Bioregional spiritual geography forgets the transnational harms America causes

Evidence

Much of the American imaginative and critical literature associated with bioregionalism tends toward a style of spiritual geography that is premised on what I call spatial amnesia. Within a bioregional center-periphery model, the specificity and moral imperative of the local typically opens out not into the specificities of the transnational but into transcendental abstraction. In this way, a prodigious amount of American environmental writing and criticism makes expansive gestures yet remains amnesiac toward non-American geographies in which America is implicated, geographies that vanish over the intellectual skyline. The spatial amnesia that often attends a bioregional ethic has temporal implications as well: whether through the legacies of wars or our outsize consumerism, we have a history of forgetting our complicity in slow violence that wreaks attritional havoc beyond the bioregion or the nation. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 730

Categorization

• DEFINE: Nixon’s coined term ‘spatial amnesia’ is a load-bearing concept worth keeping for the polyad.
• XREF: Connects directly to ch15/ch17-19 on America’s transnational extraction blindness and to settler-colonial invisibility. — connects to: Postcolonial indifference to environment and American ecological parochialism share one center-periphery root — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 793; Pastoral synecdoche can erase colonial and industrial space from national identity — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1347; Defining US communities by home country erases complex migrations and imperial geopolitics — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 37 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Supports the Grafting & Growth tree-infrastructure piece’s argument that root/place claims can erase transnational and indigenous geographies.

Broader Connections

• Pastoral synecdoche can erase colonial and industrial space from national identity #expands (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1347
• Postcolonial indifference to environment and American ecological parochialism share one center-periphery root #expands (0.82) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 793
• Bioregional allegiance can displace loyalty to the settler nation-state #complicates (0.78) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 616
• Defining US communities by home country erases complex migrations and imperial geopolitics #corroborates (0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 37
• Place in contemporary America has dissolved into overlapping abstract spatial networks #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 323