Jeffrey J. Williams Criticism as a Kind of Nonfiction: An Interview with Rob Nixon

During the 1970s and ’80s, it seemed as if criticism and nonfiction writing belonged to different worlds. It was the era of high theory, quoting figures like Lacan, Derrida, and Althusser, preoccupied with abstract concepts of Western metaphysics, and in an idiom replete with Latinate neologisms. It was what scholars did, as opposed to creative writers, and especially in the U.S. the two groups did not talk very much to each other. However, by the 1990s a cohort of younger critics started writing in venues like the Village Voice and the Nation in a different mode, addressing a broader public, followed by a generation writing regularly in LARB, n+1, and many other places. Rob Nixon was one of those critics who took a different route. Through the 1980s and ’90s, he wrote a kind of scholarly reportage for the Voice, the Nation, and the New York Times. Coming from outside the usual channels of the American academy, Nixon, a South African, crafted a public style to discuss writers like V.S. Naipaul and issues like race, apartheid, and the environment. Trained at Columbia University in postcolonial criticism, he took a note from Edward Said, who was a major figure in theory but worked progressively more as a public intellectual through his career.

As he talks about in this interview, Nixon is drawn to creative nonfiction, which he regularly teaches and which he uses to talk about the environment. His most recent work, notably Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011), which won an American Book Award, shows how ecological problems, because they develop over a long time, enact an almost invisible but decided violence. Narrating efforts by writers and activists to expose these effects, he emphasizes how they impact the poor, especially in the Global South. Nixon has also written a memoir about his family and growing up in South Africa, Dreambirds: The Strange History of the Ostrich in Fashion, Food, and Fortune (Picador, 2000), that interweaves the history of the early twentieth-century boom in ostrich feathers, reminiscent of the tulip craze of the 1600s that shaped the economy of South Africa for several decades. Before that, he published Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge, 1994), which surveyed South Africa’s culture and politics, as well as its relation

to the U.S., from the beginning of apartheid in 1948 to its conclusion in 1994. Nixon’s first book London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford University Press, 1992), assesses that Nobel prize–winning author, particularly his nonfiction.

Born in 1954, Nixon grew up in Port Elizabeth, on the southern coast of South Africa. He attended Rhodes University, where he majored in African languages (BA, 1978), but in 1980 he became a political refugee when he refused service in the military as it stepped up its apartheid actions, and he migrated to the U.S. to attend graduate school in English at the University of Iowa (MA, 1982). After hearing about Edward Said, he moved to Columbia University to study with him (MA, 1984; PHD, 1989), and stayed on there as a professor through the 1990s, with an interlude at the University of London (1992–94). In 1999, he moved to the University of Wisconsin-madison, where he was Rachel Carson Professor of English, and in 2015 he returned to the East Coast, to Princeton University, where he is the Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment.

This interview took place on June 18, 2018 in New York City. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, and transcribed by Bliss Saleebyan, a graduate student in English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jeffrey J. Williams: You have been working on environmentalism for the past decade, with your book Slow Violence and your new project on the Anthropocene. How would you define the environmental humanities right now?

Rob Nixon: It’s a morphing set of projects, and it depends on whether we come at it from a worldly perspective or an institutional perspective. In the worldly perspective, it’s a moment when there’s a widespread set of environmental urgencies in the public domain that students and, to a degree, university administrations recognize as fairly central. So there’s a lot of pressure from below to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and think about the environment in broad terms.

In terms of the institutional perspective, one of the things that’s happening is the humanities are articulating themselves to different partners. Some of those partnerships come with compromises, some come with opportunities, and some with both. What has surprised me—and this is particularly true in the Princeton context that I’ve entered in the last couple of years—is the number of scientists who are very supportive of environmental humanities as part of the spectrum of environmental thinking, in terms of public engagement, in terms of storytelling, image-making, and strategizing how to reach publics that don’t have

the discursive expertise or specialization that scientists have, and how you translate across.

For me, I’ve always taught creative nonfiction workshops, and one of the things I do is a workshop called Writing the Environment through Creative Nonfiction. It’s interesting that the majority of the students in those classes are science majors. They’ve crunched the numbers, they’ve done the data, but if they are studying, say, coral reefs in Kiribati, or an ocean that will rise, they have another type of writing or representational work that they want to do. It can be op-eds, it can be podcasts, it can be travel pieces, personal essays, or public science writing. We look at the material that they’ve gathered in the sciences and then we talk about dramatization, translation, characterization, foregrounding, backgrounding. That process I enjoy greatly in the classroom, and I learn a lot from students.

