Slow Violence
A term also used to describe slow violence, the action or process of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.
What is attrition or attritional violence?
An environmentalism that is distinguished by its economic and cultural concerns and its longer-term view of time, as its proponents must live in the ecological aftermath of development
What is environmentalism of the poor?
Daily Double Discussion: How does environmentalism of the poor differ from environmentalism of the rich? What are the tensions between "full stomach" and "empty belly" environmentalisms?
In reference to Fanon's originals of the same name, these are those whose job it is to produce and disseminate doubt.
What are new bewilderers?
Daily Double Discussion: What is the role of doubt in climate change policy? Who benefits from the "product" of doubt? How does sowing doubt "buy time?"
The role assumed by writers who help launch collective movements
What is porte-parole?
Daily Double Discussion: What does Nixon mean by "autobiographers of collective movements?"
Galtung's theory of violence that foregrounds structures that give rise to personal violence and constitute violence in and of them selves
What is structural violence?
Daily Double Discussion: What is the distinction between structural violence and slow violence according to Nixon? Why is slow violence important to name? What are some examples of slow violence?
Kevin Bale refers to vulnerable populations who are the principal casualties of slow violence as "these" people
Who are disposable people?
An accelerated form of capitalism that lacks measures to keep the system in equilibrium and prevent social unrest.
What is turbo-capitalism?
This genre is often dismissed as "supplementary" to "real" political literature
What is nonfiction?
Slow violence is not only attritional but also this
What is exponential?
Those who mobilize against corporate environmentalism, specifically around the prospect of the loss of their livelihoods through the extraction of materials
Who are resource rebels?
This industry has become a signature growth industry under neoliberalism, contributing to enclaves between the rich and the poor
What is security?
Daily Double Discussion: How does security culture contribute to putting certain violences "out of sight, out of mind?"
When literary studies becomes uncoupled from worldly concerns, Anne McClintock says, we see a fetishization of this
What is form?
While offshore violence of American imperialism may be imperceptible in terms of geography, slow violence cannot be perceived because of its __________ displacement.
What is temporal? (time)
This type of displacement refers to those experiencing the loss of land and resources beneath them
What is displacement in place (or displacement without moving?)
Referring to the accelerated resource plunder currently taking place in Africa by powers such as China and the US
Quoting Leopold's "We can be ethical only toward what we see," Nixon argues that writers can engage slow violence by rendering imperceptible threats "this" critical word
What is apprehensible? (Apprehension)
Daily Double Discussion: Are there examples in the texts we have already read (or any outside class) that make imperceptible threats apprehensible? How do they do this?
Nixon identifies these two very recent factors as highly influential our understanding of the relationship between human agency and time
What are the Great Acceleration and the emergency of cyber technology?
Daily Double Discussion: What is the role of spectacle and spectacular time as it relates to technology and media?
Those forcibly removed by development couched in environmental terms
Who are conservation refugees?
The process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company's products are more environmentally sound, often while polluting "out of sight" geographical spaces.
What is greenwashing?
Daily Double Discussion:
How do corporations and nation-states exploit the invisibility of slow violence or offshored violence?
By making the unapparent appear, Nixon says, writer activists offer a different kind of "this": of sights unseen (p. 15)
What is witnessing?
Daily Double Discussion: What is the role of writer as witness in terms of positionality, ethics, and accountability to the communities they service? How do these roles become complicated by class, etc.?