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- search for cases of fast and slow violence
- How much does the novel explicitly focus on fast vs. slow violence? Why is it weight in this particular way?
- How does the structure of the novel represent slow violence as well?
- Why is the novel titled Emergency?

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Feminist critique on Slow Violence (acc. to Nixon) --> Christian 

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Feminist critique on Slow Violence (acc. to Nixon) --> Christian 

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- slow violence as something rather 'new' to the academy though echoing the labor of feminist scholars who have for many years written about how violence is experienced in banal, everyday, intimate and routinized ways (cf. Christian)
- believe that 'Nixon's work aligns with a long existing tradition of feminist scholarship, we propose that feminist epistemologies provide a proven intervention to denaturalizing binary divisions and adopting a politics of relationally' (1067)
- binary of fast and slow violence operates as a single complex of violence, we build on arguments we previously made about the co-constitution of hot and banal nationalism (1067)
- Nixon's notion of slow violence aims to expand the category of violence, yet actually refers a lot of the times to struggles and problems women have to deal with in their everyday life in patriarchal structures (1067)

- Invisibility according to Nixon:
'how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow-moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our world image?' (1067)

- the gendering of slow violence: (1068)
--> close parallels between Rob Nixon's
(2011) theory of slow violence and the long history of feminist work on violence
--> 'hot' and fast violence obscures other forms of violence from sight/visible
--> feminists in turn point to how attention to what constitutes violence is deeply shaped by gendered epistemologies and binary thinking

1069:
-->'fast/hot' violence regarded as active, and an issue of immediate public concern (male)
--> slow violence is coded passive, routine and banal (female)
comparable to classic gender roles and would also allude to the idea why slow violence might be 'invisible' to the public eye

- Highlighting the gendering of fast and slow violence is important to note ... the original theorization engages with scholarship on ideas like structural violence, feminist attention to gradual, routinized, and banal forms of violence is largely not touched on. (1069)

- we similarly argue for approaching fast and slow violence as a single complex. Indeed, as the examples in the previous section demonstrate, fast and slow violences already thoroughly imbue one another (1072)

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p.89:
- '...the experience Rebecca was having was sexual. The violence was a by-product, as it usually is.'
- 'Slow violence, systemic violence, remote violence, residues of most human processes, are the most widely generated by-products of my lifetime and hers.'

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- Protagonist and the bunny "had done it together, destroyed the babies with our colossal care" (14) -> baby bunny is eaten by mother because protagonist deliberatly touched it (10,11)
- protagonist being physically harmed by Clare with a sharp stone because she didn't behave the way Clare wanted her to (p. 36)
-Ms. Carr hurting a student by 'slamming down the lid of the desk', thus jamming his hand (p.42)
- protagonists likes/enjoys seeing wheat bales on fire (p.71)
- Rebecca torturing the starling with a barbecue skewer --> compared to experiment/medical operation (p. 88)
- protagonists friend Kay had a confrontation with her husband which she declares as 'not good' which alludes for the protagonist that the argument had been physical and that her friend's husband has assaulted her physically (p.100)
- Ivy (calf) being crushed against a stone by a very mad bull (p.104)
- again: bull attacking Ivy and injuring her, which leads to her disappearing from the farm (p. 111)
- Account of two individual murders  brutally -->very visually described in text (p. 158ff.)
--> first murder: man stalks ex-wife and kills her dog (which she bought to protect her) then uses the dog's blood to write on the wall 'Men can lick too.'; also account of necrophile actions
--> second murder: man escapes from prison and kills a couple on a roadway, chopping off the husband's head (very brutally described)
- bear cubs are poised by some toxic liquid they feed on --> die (mother has presumably already died through said toxine (p.175)
- school performance of 'Samson and Delilah' in which Delilah is played by a boy called Stu --> Stu's interpretation seems to not be approved of by all parents --> one father touches her/him by the shoulder and covers his/her mouth with his hand (p. 187)
- hares fighting against each other like kangaroos (p. 215)

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In the novel we see various instances of slow and actively fast violence. in the end however it is the slow violence that prevails and leaves a lasting impact. Cancer killing her childhood best friend, her teacher permanently scarred by her abusive husband, the animals slowly dying of chemical poisoning. And so is the slow violence on our climate. We see fields being deliberatly burned down but what is deliberatly left out, or at least not explicitly stated is the burning of forests around the world.

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Gradually and across time and space, we don't notice it anymore.

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Examples:
- fire alarm
- domestic violence
- cancer
- killing of animals through toxins

In Text:
p. 41: Ms Carr had a large yellowing bruise on her face…”

p. 42: The bruise on her face darkened to the colour of a storm-cloud”

p. 64: When I’d finished i turned the plate upside-down… I swallowed. “Made in China,” I read aloud”

p. 72: She told us about Hiroshima, radiation therapy, Chernobyl, radon, clean energy, and Nagasaki, all in one week, and explained how the same elements could kill and could give life.

p. 78: “There was an orange ring pull, I think from a limited-edition Fanta, and recently I saw this same ring pull in an image of a dead seabird… It had travelled many thousands and thousands of miles and made its way into the entrails of this bird that had died somewhere along the northern coast of Chile”

p. 81: “Sadly, the baby had been born too early and had not survived… She had her arm in a sling. I guess we all assumed that was something to do with the baby too.”