Then there’s public outreach, which is one thing that the arts and humanities have to contribute to the larger conversation about what should be done. There’s also a critical edge to much of the environmental humanities: it’s getting us to rethink power relations through form and the structuring of people’s stories. One thing you notice is that words like “sustainability” and “resilience” cycle through the universities. That very often involves public-private partnership, with the public component as the weaker of two partners. On the surface you have a scaling up of the humanities as a partner in this big endeavor involving engineering, geosciences, life sciences, social sciences, and policy. But there is sometimes a risk of humanities scholars entering into partnerships uncritically, in ways that become complicit with the neoliberal agendas of universities rebranding themselves as “sustainable.” I feel that purely data-driven models of futures and certain kinds of technophilia don’t address the clashes in our current era, particularly around rising inequality that remains tenacious even when you have rising growth. The social destabilization that results has profound implications for civic society.

Within the environmental humanities my focus has been pretty squarely on environmental justice and the idea that different people and different communities experience different burdens of risk and different levels of access to resources in the commons. One of the exciting things on the institutional level at the moment is the degree to which justice has moved closer to the center of the field, as opposed to an earlier era where you had a much stronger focus on wilderness, on questions of deep ecology, and so forth. That enables us to recover alternate genealogies of what constitutes environmental thinking both within the U.S. and internationally.

JW: One concept that you’re known for is “slow violence.” We usually think violence is sudden, and you talk about how the image of environmental violence often takes the form of media spectacle that lasts for a news cycle. But you underscore the ongoing environmental effects, for instance with Bhopal or Three Mile Island, where people might develop a high rate of cancer twenty or thirty years afterwards, but it’s not directly attributable, and there’s no definitive causal connection.

RN: It’s slow violence and therefore not seen as an emergency, so those affected are not seen as bodies at risk in the way that somebody in a burning room is at risk. I have to say that my greatest intellectual influence is Anne Mcclintock, who I’ve lived with now for almost four decades and talked with a lot about this, and she encouraged me to think through violence in gender terms, in terms of domestic violence, where you can have deep psychological trauma of somebody who is locked in a room but not bruised, so there’s no single, decisive violent event. It’s the absence of an event and the presence of a very damaging process that I was trying to get at.

The other side of that book is about the environmentalism of the poor. For a long time it was assumed that environmentalism was a soft cause espoused typically by white middle-class or upper-middle-class people, so it came with a little affluence and comfort and wasn’t a desperate struggle. But now we realize that environmental values suffuse myriad communities in different ways. That allows the environmental humanities to connect environmentalism more directly with public health—the body of the land and the embattled body in class, race, gender, or immigration terms. The public humanities, the medical humanities—these turns overlap and have a lot of generative possibilities in strategizing or changing the voices.

One of the things that concerned me with slow violence was the question of deniability, in advance and in retrospect. One could say that fiftyfive thousand American troops died in the twelve years of the Vietnam War, or over a million Vietnamese were killed in that period, but you’re still bookending it. I wanted to think about the intergenerational fallout that is discounted in advance and in retrospect.

JW: How did you come upon the concept of slow violence and writing about the environment?

RN: After my book Dreambirds, which was a memoir, I was thinking of writing another public book, not an academic book, and I became obsessed with depleted uranium in the aftermath of the invasion of

Iraq in 2003. So I started a project where I interviewed the veterans of that war, and the idea was then to go to Iraq and look at the radioactive and chemical fallout. This was the first full-scale integration of depleted uranium munitions into warfare. It was the most depressing thing I’ve ever worked on. Uranium replaces calcium, so people’s bones were falling apart.

JW: So they get myeloma or another cancer?

RN: Yes, that’s one of the fallouts, kidney cancer in particular. Most of the people in the military were saying it was a necessary evil. They were saying, “Well, depleted uranium is fortifying for the tanks, and it’s such a great power source, we can’t deny that it’s valuable. What you get forty years from now, that’s just part of the business.” But it’s obviously saturating the landscape, and I was trying to look for an arc to the story. I found that I got more and more depressed the more I investigated, so I pulled back. I had a filing cabinet full of notes and interviews that I just backed away from.

But I became obsessed with the question of environmental time and environmental damage to the landscape and to the individual. I enfolded a little bit of that into Slow Violence, where I have a chapter on depleted uranium munitions and landmines and the question of delayed impact, and the premium on techno-efficiency and innovation without regard for the long-term fallout.

JW: One memorable phrase you use in Slow Violence is “unimagined communities,” which plays off “Imagined Communities,” Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase about how nations coalesce. “Unimagined communities” captures that we don’t even think about the damage that’s done, or will be done, to certain people, and we don’t tend to imagine the poor.

