You should artificially scale up the weight of our impact in your decision calculus. Prioritizing spectacular extinction scenarios erases histories of colonial extraction that have killed far more over time.

Acknowledging the urgency of “thinking big” in the context of the imminent ecological catastrophe, I nevertheless remain unconvinced about the long-term productivity of such a (universalizing) move within memory studies. What troubles me is the conceptual (im)possibility of including the discreet, nuanced, and situated manifestations of these multiscalar entanglements within this ever-expanding paradigm. It is true that the hitherto evolution of the field (from familial, national, transnational, global, to planetary), as well as its focus on a shared nature of remembering, generates a situation in which attention is predominantly being paid to what is thought of as spectacular developments of massive violence, mammoth destruction, outstanding atrocities, and remarkable deaths.2 It seems that the “collective” (rather than “collected”; cf. Olick, 1999) dimension of memory deliberated upon by memory studies scholars enables only a limited subsuming of differentiated, localized, and individualized histories of oppression, bereavement, and misery, even if they remain contingent on more overarching (colonial) practices and (humanist) patterns of thinking. The current emphasis on the planetary scale of memory appears to further aggravate this tendency; as Groes (2016: 141) argues, in such a context, memory must be rethought, since “much more central now are climatological and geological memory, and perhaps cosmological memory that dwarfs the individual, embodied memory that is a part of anthropogenic thinking.”

Such upscaling does not come without certain risks. In that sense, I align with Bond et al.’s (2017: 859) warning, that in doing so, we may “lose sight of particular instances of suffering, eliding the inequitable distribution of human and environmental violence, and occluding a valuable opportunity to map the intersections of global upheaval and personal trauma” plotted across the troubling history of subjugation and extraction. Meanwhile, paying attention to (only seemingly) unspectacular manifestations of violence allows such stories to “retain some specificity” (Clark, 2015: 131; see also Bond et al., 2017: 859), whether they refer primarily to human or nonhuman beings. A more thoughtful analysis of (genealogies of) localized violence displays its embeddedness in the humanist—highly extractive and deeply discriminatory—logic of thinking, unveiling its multiscale entanglements and varied manifestations. Attending to such (minor) stories of (planetary) harm clearly uncovers, to reference Braidotti (2020: 265), that although “we are in this together, we are not one and the same” (original emphasis; see also Braidotti, 2019), and that we are not (and have never been) in this in the same ways. It is thus necessary to expose the racial and classist blindness, as well as still to a large extent anthropocentric construction, of the Anthropocene rhetoric.3 As Yusoff (2018: 2) notes, “As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life—anthropos—through universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations.” It is therefore crucial to remember—contra Chakrabarty’s (2014: 11) earlier-mentioned views—that “The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction” (Yusoff, 2018: 2). As such, the language of colonialism, which has been increasingly invoked in discussions associated with the unequal global distribution of climate change’s effects, cannot be approached merely as a metaphor (cf. Bhambra and Newell, 2022; see also Bhambra, 2021). Processes of colonialization of land/people and climate change share a natal moment (Yusoff, 2018), which calls for new forms of remembrance capable of embracing, as Braidotti (2020: 266) evinces, “different ways of caring,” as well as of responding to a great diversity of racially, socially, religiously, and economically stratified—albeit often covert or discreet—violences and desolations.

Unspectacular violence

Writing about different forms of environmental damage, Nixon (2011: 2) proposes the concept of “slow violence” to describe “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” In Nixon’s (2011: 2) words, “Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.” For him, however, it is urgent to address a different kind of violence, “a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (Nixon, 2011: 2). It seems that, for Nixon, the most problematic dimension of slow violence is connected to its unspectacular character: such forms of inflicting harm over extended periods of time remain difficult to mediatize as their gradual, silent advancement enables decoupling of their effects from causes, making it next to impossible to identify those who should be considered accountable for the generated harm. Time thus serves as a means of naturalizing and neutralizing “the state of things” (Rancière, 2013: n.p.). The originality of Nixon’s concept rests on his insistence that our understanding of violence cannot remain limited to “newsworthy” occurrences. In this context, crucial is his differentiation between spectacular, highly visible events of fast violence on the one hand, and unspectacular, indirect and invisible operations of slow violence, on the other hand. While the former catch public attention and call for immediate civic response, the latter exist in the shadow, without making headlines.

