Rob Nixon, the Rachel Carson Professor of English, recently published a new book that was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Nixon's book - Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011) - examines the challenge of developing arresting stories, images, and symbols capturing the effects of slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes –“slow violence”– in a media and political culture.
Nixon’s book examines the media inattention paid to slow violence, but also celebrates writers and thinkers who have embraced non-conventional environmentalist and social justice narratives to draw attention to the plights of their communities.
He draws attention to Ken Saro-Wiwa, an author executed by the Nigerian government for his activism against the European and American oil companies aligned with the corrupt regime that have despoiled the farming and fishing lands of his people on the Niger Delta.
“To confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible. That requires that we think through the ways that environmental-justice movements strategize to shift the balance of visibility, pushing back against the forces of temporal inattention that exacerbate injustices of class, gender, race, and region.”– Rob Nixon, The Chronicle of Higher Education
At UW–Madison, Nixon’s research interests include creative non-fiction, postcolonial literatures, world literature in English, environmentalism and literature, African and Caribbean literatures, and Contemporary British literature.