The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature by Tara Powell (review)
searing critique of so-called precision warfare in the post-9/11 period. His analysis of soldier testimony reveals the long-lasting effects of warfare that, with its cluster bombs and depleted uranium (whose half-life is 4.51 billion years), is anything but precise. The human and environmental costs of precision warfare are enormous, Nixon shows, and he offers us the disturbing facts that the United States and its allies dropped 24 million cluster munitions on Iraq alone in 1991 and that Afghanistan is the "most heavily mined nation" in the world (225). Here, Nixon provides a particularly convincing account of slow violence. "In the aftermath of war," he writes, "political changes occur far faster than environmental recovery. There remains little incentive for an administration to spend taxpayer money cleaning up lethal detritus left behind in far-off countries from a predecessor's war" (228). The chapter's conclusion has import for both literary studies and contemporary geopolitics. "We should be campaigning for a universal ban on both airand surface-delivered cluster bombs," he advocates, while, as critics and writers, we should also be seeking "new ways to tell the slow-moving stories about the long dying" (232). The final chapter of Slow Violence glosses the critique of firstwave ecocriticism for its "parochialism" and North America-centric canon (234–35). Nixon here faults bioregionalist writers and critics in the United States for perpetuating a center-periphery model. Although he sees merits in bioregionalism (highlighting throughout Slow Violence both the local and global senses of place found in writers like Saro-Wiwa and Maathai), Nixon calls on environmental literary studies to deepen its "international dimension" (243). His crucial point here is that ecocriticism must broaden both the field's canon and its critical-theoretical paradigms so as to make visible the relationships among subnational cultures and communities, nation states, and transnational interests that together shape the life's work of writer-activists like Saro-Wiwa.