Toxic disaster erases a victim’s categorical identity down to uncertain humanity

Evidence

Neither Christian am I nor Hindu nor Muslim, not Brahmin nor Sufi nor saint, neither man am I nor beast. I don’t know what is being beaten here. If they kill me what will die?” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 978

Categorization

• FICTION: Animal’s litany of negated identities could seed a first-person narrator whose very categories dissolve under state and corporate violence.
• XREF: Echoes the earlier book claim that chemical catastrophe erases preceding identity; ties to the chapter on how trauma erases a person’s sense of self. — connects to: Chemical catastrophe can erase an affected person’s sense of precedents and future — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 143; Toxicity erases a community’s pretoxic past along with individuals’ human histories — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 144; Toxic disaster survivors describe themselves as living dead whose memory is erased — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 963