Toxicity erases a community’s pretoxic past along with individuals’ human histories
Evidence
Animal has forgotten his childhood human name: it’s as remote, as inaccessible as his city’s culturally rich, prelapsarian, pretoxic past. From the moment children at the orphanage taunt him for walking like an animal, he embraces the name of his alienation and abasement, scoffing at those, like Zafar (the slum’s chief anti-Kampani activist), who suggest that he is not a beast just an “especially abled” human. The catastrophe that has befallen Khaufpur, imposing on the city a radically changed culture of nature, has in the process converted Animal into a figure who insists, “I’ve no choice but to be unnatural.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 144
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Chemical catastrophe can erase an affected person’s sense of precedents and future — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 143; Loss of historical memory harms groups the way amnesia harms individuals — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1821; Toxic disaster erases a victim’s categorical identity down to uncertain humanity — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 978 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Toxic disaster erases a victim’s categorical identity down to uncertain humanity
#expands(0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 978 - Loss of historical memory harms groups the way amnesia harms individuals
#expands(0.82) — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1821 - Conflict escalation alters even retrospective moral judgments of past in-group harms.
#qualifies(0.72) — Sonia Roccas and Yechiel Klar and Ido Liviatan, The Paradox of Group-Based Guilt, 86