RN: There are different forms of distancing that occur, and sometimes we need those mechanisms to survive. You can’t be intimate with everything—there’s a temporal distance, there’s a geographical distance, there’s a technological distance, there’s a rhetorical distance. All of those mechanisms shape the way that we identify with this as opposed to that community or this as opposed to that landscape. The interface between disposable communities and disposable landscapes is very significant in terms of what constitutes an imagined community and what constitutes an unimagined community, and the degree to which certain spaces, certain lives, are recognized as disposable.

If you globalize that and look, say, at indigenous people, they are not immediately available for imagination. In the murderous frontlines of environmental crisis, whether you’re talking about forests or warfare that is exacerbated by aridification or climate crisis, if we think about the people living in those places, their lives are disposable and their deaths are not consequential because they are not going to generate stories that might require a public response. If you think, particularly in democracies, that everybody’s a citizen—well, in a sense, not everybody is.

The critical confluence at the moment is between environmental crisis and rising levels of inequality. That is a collision that’s happening in a lot of places and in different manifestations in the carceral system, the education system, and affordable housing. If we go back a couple of decades, with the big green conservation movements, a lot of the decision making was happening in Geneva or London or DC or New York and was imposed on people whose own environmental values were seldom part of the conversation. The result was that you get conservation refugees, and in large parts of Africa and Latin America especially, the idea that environmentalism was a white northern thing that had nothing to do with the experience of environmental burdens.

JW: Your work has a scholarly grounding, but you’ve fashioned yourself in a different way as a writer. In Slow Violence you tell stories about particular writers and, as you mentioned, you use narrative to do critical work. Some of the information that you weave into the stories is quite damning, whether about Bhopal or uranium. You show how these writers are fighting a battle and trying to expose particular problems, although it’s not quite the same thing as activism to do that.

RN: The question of the writer/activist has compelled me for a long time, going back to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and before that living in New York during the HIV/AIDS era. The interface now between climate change and creative work is happening at the crossroads between politics and art. For me, the role of art in helping shape public perception goes back to working with Edward Said as a graduate student and as a colleague. His biggest influence on me was his example, particularly the way that he would develop a knowledge of a certain field and then rework it for different platforms. It could be Critical Inquiry, it could be London Review of Books, a BBC interview, a class, or a workshop.

I think that lack of rigidity and the effort it takes to listen your way into your imagined audience is very valuable and something that I try to pass on to students, particularly now that there are all these prolifer

ating platforms. You really have a plethora of opportunities to reshape knowledge and to reword it and revisualize it. That has fascinated me for a long time, and the struggle, going back to the anti-apartheid movement, of artists seeking a level of individual expression in relation to a deep commitment to social change is an inevitable tension, but sometimes a harmonious convergence.

JW: The path you take is not a high theoretical path, but you’re not antitheory; you incorporate insights of postcolonialism or other kinds of theory, but with more literary kinds of writing. What models do you have?

RN: I’m drawn to books that have scene and character, but also a certain kind of conceptual energy. How far can you go toward challenging people’s thinking conceptually without relapsing into a specialized, exclusive language? In a book like Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, it’s fairly specialized, but I’m trying to find a terrain of relative accessibility that has a conceptual dynamism to it, as well as a periodic storytelling component. That’s perhaps an odd mix, but let me take two powerful contemporary examples, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Students say, “Wow, you can actually think like that and write like that?” They don’t automatically put the two skills together.

Another book from an earlier era that shifted my thinking was Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman, about coming from a working-class family in Britain and how working-class women are represented in Freud and by people like Henry Mayhew. She pieces together a history from fragments recorded by people from higher classes, and melds that with autobiographical memories of her mother struggling as a working-class single mother. Books that are a hybrid, when you feel the personal presence of the writer and also a certain intellectual questing, and you feel a sense of accompaniment on that journey—that’s a mixed genre that I find quite intriguing.

To take a more poetic example like Claudia Rankine, you feel her commitment to formal experimentation is as deep as her commitment to the issues that she’s narrating. I find that very compelling, and I think it’s useful to teach to graduate students in particular, because it opens them up to other modes of writing and other ways of doing creative conceptual work. Before I start working with a student on a dissertation, I ask them to bring in two samples of writing that resonate with them at the level of cadence. I want them to hear the writing, and at least one of

the examples should be something they’re ideologically ill-disposed to think favorably of, so they can get behind the ideas to some quality in the writing itself, and then to do an exercise in mimicry to try to write something in that mode.

JW: How did you come to that mode?

RN: Part of that is my formation coming through the 1980s and ’90s, when there was a surge of theoretical energy, and being a graduate student in English at Columbia. Coming from my provincial background, literary theory at that time felt vastly more consequential and sexier than being a celebrity chef. There was this incredible urgent energy around theory.

