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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Unimagined Communities: Megadams, Monumental Modernity, and Developmental Refugees”
In Chapter 5, Nixon addresses the concept of “virtual uninhabitants” (153), which is similar to that of “development refugees” (152) and unimagined communities. Virtual uninhabitants are groups of Indigenous peoples who reside in areas characterized by developers as empty spaces devoid of human culture. Megadams represent an especially poignant example of developers and their home countries (often more economically developed countries) denying the rights of inhabitants living along rivers.
Nixon documents “five main strategies [that] have been used to deny the rights of ‘hydrological zone’ inhabitants” (163). The first is forced removal of the inhabitants with direct violence. The second is a rhetorical appeal to inhabitants that their sacrifice “is for the greater good” (163). The third strategy is the use of indirect violence by labeling the inhabitants as “development refugees” (163) before the project begins, making the inhabitants invisible in their own ancestral home. Fourth, developers will dismiss rights by saying that the inhabitants are culturally inferior. Finally, developers will enforce the Western notion of private property to negate ancestral claims. Most inhabitants in economically developing countries do not have title deeds to their ancestral land. Developers exploit this fact to assert that the property does not belong to them.
Nixon highlights the writings of Indian author Arundhati Roy (1961- ) who wrote extensively on the “serial damming of India’s Narmada River” (154), where developers anticipated building 3,000 dams. Roy’s primary genre was “the polemical, interventionist essay” (157).
There is a long tradition of anti-dam writing in the US, mostly focusing on the idea of the pristine wilderness. Roy’s writings differ from these traditions in three ways. First, Roy wrote at a time when the US dominated as a superpower, which led to the rise of the antiglobalization movement. This social movement called for changes to institutions that would make leaders answerable to their citizens and not to corporations. Second, Roy wanted to “expose the collusions between a fascist strain of Hindu nationalism at home and neoliberal globalizers, notably the megadam boosters at the World Bank and in the Western-based dam industry” (155). The latter was starting to pivot dam-building from their home countries to economically developing countries. Finally, Roy wrote about dams located in rural areas with large concentrations of people. American writers wrote about dams located in the sparsely populated American West.
Like other writer-activists, Roy grapples with how to make virtual uninhabitants visible. Her writings focus on “the tyranny of scale and the politics of violent invisibility” (160). She is especially concerned with the massive number of people who face displacement along the Narmada River for so-called economic development.
India, alongside other economically developing countries, became obsessed with dam-building. The construction of a megadam symbolized “the postcolonial nation’s modernity, prosperity, and autonomy” (166). Yet these dams still tied countries to colonial and imperial powers. Loans from the US and Europe and from transnational financial agencies funded their construction and put the newly independent nations into massive debt. Collusion between elites in developing and more economically developed countries remained. Writer-activists, including Roy, viewed megadams as “the disease of gigantism” (169).
Dams are by their nature diversionary. They physically divert water and land. In doing so, they also divert the economic power inherent in this water and land from vulnerable communities to the elites. The symbolic power of a dam, as a crowning achievement of modernity, also diverts public attention away from the people impacted by its construction. This diversionary nature presents formidable odds for writer-activists.
Through Roy’s and other writer-activists’ writings against megadams, Nixon shows that:
the notions of surplus people, developmental refugees, and uninhabitants give us a language for contesting the narrative of the redemptive megadam as a spectacular symbol of rational deliverance from irrational rivers and irrational cultures (172).
Activists at the local and international level have successfully slowed the construction of megadams in many parts of the world. Although water wars are also beginning all over again, like in Brazil, Nixon reiterates the importance of writer-activists in determining ways to document slow violence inflicted on vulnerable communities.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time”
Through four literary journeys, Nixon explores the purpose of nature reserves in South Africa and who gets to be part of tourism. Racism and colonialism fill the history of nature reserves. Colonial conservationists blamed Black South Africans for the decimation of wildlife in the country, despite all the evidence showing that Europeans were the actual culprit. Colonial powers created laws that prevented Black South Africans from hunting, which had negative health and food security consequences. Nixon notes that:
The colonial rescripting of wildlife scarcity as a Black problem—which helped rationalize the early twentieth-century creation of national parks—depended on demonizing blacks as barbarous poachers whose relationship to wildlife was one of illegality and threat while depending, conversely, on mythologizing whites as stewards of nature whose conservationist principles evidenced a wider civilizational superiority (190).
Nixon begins by detailing his own experience in South Africa in 1994. During this time period, right before Nelson Mandela was elected president, many white South Africans left the country. This led to a sharp increase in the availability of megafauna for sale. Nixon visited “J.P. Kleinhans, who had converted his sheep farm into a hybrid space—half game reserve, half hunting lodge” (177). Foreign tourists could visit his game reserve/hunting lodge to hunt “dangerous African animals” (177), most of which were actually retired circus performers and to experience “the real Africa” by living in so-called traditional huts amongst the wildlife. In this example, the nature reserve represents a performative stage. It pretended to be “wild Africa” for tourists while also symbolizing the unknown in what it meant to live in a postapartheid country.
