere where the chemical industry has destroyed people’s lives,” Sinha observes. “I had considered calling the city Receio and setting it in Brazil. It could just as easily have been set in Central or South America, West Africa or the Philippines.”⁷

Chernobyl occurred three years before the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1989, which was also the year John Williamson coined the term “the Washington Consensus” to describe the prevailing ideology that united the World Bank, the IMF, and the U.S. Treasury Department around the preconditions for “development aid” to nations in the global South.⁸ The devel-opmentalist, neoliberal ideology of the Washington Consensus became a crucial foreign policy wing of what George Soros would term “market fundamentalism,” a broad crusade that would continue to gather force amid the postcommunist ideological uncertainty through demands for deregulation, privatization, and the hacking back of government social programs and safety nets. It was in this neoliberal context that, ultimately, the ailing survivors of both Bhopal and Chernobyl would find themselves sinking or swimming.

From a temporal perspective, the Chernobyl disaster of April 26, 1986, was distinguished by an initial catastrophic security lapse followed by a series of time lapses. The initial catastrophe was spectacular but, in media terms, deferred: eighteen days passed before Mikhail Gorbachev appeared on TV to acknowledge the explosion.⁹ Had the Soviet government dispensed nonradioactive iodine pills during that lost time, it could have averted the epidemic of thyroid cancers that only began, en masse, four years later at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a Ukraine that was officially independent yet bound in environmental, epidemiological, and consequently economic terms to the Soviet-era nuclear disaster.

The different timelines of mutation—international, intranational, intergenerational, bureaucratic, and somatic—are dizzying even to attempt to map. The prevailing winds carried the radiation plume north over Belarus, across eastern, western, and northern Europe, and beyond. Over time, through toxic drift, the national epicenter of the catastrophe would shift so that Belarus, not Ukraine, would become the country most pervasively polluted.¹⁰ In both countries, radiochemical poisoning coursed through air, water, soil, crops, meat, and mother’s milk at divergent speeds. Some symptoms manifested themselves relatively quickly, others appeared most dramatically among children born a decade or more after the disaster struck. The stratified slow violence of the fallout was compounded by the tardiness of the Soviet authorities, whose reflex response was foot-dragging, equivocation, and denial.

Adriana Petryna’s anthropological work on post-Soviet Ukraine persuasively demonstrates the complex entanglements between environmental fallout and the socioeconomic fallout of being classified as a sufferer or nonsufferer. Compensation for Chernobyl injuries that rendered a citizen an official sufferer might be a mere $ 5 per month. But after Washington Consensus-style market liberalization was imposed on Ukraine in 1992, hyperinflation and mass unemployment followed, creating a sudden chasm between economic survivors and economic casualties.¹¹ In this neoliberal context, official recognition as a Chernobyl sufferer-survivor—and the modest government compensation that ensued—could make the difference between subsistence and starvation for a whole family.¹² The onus of proof fell on Ukrainians to develop, over time, an intimate expertise that was both bodily and bureaucratic. Which symptoms counted and which were discounted by the state? What work history in which officially recognized affected areas (and for how long) would strengthen one’s claim for the imprimatur of sufferer? Which doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats could accelerate one’s efforts to enter that inner circle? How could one meet such influential people? Did they need to be bribed?

The ground rules for being counted and discounted kept changing. Even the boundaries of the pollution zones were unstable, shrinking and dilating through a mixture of bureaucratic caprice, economic expediency, and slippery science. So the system required energetic, up-to-date proactivism on the part of Ukraine’s biocitizens as they scrambled to avoid plummeting into economic free fall. A key survival strategy was to fit their life stories, their self-narrations, into the limited generic narratives of suffering that possessed a state mandate from which a small stream of compensation might flow. New categories of identity emerged that—in other societies, in other times—might have remained confined to the domain of private medical records. Instead, a Ukrainian might introduce herself, position herself publicly, by announcing, “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.”¹³

Foreign Burdens: Chernobyl, Bhopal, and Animal’s People

Within ten days of the Chernobyl explosion, the Soviet authorities had mobilized thousands of Ukrainian coal miners to help with remediation work at the disaster site. One of them, Dmytro, who labored at the site for a month, was later afflicted with pulmonary, cerebral, and cardiac disorders and found to have chromosomal aberrations. In an interview, he portrayed his body’s radiation load as a “foreign burden.”¹⁴ He was referring—as his interviewer notes—to the sense of harboring an alien, unnatural, and disquieting force within.

But the miner’s choice of phrase deserves a second parsing, one directly pertinent to my reading of Animal’s People. Dmytro had been saddled, I would argue, with a “foreign burden” not just in a somatic but in a geotemporal sense as well: his post–Soviet Ukrainian body remained under occupation by a Soviet-era catastrophe. For in the case of Chernobyl, not only did the radiological toxicity travel across the national border, but (as the Soviet Union fragmented) the national border traveled across the toxicity. The Ukrainian body politic, though politically autonomous, remained environmentally and epidemiologically dominated by the “foreign burden” of a ghosted country, by a Soviet past that (as Faulkner would have it) was not even past. Through the workings of slow violence across environmental time, Ukraine’s sovereignty was compromised. If the Ukrainian body politic at large was afflicted with the burden of involuntary macro memory, mutagenic chromosomes at the micro level sustained a Soviet heritage that prompted Dmytro (and many compatriots) to refuse to reproduce for fear of a future burdened by an afflicted Ukrainian child.

The concept of the foreign burden offers a productive prism through which to approach Sinha’s novelistic response to the Union Carbide disaster when, one early December night, a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas (in combination with other toxins) leaked from the company’s pesticide factory in Bhopal. Estimates of those killed immediately vary wildly, from 4,000 to 15,000 people. In the years that followed, scores of thousands of deaths and life-threatening disabilities were linked to exposure to the gas cloud. By some estimates, 100,000 residents continue to be afflicted.¹⁵

Although Animal’s People is set twenty years after the disaster, the novel dramatizes the illusion of the singular event: from a narrative perspective, the events—like the poisons themselves—are suspended in medias res, in a state of environmental, epidemiological, political, and legal irresolution. If the unfolding of slow violence across environmental time is typically managed through powerful strategies of distantiation, in Sinha’s novel those distancing strategies depend primarily, in geographical terms, on transnational corporate distance and, in temporal terms, on both the slow emergence of morbidity and on legal procrastination, which provide prevaricative cover for the CEOs who wish to exploit time to defuse the claims of the afflicted. Khaufpur (Sinha’s fictional Bhopal) is the “world capital of fucked lungs”; it is also a place of interminable trials—bodily and legal.¹⁶

For twenty years the immiserated people of Khaufpur have been trying to bring the American CEOs of the corporation responsible—named simply as the “Kampani”—to stand trial in India. Thirteen judges have come and gone in successive trials, but the spectral Kampani bosses keep failing to materialize, maintaining their oceanic distance from a city infiltrated and haunted by Kampani poisons. Playing for time, the Kampani resorts to legal chicanery, political bribery, and backroom deals with India’s Minister for Poison Affairs and his collea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque
• 2. Fast-forward Fossil: Petro-despotism and the Resource Curse
• 3. Pipedreams: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice, and Micro-minority Rights
• 4. Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• 5. Unimagined Communities: Megadams, Monumental Modernity, and Developmental Refugees
• 6. Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time
• 7. Ecologies of the Aftermath: Precision Warfare and Slow Violence
• 8. Environmentalism, Postcolonialism, and American Studies
• Epilogue: Scenes from the Seabed and the Future of Dissent
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index