Fiction must dramatize time’s occlusions as much as geography’s to expose slow violence

Evidence

Yet the legitimate urgency of spatial prophecy should not, in turn, distract us from the critical task—especially for environmental writers—of finding imaginative forms that expose the temporal dissociations that permeate the age of neoliberal globalization. To this end, Animal’s People, Indra Sinha’s fictional reworking of the Bhopal disaster, offers a powerful instance of a writer dramatizing the occluded relationships of transnational space together with time’s occlusions. Sinha’s novel stands (to adapt Williams’s phrase) as a work of “militant particularism,” yet it discloses through that radical particularity temporal and spatial webs of violence on a vast scale. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 121

Categorization

• SEED: The Williams/Berger contrast — spatial prophecy vs temporal prophecy — is a teachable framework for how to read environmental fiction in the literature strand.
• XREF: Echoes ch5’s account of the writer-activist translator role and connects to the literature-of-visibility purpose of the ecojustice polyad. — connects to: Slow violence is marginalized by converging forces of inattention — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 850; Art commemorating past violence must also fight the slower violence of forgetting. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 772

Broader Connections

• Slow violence is marginalized by converging forces of inattention #qualifies (0.78) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 850