Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

In this chapter, Nixon details two literary works—American anthropologist Adriana Petryna’s (1966- ) nonfiction Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and British-Indian writer Indra Sinha’s (1950- ) fictional Animal’s People—to illustrate instances of slow violence in which a “foreign burden” (50) imposes itself on unsuspecting communities. Foreign burden takes on two meanings. The first has to do with the chemical and radiological impacts on the human body and the environment from two specific disasters. The second has to do with how foreign burden is an inheritance from an outside force.

Petryna’s Life Exposed is an “anthropological work on post-Soviet Ukraine” (49) that details the aftermaths of the Chernobyl disaster, a nuclear accident, in 1986. The disaster took place in what is today known as Ukraine. At the time of the disaster, however, Chernobyl was part of the Soviet Union. Nixon spends far less time on this work than on Animal’s People.

In Animal’s People, Sinha tells a fictional story based on the Bhopal disaster, a chemical accident at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984. He utilizes the literary form of picaresque. The book takes place in the town of Khaufpur (a stand-in for Bhopal).