I had very little idea of America when I came here. I remember being in my third year of graduate school at Columbia and saying to another grad student, “This Ivy League term that people mention, what is that?” I had no idea of the professional aspect. I had come here as a political exile—a first-generation college student and also as a white exile from a white supremacist society, all of these contradictions.

Said was definitely a guiding light, in two ways. I was preoccupied with the anti-apartheid struggle in my writing, my thinking, and my activism. Through his broader work on imperialism and his connection to the Palestinian struggle, Said’s worldliness appealed to me a lot. I started thinking through half-baked analogies across different struggles and different literatures. I would be reading work from the Caribbean, or the Middle East, or India, and thinking about South Africa, or Kenya, or Nigeria in different terms. Also, as I said, I admired Said’s commitment to a mix of public outreach and theoretical thinking at a time when it was very easy to withdraw into involuted professionalism that, to my thinking, was a bit complacent. I just wasn’t drawn to the rarified opacity that had few points of traction with the broader social struggles that were going on in the world.

JW: It seems like, in the ’80s, there was a shift from the absorption in theory, and Said emblematized it.

RN: Yes, it was shifting out. The seminars that I remember taking with Said included one on imperialism and also a formative one on the Frankfurt School. Being introduced through him to One-way Street, Minima Moralia, formative texts with unorthodox but tremendously urgent writing, had a huge influence on me. Retrospectively, there were gaping holes in his perspective on gender and sexuality—i have no illu

sions about the fact that it was easier for me to work with him than it was for many female students who were trying to insist on the relevance of gender to the study of empire. That was not anything he would go near. I encountered Raymond Williams through Said, and the idea of cultural materialism as a theoretical approach that led out into the world and then led back into imaginative forms—that was tremendously important to me, so that you could declare yourself to be theoretically engaged but without wearing the uniform of a certain kind of deconstruction or poststructuralism that seemed to me antiworldly.

The other side to my metamorphosis involved the public journalism I began doing at the Village Voice, the Nation, and elsewhere. The VLS was really energetic at the time. I would go to the editor’s office, and she would say browse around, take a few books, and review them. I remember once there were three new books, two by Raymond Williams and one by Stuart Hall, and I wrote a long review/essay about them and got two thousand dollars for it, or something like that. It helped me pay for my way through graduate school. I grieve for talented graduate students today, who have so much creativity, but the monetary reward and the dignity that comes from being properly paid for their verbal efforts aren’t there.

Public writing was particularly sustaining for me in a very embattled university environment, where Anne Mcclintock and I were denied tenure twice. Between the two of us, we were denied tenure four times at Columbia, which is a complicated story. Part of it was the war between the Trilling wing and the Said wing, and if you were associated with the Said wing, you were going down in the eyes of the Trilling wing. Columbia’s Trilling wing had a lot of clout.

Also, I think Anne and I were to some extent unplaceable to them. For people who hated theory, we were theoretical, but accessible and literary in certain ways. And the people who saw themselves as high theory thought of us as not theoretical enough. At that time, of seventeen people who came up for tenure in the English Department, only one person was granted tenure, so it was a nominal process. The department was enormously fraught and the institution itself was deeply suspicious of postcolonial studies, so it was enlivening to be writing for the Village Voice. I would go to a loft party in the East Village and someone would say, “Oh, I just read your piece in the Village Voice!” and I’d feel part of an urban buzz that was immune to the chaos and corruption of the Columbia English Department.

JW: Even though you were a graduate student, you were a writer in New York. It must have been heady.

RN: It was a kind of dream life and gave a counterbalance to whatever crap was going on in the university. I remember at one point U.S. News and World Report had a breakdown of different departments and different subfields, and Columbia English Department was ranked as number one in Third World Literatures. So the dean called up the chair and said, “Is this how you want to represent us to the world at large?” There was this fantastic cohort of postcolonial faculty and graduate students, but there was a deep discomfort in the university with what was happening to the English Department.

I think I was fortunate in moving to Wisconsin, but I quickly realized that it was more difficult to teach postcolonial studies than in New York—students were less well-traveled—and I quickly got very involved in something called Cultures and Histories of the Environment, which was the environmental humanities wing of the giant Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies there.

JW: Let me ask another question about Columbia. Back in 1986, you had a quarrel in Critical Inquiry with Derrida. My impression is that you basically gave a scholarly corrective to his use of apartheid, explaining the history of South Africa and the policy of apartheid, in response to his essay mulling over it as a concept, and you charge him with being too abstract. His rebuttal was somewhat overwrought, and he essentially calls you a practitioner of apartheid in upholding the homelands of the disciplines.