p. 81: The only violence I had noticed, up to that point, had been staged by Rebecca”

p. 133: the spider that had traveled on the banana

p. 161: That day Ms Carr did not have a bruise on her face, or a broken arm, or even the bandages taping two of her finders together, more than once the same two.

p. 175: A few nights later, when the cubs appeared, there was a pool of bright blue liquid with foam around its edges at the foot of a nearby tree.”

p. 197: I asked why Clare had died. She had an infection from a tiny fungus that is present everywhere, in bins and compost heaps or damp in a house… it’s to do with poverty and that’s a complex problem.”

p. 211: At the entrance to the wood a muchkeap had recently been removed to be spread out on the filed, leaving behind it a large oval of stinking black liquid, marbled with petrol rainbows.”
p.97: “I can’t remember a time when Clare began to be ill. It happened in an ongoing way, in the way that most things happened and still happen: without attachment to date or hour, in a suspended present - hovering.”

THE FIRE:
p. 70: The wiring on the side of the building opposite me…I guess they left the job half finised. It looks dangerous to me but I’m not an electrician”

p. 141: Yesterday, I was woken up in the early hours by my smoke alarm”

p. 217: “At my desk beside the window I could smell real smoke … I’d been so absorbed at my screen that I hadn’t seen it start, or build. I’d been so busy with my story that I hadn’t looked out. My smoke alarm, I realized, was pipping again, but I’d been ignoring that for months…. But the homes of my neighbours, in the flats opposite, had disappeared inside the blaze.”

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Definiton Slow Violence:
"A violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersedacross time and space, an attritional violencee that is typically not viewed as violence at all." (2)

Aspects of slow violence:
- incremental
- playing out across undefined temporal scale
- not instantaneous
- not spectacular
- relatively invisible
- presents representational and strategic challenges
- mobilizing masses is difficult

"the long dying.. are underrepresented in strategical planning as well as in human memory" (2,3) -> this is the case for unnamed narrator who glosses over/doesn't see acts of slow violence around her. Her focus and attention is drawn to actual violence instead.

Definition Violence:
as compared to conventional definition of violence: "event or action that is immediately in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility"  (2)

Aspects of violence:
- newsworthy
- easy to spot
- focused
- time bound
- body bound

Why is her attention on fast violence instead of slow violence?:
For Nixon, it is clear that "different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. (...) Falling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match" (3)

Acts of Slow Violence:
- toxic buildup
- domestic abuse
- posttraumatic stress
- environmental calamities

-> here, casualties are postponed, often for generations

Triggers/Instigators of Slow Violence:
- Wealth
- Politics
- Capitalism
- Sexism
- Racism
- Inequality

Examples:
Chemical Slow Violence -> driven inward, mutation of cells is invisible, over generations, undiagnosed, untreated

Domestic Abuse -> "In domestic abuse, for instance, violence may be life threatening but slow, bloodless, and brutal in ways that are not always immediately fatal: a broken nose constitutes a different order of evidence from food or

access to medical treatment or human company withheld over an extended period." (16)

Writing about Slow Violence:
From a narrative perspective, representation of slow violence needs to be "slow paced and open-ended, eluding the tidy closure, the containment, imposed by the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat" (6) It also over spills clear boundaries in time and space
-> this mirrors the structure and narration of Emergency: the novel is slow paced, open-ended and without containment and over spilling boundaries (no chapters, flow between past and present (also showing the long stretch of time that slow violence requires)). It is also open ended -> no solution is given, no lesson learned. Ending also gives metaphor of "no containment" -> a fire that can't be contained

In life and narrative we tend to want to bracket violence, andd thus we ignore ongoing and belated casualties

Fiction can make the unseen visible, accessible and tangible

For protagonists violent folklore narratives helped her understand (slow violence): “These stories were useful and sensible. They revealed a disturbingly interesting world beyond my perception, and they taught me that my senses and my intelligence wouldn’t always read everything right.”

The Ending:
Rhetorically, an example for this can be forebodings and shadows cast by the invisible. In Emergency, slow violence is often presented but not named out front. This changes with the ending of the novel, as readers may experience an epiphany. The beeping fire alarm that is so normal to the narrator that is able to ignore it completely, the dodgy visible electric cables outside the building across from her all become visible in a new way as the reader is made to realize that everything around the narrator is currently on fire - she has just been too busy with her childhood and the violence found there that she wasn't able to take notice.

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- innocence (or lack thereof)
- witnessing violence
- = countryside

Climate marches are full of placards on which the words Our House Is on Fire are scrawled, a message more poignant if it is in a child’s crayon. But “our” is a slippery word. The truth of it is that some parts of the house burn before others, and that many go on living in the house as it burns, experiencing joy, falling in love, taking naps, working, getting bored. Emergency feels honest in a way that a lot of “nature writing” today does not. When Hildyard turns her lens on the forest, the pot-noodle container isn’t airbrushed out of the frame. The experience of being “in nature” is not one of quiet reverence, but instead can involve remembering what one has watched on TV that day, empathizing with a fox and then being suddenly alienated by the otherness of its animality. There is no purity of landscape, no lofty moralizing. There is just a child interacting the world and trying to make sense of it in a way that is utterly chaotic.