The second literary journey is that of fiction writer and essayist Njabulo Ndebele (1948- ). He documents his experience visiting a game lodge for the first time in his own country. Ndebele writes about wanting to visit the lodge for leisure, but instead being confronted by the ambiguities that still surround Black South African tourists. The game lodge is sealed off from the societal changes occurring in South Africa. Thus, Ndebele’s “presence is historic in an enclave from which history has been banished; he disturbs the sealed domain of white men playing games of bushveld risk, implicitly reminding them of risk in a wider form—those political transformations that may, however, come in tandem with opportunities” (182). Ndebele even questions whether the white South Africans at the game lodge view him simply as a means to political connections with the new Black South African government.
American writer James Baldwin’s (1924-1987) “Stranger in the Village” represents the third literary journey. This essay details Baldwin’s experience when he went on vacation to a Swiss Alpine village and realized that many of the villagers had never met a Black man. Similar to Ndebele, Baldwin is also “thrust by the stresses of racialized leisure into a state of spectacular self-consciousness” (186).
The final literary journey is South African writer and political activist Nadine Gordimer’s (1923-2014) short story “The Ultimate Safari.” This story tracks a group of refugees escaping from the Mozambique civil war and their trek through South Africa’s Kruger National Park. These refugees “find themselves plunged, unguided, into a time outside of time, into a bewildering, life-threatening timelessness from which, if they are to survive, they must extricate themselves” (188). The narrator of the story is a 10-year-old girl. She details the fear she and other refugees have about crossing inside a nature reserve, because they consider the space to be for white South Africans.
All four of these stories illustrate how different groups perceive time and space. Nixon is unsure if the tension found in perceptions of the game reserve can change. Moreover, he wonders whether “the space of game reserve can be repossessed, imaginatively and experientially” (197).
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In Chapters 5 and 6, Nixon focuses on writer-activists who are concerned about temporal, environmental, and geographical time and their impacts on the unfolding of slow violence on marginalized communities. Roy wrestles with the impact of “the tyranny of scale” (160). She attempts to shed light on the millions of people who are being displaced from their homes along the Narmada River due to dam-building. By severing people from their ancestral home (vernacular landscape), these communities “find themselves stranded not just in place but in time as well” (162). Dams submerge both the past, present, and future.
The writer-activists that Nixon highlights in Chapter 6 focus on the “racialized ecologies of looking in relation to environmental amnesia. This environmental dynamic between seeing and not seeing, between remembering and forgetting, is forcefully exemplified by the game reserve” (176). One example is Nixon’s own experience visiting Kleinhans’s “half game reserve, half hunting lodge” in South Africa. Kleinhans did not employ Black South Africans, even though the country was abandoning the apartheid system and experiencing an emergence of Black empowerment. He “was creating a racial and temporal enclave, a timeless island outside a time of change” (178). Nixon suggests that Kleinhans created this enclave to partly block himself from this change, which confronted his own white masculinity identity. Kleinhans also took advantage of his society’s changing around him. There were fresh business opportunities because the country was democratizing. In this example, Nixon shows how nature reserves at this time symbolized “a stage that was both ‘timeless’ and suffused with the historical uncertainties of an emergent postapartheid order” (180).
Ndebele’s and Baldwin’s writings also “expose the profound resistance—local, national, international—to the temporal and geographical incorporation of blackness into modernity” (187). Both writers had hoped that they were traveling at a time where they could be accepted as tourists, but it was not the case. The dominant cultures were trying to ignore the changing times. They thought that by living in their time bubbles, they would not have to deal with societal changes.
In this section, Nixon continues to expand on how to break the narrative monopoly around who controls accounts of environmental injustices. Roy is one of the most controversial writer-activists that Nixon discusses in his book. Her attempt to “bring dam building into the domain of violence” (158) ignited controversary within India. This controversary stems from her attempt to connect India’s nuclear tests with dam building. The Indian government, which Nixon notes embodied Hindu nationalism, believed that both technological feats demonstrated that India was now a modern country. Roy’s essays continuously raised the question: “at the turn of the millennium, what did it mean to be a major modern nation? Or rather, what did it mean, as a nation, to display modernity” (158)? She disagreed that these technologies represented modernity. Roy was also deeply concerned with how nuclear tests and dam building impacted the nation’s unimagined communities.
Roy’s status is complex because she comes from a more privileged background than the people she wrote about. She was also not a founding member of an environmental movement. Nixon notes that “this complicated the fraught politics of representation and left her more vulnerable to attacks on grounds of privilege, insensitivity, and usurpation” (171). Despite her controversial standing, she used her celebrity status to raise awareness on a local, national, and global level for the people most impacted by dam building in India, most of whom were hitherto invisible.
