New Day Jazz

Justin Desmangles

Our guest this afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, winner of the 2012 American Book Award,  the 2012 Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the Environmental Studies Section of the International Studies Association,  the 2012 Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award from the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University, as well as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2011. 
In this enormously important book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, author Rob Nixon lays out some of the most persuasive and highly original analyses to date on the problems, perils, and confounding paradoxes surrounding the phenomenon of global destruction caused by rising levels of toxicity in the world today. While it is no secret that the most technologically advanced nations on earth, most especially in the West, and most particularly the United States, are the primary culprits in perpetuating the phenomenon of global warming, little has been done, until now, toward the unique role artists, particular writer-activists, can have and have created in off-setting the imminent catastrophes associated with it. Beginning with Lawrence Summers infamous quote outlining the logical necessity of the aforementioned advanced nations capitalists to dump toxins into an "under polluted" Africa, Nixon guides us through the surprising subterfuge of evasions, confrontations, revelations and disclosures surrounding the various industries, corporations, governments, unions, villages, townships, preserves, rivers and mines that are the landscape of the most volatile, socially and politically charged issues of our time. Those involving the very survival of the planet on which we live. Drawing heavily on the work of Rachel Carson, as well as Edward Said, Nixon has created a singular, remarkably rigorous, and inventive style of literary criticism, illuminating the work of writer-activists both in America and around the world, whose own powerfully deciphering works offer highly original solutions and perspectives on the daunting, often intimidating, prospects of human extinction. In a culture where our perceptions of the world in which we live are increasingly mediated by rapid advances in communication technologies, and their attendant archives, Nixon forwards the theory of 'slow violence,' a violence that develops incrementally over time, time not immediately apparent or presentable by spectacle driven media and broadcast technology. For those trapped inside and outside this virtual membrane, the paradox is lethal. Among the many writer-activists discussed by Nixon are American Book Award winner Camille Dungy, Arundhati Roy, the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, Noble Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathi, Njabulo Ndebele, and Indra Sinha, author of Animal's People.

Genre

Blues & Classical & Experimental & Jazz & Poetry & Literature

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