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"Nixon, Rob"
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On Ordinary Martyrs and the Defense of the Forests
Nixon discusses the ordinary environmental martyrs in Cabanas, El Salvador and defends the forests. He states that we typically think of a martyr as a rare and singular figure, Such individuals can seem to constitute a kind of pantheon of self-sacrificial valor. Despite persecution, mental torture, and death threats, despite probable execution or assassination, the martyr refuses to compromise on conscience or cause. But after seeing those Salvadoran women, he started noticing the plural term \"environmental martyrs,\" and the equivalent across a host of languages spreading internationally. A recognition was clearly growing: that environmental struggles across the global South are producing communities of martyrs, collective victims--but always more than victims--of intolerable injustices.
Journal Article
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
“Slow violence\" from climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today.
eBook
Neoliberalism, Genre, and \The Tragedy of the Commons\
In december 1968 the journal
science
published “the tragedy of the commons,” a slender tract by the ecologist and geneticist garrett Hardin that became one of the twentieth century's most influential essays. Hardin's thinking resonated in particular with policy makers at the International Monetary Fund, at the World Bank, and at conservative think tanks and kindred neoliberal institutions advocating so-called trickle-down economics, structural adjustment, austerity measures, government shrinkage, and the privatization of resources. Although Hardin's paramount, Malthusian concern was with “overbreeding,” his general critique of the commons has had a far more lasting impact. He memorably encapsulated that critique in a parable that represented the commons as unprofitable and unsustainable, inimical to both the collective and the individual good.
1
According to this brief parable, a herdsman faced with the temptations of a common pasture will instinctively overload it with his livestock. As each greed-driven individual strives to maximize the resource for personal gain, the commons collapses to the detriment of all. Together, Hardin's pithy essay title and succinct parable have helped vindicate a neoliberal rescue narrative, whereby privatization through enclosure, dispossession, and resource capture is deemed necessary for averting tragedy.
Journal Article
NEOLIBERALISM, SLOW VIOLENCE, AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL PICARESQUE
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. [...] among the many merits of Sinha's novel is the way it gives imaginative definition to the occluded relationships that result both from what I call slow violence and from the geographies of concealment in a neoliberal age.3 Slow Violence, Chernobyl, and Environmental Time The role of what I call slow violence in the dynamics of concealment derives largely from the unequal power of spectacular and unspectacular time.
Journal Article
London Calling
V. S. Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third-World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox reading of his work, Nixon argues that Naipaul is more than simply an unduly influential writer. He has become a regressive Western institution, articulating a set of values that perpetuates political interests and representational modes that have their origin in the high imperial age. Nixon uses Naipaul’s travel writing to probe the core theoretical issues raised by cross-cultural representation along metropolitan-periphery lines. In successive chapters he explores the relation between multi-cultural identity and the rhetorical conventions of exile; the imperial undertow in travel writing as a genre; the tensions between ethnographic and autobiographical modes of authority; and the magnetic pull of the Conradian tradition in figuring the third World. In the penultimate chapter, Nixon analyses the importance of the discourse of primitivism as a means of abrogating Third World experiences of historical change and, in particular, of minimalizing the role of indigenous resistance. Finally, with reference to economic theories of dependency, he critiques the vision, popularized by Naipaul, of the post-colonial world as divided between mimic and parasitic Third World nations on the one hand and, on the other, the benignly creative societies of the West.
eBook
Spotted Owls
October 3, 1995: verdict day in the O.J. Simpson trial. A day that every American of a certain age recalls—where they were, with whom—when law clerk Deirdre Robertson pronounced the words “Not guilty” at 10:07 a.m. Pacific time. I too remember my exact location: up Scheelite Canyon in the Huachucas, looking for Mexican Spotted Owls, with Robert T. Smith for company.
The Spotted Owl flew across my sightlines as a political football long before it had any reality as a living bird. Like most people living in the U.S. during the late 1980s and early 1990s I had
Book Chapter
London Calling
Challenging the popular view that Naipaul is a literary mediator between First and Third World experience in the post-colonial era, this study argues that his work articulates a set of values that perpetuates political interests that have their origin in the Imperial age.
eBook
