Genre functions as a switch mechanism between local and global environmental concern.

Evidence

The more exacting challenge, it seems to me, is how to articulate these vital aesthetic concerns to socioenvironmental transformation. Clearly, genre study remains a pertinent component of our inquiries into the complex interface between aesthetic forms and forms of socioenvironmental change. As Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell have argued succinctly: “the importance of affect in environmental writing highlights the function of genre as a point of transit—a kind of switch mechanism—in the reversible hierarchy between the local and the global.” Indeed, some of the most powerful transnational environmental writing, from Sinha and Roy to Munif and Saro-Wiwa, has arisen at those transit points where genre inventively mediates foreign policy, nation-state violence, and local resource rebellions. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Shifts genre from aesthetic technique to mediating apparatus — complements narrative-as-view-making thread from chapter 1. — connects to: Restricting concern to local issues stunts learning about the wider world — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 130