RN: Apparently Derrida was very upset because he thought that Said put Anne and me up to writing the piece. It wasn’t the case at all. He had Derrida’s piece on his desk before it went into print and he said, “What do you think of this?” Anne and I were both appalled after we read it, and we thought, “We’ll write a response.” I haven’t been back to it in a long time, but Derrida’s piece was both about apartheid and also about rhetoric and the place of history in understanding rhetoric. We had a deep distaste for the way in which he was coming at it, shorn of history at a time when the history seemed very significant. So that was one context. The other context was the boycott of the 1980s, which was very powerful at Columbia at the time. Anne and I had gotten quite involved in that. At one point, the students chained the doors of Hamilton Hall shut, and it was a volatile time on campus. So in my first year of teaching, I taught a class on South African Politics and Literature. About thirty-five students, maybe half African American, six or seven South African, of various political persuasions or ethnic backgrounds, and a small minority of white Americans were in the class. It was so intense

and urgent, and it required a readiness to hand over the podium to somebody else. I was running the class, and also the class was running the class. It spilled back and forth between the streets and the classroom and was one of the most astonishing teaching experiences I’ve ever had. It doubled as an education for me in black American history and politics.

People were looking for connections, and the connections were there. Someone would say, “Well, what do you think are the main differences between South Africa and the U.S.?” And I’d say, “Well, in South Africa ten percent of the population was white, so you’ve got a black majority to start with. You’ve got twelve languages. Maybe one percent of black South Africans are born with English as their first language.” So we’d start talking about differences, and then we’d start talking about connections.

At that time, I was writing essays for the Village Voice, Transition, and elsewhere, and some of those became enfolded into the second book, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood. That has the imprint of the transition period, particularly from Mandela’s release in 1990 to his ascension to the presidency in 1994, which is the year the book came out. It’s kind of a halfway house between academic writing and journalistic writing, mixing both.

JW: Especially in Dreambirds, your third book, you tell about growing up in South Africa, and you mention that, because you were going to be conscripted in the military at the time, you went into political exile.

RN: I was a fellow traveler in the anti-apartheid movement; I wouldn’t say anything dramatic about my role. But I majored in African languages at the university as an undergraduate.

JW: For a white South African, would that be unusual?

RN: It was very unusual. There were just three of us. And I was very involved in the church.

JW: What church is that?

RN: The Anglican Church. That was a time when many Anglican churches were becoming increasingly political—desmond Tutu was a rising force—but it was also a time when the Pentecostal movement was sweeping through the Anglican Church. I spoke out against apartheid— but I also spoke in tongues. I was chairman of the Anglican Society.

JW: As a student?

RN: Yes.

JW: So you were very religious?

RN: Yes, I was.

JW: Are you anymore?

RN: No, my early twenties was the end of it. But the church played a crucial role in giving me access to black South Africans. The combination of being relatively fluent in Xhosa and going to Anglican camps with black students from black universities was far and away the most intense opportunity I had to actually get to know other South Africans. The combination of language and religion enabled me to form some quite strong friendships, which were unusual at the time. So when, two years later, I received a military call-up, I realized I couldn’t put on a uniform. This was not long after the Soweto Uprising. Then there was the option of leaving the country for good or serving a seven-year jail sentence instead of going into the military. So I left and ended up in Iowa.

JW: Were you interested in writing, then?

RN: No. I applied for a Fulbright and had to leave before I found that I received it, so then there was this awkward business that I had left the country and couldn’t go back.

JW: Were there a lot of people who left?

RN: A small number of white resistors left, alongside multitudes of Africans. At the time it was possible to get refugee status in Holland and Ireland and to some extent the UK. But because of Ronald Reagan and the fact that the apartheid regime was seen as an anticommunist ally, you couldn’t get refugee status in the U.S. So I came in as a student.

JW: Were there many people who went to prison?

RN: Many people, yes, but only a few white conscientious objectors. Arriving in Iowa from that volatile background was quite surreal. I knew nothing about America, and I remember not being able to read people. I was as ignorant about them as they were about me. TV had

been banned in South Africa, so by the age of twenty-five I had watched maybe thirty hours of TV in my life. But people were really nice. They’d say, “You’re from Africa, and you’re white—how does that work?” I didn’t know where to begin, and my head was full of conflagration and paranoia.

I remember once walking downhill to the University of Iowa library and a guy waved at me from across the road. I had only been in the country for a few days. He crossed the street and I said, “I’m very jetlagged, I don’t know where we’ve met,” and he replied, “We haven’t met. I’m Bob.” I was convinced he was from the South African Secret Police, despite his American accent. I thought to myself: “They’re everywhere!” I didn’t go to the library; I turned around and went back to bed. I missed the first week of classes and stayed in bed rereading all of Kafka. Kafka was what grounded me. In South Africa, Kafka was an empiricist. The streets of Iowa were a completely unknown quantity for me. I was there for six months, then Anne joined me and we stayed in Iowa for two years.

