American assumptions of natural continuity stem from historical amnesia and isolation.

Evidence

57 Munif’s sense of how easily place and history can be irreparably fractured calls to mind sentiments that Czeslow Milosz voices in The Captive Mind. As a Pole, through historical hardship, Milosz learned that what he calls the “natural” social and environmental order can be irreversibly undone at high speed. On arriving in the United States, he was startled by the widespread American assumption that the world they inhabited would “naturally” continue more or less the same. Milosz read this assumption as an imaginative shortcoming born of historical amnesia and geographical isolation. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1027

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading theme of settler-colonial critique and the American exceptionalism strand (ch18: ‘American exceptionalism abroad requires forgetting domestic conquest’). Also echoes ‘recognizing slow violence demands images matching its delayed temporality’ — the reverse of this amnesia is the failure to see slow harm. — connects to: Belief in a ‘postmodern condition’ is American historical amnesia.; Claims of a unified postmodern condition stem from American cultural amnesia favoring novelty — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 718; Postmodernism carries essentialist and Western-centric assumptions in its American form.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the trees-as-infrastructure and land/place thread in ‘Grafting & Growth’: both explore how societies naturalize ongoing conditions and forget historical disturbance.

Broader Connections

• Claims of a unified postmodern condition stem from American cultural amnesia favoring novelty #corroborates (0.90) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 718
• Belief in a ‘postmodern condition’ is American historical amnesia. #corroborates (0.88)
• Postmodernism carries essentialist and Western-centric assumptions in its American form. #qualifies (0.75)