Deracination shaped Munif’s imagination of petro-capitalism’s uprooted communities

Evidence

Munif knew no such house. Imaginatively, he was housed and fed by homelessness; he never possessed a categorical nationality or a conclusive homeland. He understood what it meant to live and travel as a problem. He bore witness in his writings to upheaval after upheaval—the nakbah that drove Palestinian refugees into Jordan, the Nasserite revolution, the Suez Crisis, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Lebanese civil war, Sabra and Shatila, the Iranian revolution, the intafadah, the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, and the 2003 Iraq War shortly before his death. He felt drawn at a monumental and a micropolitical level to deracination as a theme: to societies and subjectivities rapidly undone and remade, not least at the ruined oasis and in the company town through petro-capitalism’s dominion. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 248

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch5’s writer-activist-as-translator figure and ch10’s displacement-without-movement arc. — connects to: Munif frames petro-despotism as self-immolating worship of oil time — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 279; Exile sharpened Munif’s sense of resource wealth as squandered time — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 280

Broader Connections

• Exile sharpened Munif’s sense of resource wealth as squandered time #corroborates (0.78) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 280
• Munif frames petro-despotism as self-immolating worship of oil time #corroborates (0.72) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 279