JW: Where had you met?

RN: At the University of Cape Town. In Iowa City, we had one of those chance events that can send lives in a whole new direction. I was studying for my prelims, and Anne said she was going to a talk by someone called Said. Neither of us knew who he was, but she came back and said, “That was amazing. We’ve got to go where he is.” So we applied to transfer to Columbia, and that’s how we ended up in New York. People often think I went to Iowa to join the Writers’ Workshop, but I was in the English PHD program, although I’d hang out with the stunning array of international writers there.

So our first two American years were spent in Iowa, then we had thirteen years in New York, and then fifteen in Wisconsin. After that we came back to the East Coast. I’m glad to be back, but I’m also glad to have had the counterbalance of those two versions of the Midwest in my American experience. It does give me another set of Americas to work with beyond the bicoastal cliché.

Growing up in Port Elizabeth, I always felt that I was in a provincial place. The dream was to get to Cape Town or Johannesburg. So when I went to the Midwest, I recognized it as a place I didn’t want to live permanently, but I felt defensive on the part of Midwesterners in relation to the power of an external media to misrepresent you. I didn’t feel at home in the place, but part of me identified with a certain psychological defensiveness about external dismissals of it.

JW: So at Columbia, you worked with Said and on postcolonial criticism, and also wrote for the Village Voice. You wrote your first book on Naipaul. Naipaul now is a distant eminence, but in the ’80s all his books would be reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. In a way, just as Conrad was a figure for Said, was Naipaul for you?

RN: I felt that he was a writer through which I could think. And as you rightly remark, he had this extraordinary cultural prominence at that time, along with Salman Rushdie, as a sort of spokesperson for the former colonies, the go-between. He was a very powerful Mandarin at that moment. I’d always loved nonfiction, both reading about and writing nonfiction, and I found myself engaged, challenged, and offended by his writing, so there was a lot of traction there for me. So I put together a dissertation proposal, but the English Department rejected it. They said Naipaul was too contemporary—he hadn’t passed the test of time. I went to Said and said, “Listen, I really want to do this.” So he presented a case for me, and they allowed me to write on Naipaul. It’s a type of book that’s almost unthinkable today, an author-centered book, but there wasn’t much written on him, and most of what was written on him was from a liberal, sympathetic point of view.

Mine is much more critical. But what I realized retrospectively was that I was pulled in by his stylistic adroitness and his voice. There is a certain persuasiveness and distinctiveness to his voice, and I enjoyed reading him, even when I hated what he was saying. I also realized that, despite the political quarrel I had with him, part of what drew me psychologically to his work was the fact that he was a triangulated person who was deeply attached to three societies, Trinidad, India, and England. I had grown up in a Scottish household in South Africa. We were a four-generation unit, with nine of us. My great-grandfather, who’d been born just after the Crimean War, and my grandmother were in the bedrooms next door to me, and then there was a room where my three sisters slept. My parents were in the middle of this structure, along with these two ancient Scots imbuing us with a kind of Glaswegian, Victorian severity. So I was very steeped in a Scottish version of Britishness at home, and the books I read were Robert Burns, John Buchan, and so forth. Nobody in our family had been to college before my sisters and I, but there were books around, and there was a deep respect for religion.

Like Naipaul, I felt very triangulated—i was Scottish, and I was South African, and I became an American. Ironically, later when I was denied reentry into America, I went to the UK. It’s a long story, but I hadn’t satisfied the two-year return clause that comes with a J-1 Visa to go

back to the country of origin, because I had this jail term over me if I returned to South Africa. So Anne and I went to the UK, where she was a citizen, in the hopes that I could reenter from there. At least that’s what Columbia advised; I tried that, and the INS wouldn’t let me in. This continued all the way to Wisconsin, where nineteen years after I first arrived in the U.S., the INS said we’d be deported in thirty days. So I constantly had this feeling of being a person on the verge of another involuntary displacement.

Anyway, the feeling of triangulation was very strong in Naipaul. I’m sure it was a component in my fascination with his negotiation of displacement. Being nationally triangulated is very different than being bicultural; with deep tricultural attachments, you’re circulating constantly.

JW: I thought it was striking that you did a book on a single author, and it’s not through a declared theoretical lens. Instead, you’re trying to fill in the history and the cultural context. So it’s not really biographical, either.

RN: There is some methodological continuity between that and Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood and even Slow Violence in that probably ninety percent of my reading is on nonfiction. I’m energized by nonfiction as a reader, as a writer, and as a teacher. I like the fact that you can shuffle between aesthetic concerns and worldly narratives. Probably you see that in Slow Violence as well: some of what I’m doing is recognizable as a version of literary studies, some less so. I think part of my inadvertent long project has been to defend the imaginative status of nonfiction as a creative mode. I keep going back to that: I think there’s an extraordinary versatility and imaginative deftness to the best nonfiction. That’s mostly what I teach and think and write about.

