First-generation class mobility shaped the environmental writer-activist into a translator straddling worlds

Evidence

Most of the writers I discuss—Maathai, Saro-Wiwa, Munif, Kincaid, Jordan, Ndebele, Naipaul, Carson, Richard Rodriguez, Nadine Gordimer, and James Baldwin—were the first in their families to attend college. From the contradictions of sudden class displacement—often compounded by transgressed expectations that attend gender, race, sexuality, or immigrant status—a certain type of public intellectual may arise, someone who has to negotiate the vexing terrain of unfamiliar—and unfamilial—privilege fraught with an anxious sense of collective responsibility. The public role such figures assume is often animated both by an expressive anger and by the fear that their novel, precarious privilege is temporary or illusory—that one misstep may plunge them back into a viscerally remembered familial indigence. What frequently appears, then, is a quest to improvise community, both literal and imaginative, to help counter the isolation that comes from feeling economically, professionally, and psychologically unsheltered by precedent. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 74

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘go-between’ profile echoes the polyad’s listening/observation-as-method theme and the memoir social-depth-of-field idea alongside it. — connects to: Mobility into intellectual roles severs a person’s organic link to their class of origin

Broader Connections

• Mobility into intellectual roles severs a person’s organic link to their class of origin #complicates (0.82)