A thought on slow violence and space calendar conditions
Rob Nixon’s groundbreaking new book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor opens up universalizing ecocritical prisms of understanding through which Space Calendar conditions may be understood as components, connections and crucial linchpins of comprehension in vast global networks across the many temporal orders human beings knowingly and unknowingly inhabit today. Indeed, in our neoliberalist time of transnationally externalized risks and internalized profits, the precise visualization offered up by the theories of space calendar conditions, may well become an important site of environmental justice. As neoliberal ideologies erode national sovereignties and diffuse answerabilities, Nixon argues that “We need to ask how directly, how forcefully a given community is impacted by the cycles of sun and moon; by ebbing and flowing tides; by shifts in the seasons, stars, and planets; by the arrivals and departures of migratory life; and by climate change in ways that are crosshatched with the migratory cycles of transnational capital, electoral cycles (local, national, and foreign), digital time, and the dictates of sweat-shop time” (61). In a global context, the space calendar condition can thus be viewed as just such a way of imaginatively visualizing relationships and recognitions of connection and consequence that Nixon calls for – and which monolithic corporations would prefer remained occluded. Allied with Nixon’s theories of slow violence, the frameworks of the space calendar condition when applied to relevant sites in the global south (and elsewhere), may engender some of the “imaginative definition[s]” (46-7) needed to provide a clearer picture of the long-term attritional damage to its ecosystems and their component communities, enabling a more realistic assessment of “the plight of the stationary displaced” (42″). Such visual and imaginative definition may in turn empower these disenfranchised communities to speak engage more efficiently with the dissembling “culture of doubt” and confounding “army of bewilderers” (40).
Space Calendar project 