JW: Many of the things that you published from late 1980s through the early ’90s are about South Africa. Your second book, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, is a wide-ranging look at South African culture, from the beginning of apartheid, which started officially in 1948, to its coming apart through the 1990s.

RN: That didn’t start off being a book, but a collection of responses to historical events. Transition was just being revived in the early ’90s, and in the first issue I had an essay on Mandela and African American culture. All these anti-apartheid films started coming out, like Cry Freedom, and I became interested in the refraction of the South African

struggle through American culture, and vice versa, the impact, say, of the Harlem Renaissance on black South African culture, something I had been very aware of growing up. So this cross traffic, this transatlanticism, became the subject of what’s effectively a cultural studies book—it’s about film, it’s about the cultural boycott, it’s about the ban on TV. TV was banned until 1976 on the grounds that it was a communist medium. The book looks at the links between the Harlem Renaissance and the Sophiatown cultural renaissance, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the apartheid era, and so forth, and how they were implicated in each other.

When I was living in Iowa City, I was very aware that Bessie Head, a mixed-race South African writer whom I admired a great deal, had passed through Iowa City. She was one of my points of reference. Probably all of my books in some ways are about the variations on displacement and the politics of displacement, and about what displaced persons gain and lose by creating alliances that may be partly based on misunderstandings, as well as on unexpected common ground. Thinking back on Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, a missing element was analogies between South African settler colonialism and American settler colonialism. Most black South Africans were not enslaved, and the critical issue was the conflict over land and grazing rights, which led to the displacement of indigenous peoples by white settlers. I didn’t fully recognize the depth of that potential comparison until I was in Wisconsin, where racial politics had a much more foregrounded native dimension.

JW: Homelands is a kind of hybrid writing, scholarly but more in a nonfiction idiom than most academic writing. And you go farther in your next book, Dreambirds, which is obviously written for a general audience. It tells about South Africa and the history of the ostrich boom a century ago, but it is half a memoir, starting with being at your father’s funeral and dwelling on having left South Africa.

RN: That’s a fair description. I do return to displacement repeatedly. That book arose out of a time when I was ambivalent about whether to stay in academe or to jump ship into public writing. Retrospectively I’m very glad I didn’t, but a piece was commissioned by the New Yorker on ostriches, and I had wanted to write something that was more squarely public. This was a time of a memoir boom, with Kathryn Harrison and Frank Mccourt and all, and I loved memoir. So I thought I’d give it a shot. I was also trying to feed in some cultural history, some natural history, and a fair dollop of autobiography, so it’s a mixed-genre book.

I had a great deal of fun writing it. I spent quite a bit of time at various artist residencies in that period—at Mcdowell, Blue Mountain Center, Yaddo, and so on—and that for me was one of the greatest gifts of my American sojourn. You could step out of the institutional confines or expectations of the university and see there’s this other expressive community. Those residencies are essentially camps for adults, creative people hanging out for a month being a little obsessive, and you have these amazing conversations and an expansive time for writing. My residencies really anchored me during those challenging years when the INS was constantly threatening to throw me out of the country, and Columbia was repeatedly denying me tenure. In conditions of creative sanctuary, I was able to joyfully immerse myself in the writing, so it was a wonderfully exploratory period.

JW: It seems like Dreambirds was a way for you to come to terms with South Africa, and then you go in a different direction, toward environmental criticism. How did that turn come about? I can see how your focus on the poor comes together with postcolonialism.

RN: I had a very active childhood, and I was obsessed with natural history, and then I fell into politics at university and felt that the outdoor ecstasies of the natural world were corrupted by the segregated universe in which they existed. So when I moved to the states and undertook a metropolitan makeover of this improbable provincial in New York, the last thing on my mind was the environment. I was deeply skeptical, as was Said, of environmentalism as a kind of phony politics.

Then two things happened: one was that it was impossible not to be deeply touched when the HIV/AIDS crisis in New York was sickening friends and colleagues. The politics of public narrative, the politics of blame, the transformative creativity of ACT Up—that was very much part of the mix at that time. And I read Derek Jarman’s memoir called Modern Nature, where he discusses that he’s HIV positive, and he leaves Soho in London and goes to Dungeness, which is a pebbly beach in Kent, in the shadow of the nuclear power station. He grows a garden on this inhospitable beach and lives in his cottage, and his memoir peters out as he loses his sight and dies. I really admired him because he was such a creative figure in film and literature, and his memoir is about trying to be present in his gardening in relation to the assaults of the virus and of the nuclear power reactor. I thought, “Oh, this is a kind of environmental writing.”

Shortly after that, I started reading Ken Saro-wiwa and seeing him in the news about the struggles in Nigeria, as he attempted to redefine

that struggle in environmental terms, as what he called ecocide against his people. Here was somebody who gained international prominence by reconfiguring a struggle that had been depicted as localized, a struggle about the Ogoni people that nobody cared about, as a struggle for social justice and human rights and the future of the environment. So I did an op-ed for the Times and a couple of other essays on Saro-wiwa, and then got involved in a campaign when he was arrested, before he was executed. He was the first African writer that I encountered who announced himself as an environmentalist.

So in 1995, I decided to teach a course at Columbia called Modern Nature, bookended by Saro-wiwa and Derek Jarman. I read Silent Spring, and I put that in there; I was improvising. I suddenly saw the possibility of making a segue between studying empire and postcolonialism, and environmentalism, although I didn’t know the extent of environmental justice literature at that point. I wrote an essay called “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” and that was one beginning point for Slow Violence, along with the Saro-wiwa piece. That was a book I wasn’t intending to write, but it began to take shape over time as I responded to these events.

JW: I want to press a little more on the politics of that. Is it possible to be against damage happening to the environment without taking a stand on capitalism?

RN: This is something that comes up a lot: what alternative value systems are out there? Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which I admire greatly, rails against the effects of capitalism, but the adversary-in-chief is really neoliberalization. What I have seen and lived through as an adult is the neoliberal era and the hyperindividuation and normalization of a variant of capitalism that is incredibly rapacious. It sometimes projects this self-satisfied image of lifting people out of poverty, but at the cost of catastrophic short-term thinking in terms of intergenerational justice and with catastrophic fallout for the people that fall through ever more threadbare social safety nets. So yes, I think there is a problematic dimension to capitalism per se, but I’m also trying to look forward out of the neoliberal moment toward something more humane and inclusive, some system that can offer viable futures for more people.

So there is a critique of capitalism, but it’s not foregrounded to the extent that I focus on the distributive inequities that have run amok. There’s so little effort on the part of most governments to rein in those inequities, whether it’s housing, or the racist commercialization of

prisons, the proliferation of private contractors, the militarization of everyday life—all of these things are deeply implicated in what kind of environments future generations are going to be inheriting.

JW: Your most recent work is on the Anthropocene, and I understand that you’re working on a book on it.

RN: It’s only a series of pieces right now, among them a piece in a book called Future Remains. I had the opportunity to teach a faculty seminar in 2013 on the Anthropocene at Wisconsin, which was a phenomenal experience. We had a dozen of us from eight or nine different departments, and after gaining some traction, the seminar was a point of contact with scientists. At the time, I felt skittish around some of the ways in which the term gets used, similar to the way I feel about Steven Pinker’s work and the idea of a universal human subject in evolutionary psychology, which sidesteps questions of political governance and differences among the distribution of possibilities across different human communities. Crucial here is how you build a question of inequity into the Anthropocene. Kyle Powys Whyte at Michigan State has written quite thoughtfully about this question and how the Odawa people were forcibly removed from Michigan to Oklahoma. That and other forced removals have given many native peoples an anticipatory angle on the accelerations of planetary change and the Anthropocene—suddenly you’re in a completely different ecosystem, so you have all these forms of cultural and ecological severance, and your hereditary knowledge has no traction on your radically altered environment. I find that useful in thinking about vulnerable communities living in the crack lines of environmental violence and the way in which the colonial past is so necessarily part of our readings of the future.

If you’re coming at the Anthropocene in the company of scientists, much of the focus is on future trajectories. But people look at that future through their ideas of collaboration and sharing in the past, so how does that affect their position toward future prospects? One thing I’ve been thinking quite a lot about is the question of loss and grief. How do we resist the widespread impulse to say, “Oh we’re a promethean species, we’ve always adapted, we’ve always innovated, and resilience and sustainability are our nature, so we’re gonna make it okay.” They use these big “we’s” at this time of elite resource capture and community abandonment. Silicon Valley is at the epicenter of this, dispensing a Libertarian, antiregulatory, techno-utopianism that drives a lot of the most dubious, facile optimism, by the few for the few.

JW: We can go to Mars.

RN: Yes, Planet B. And then the philanthro-billionaires get to determine where they would go rather than it being part of a public democratic process. So how do we strategize forward, taking into account very different experiences of power in relation to environmental access and environmental vulnerabilities? And how do we acknowledge the possibilities that can arrive via technology while at the same time being deeply skeptical of the corporate tiering that doesn’t acknowledge cultural specificity. I’m impatient with grand human stories that don’t face, head on, the unimagined communities that continue to languish in states of traumatized immiseration.