Nixon’s proposal draws on Johan Galtung’s conceptualization of structural violence. Rather than involving direct action between subjects and objects of violence, such a form of injuring is “built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (Galtung, 1969: 171). In this sense, direct violence often remains closely connected to hierarchically organized structures of power, (re)producing social hierarchies. “Cultural violence,” on the other hand, embodied in a rich inventory of cultural means (such as art, science, religion, ideology), “can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” (Galtung, 1990: 291). Also, “a causal flow from cultural via structural to direct violence can be identified” (Galtung, 1990: 294), as covert violence tends to work as a catalyst for more specific acts of direct violence and to serve as a means for justifying or ignoring them. While Nixon’s elaborations only briefly reference Galtung’s work, I view this aspect of his theory as extremely important, given the complex, racialized genealogies and cartographies of toxicity and environmental damage, as well as considering the unequal distribution of harm across different human and nonhuman entities. Also worth highlighting is the fact that not only do the well-established, silently operating structural inequalities make slow violence possible, but they likewise enable the rendering of such massive ferocities as unspectacular.

Posing—as Nixon (2011: 2) highlights—“strategic and representational challenges,” unspectacular violence is typically suppressed, belittled, and marginalized in public memory. But its absence in the mnemonic landscape is also connected to the fact that those groups who are most affected by the detrimental transformations related to processes of toxicity, contamination, and environmental harm—namely, the non-affluent, the non-Western, the non-white, the nonhuman—are rarely considered legitimate political agents, as, at least as far as humans are concerned, exposure to harm has for long been organized along color/class lines. Situated on the invisibilized margins of social hierarchies (ordered by naturalized structural inequalities), the quality of life of those traumatized by the havoc wreaked by slow violence’s continuous operations remains indifferent to the broader public, while their authority as witnesses to the regular courses of inflicting harm happens to be culturally discounted. This is an upshot of what Said (2001: 10) calls “an imposed silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power,” which constantly works to deepen the marginalization of those already structurally excluded. Therefore, the dearth of visibility of unspectacular experiences connected to slow violence in the broader memorial landscape is a result not only of the representational difficulties identified by Nixon, but also of the unequal social organization of power. This hinders possibilities for mobilization and counteracting. It seems, therefore, that some arrangements of quite massive and consequential violence are discursively rendered unspectacular not solely because they unfold in slow motion (as Nixon suggests), but also (or primarily) because they mostly affect those who (historically) possess little political power, that is, the disposable and “non-grievable” (Butler, 2009) bodies, both human and nonhuman, doomed to experience the degrading conditions for sustaining life.

Violent legacies

Structural hierarchies and unequal participation in power (including the possibilities of shaping the memorial landscape) constitute an ongoing legacy of Eurocentric, humanist ways of thinking, configuring global power relations on different levels since the beginning of modern times. In her critical investigation of the white historiographies of colonization of both knowledge and land, Wynter (1995, 2003) traces the successive processes of transcribing the European theocentric, Judeo-Christian, and Scholastic orders of knowledge into a modern, humanistic one, embodied in what she terms “Man1” and “Man2.” Wynter’s strategy connects the homo oeconomicus to, yet also differentiates it from, homo politicus and homo religiousus (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 10). For Wynter, the figuration of “Man1” emerged in a post-1492 context to code human species according to the “rational/irrational” order, which excluded people of African descent, designating them to onto-epistemic absence or death (see McKittrick, 2014: 22; Wynter, 1995; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 47). In the nineteenth century, this formulation shifted toward the construction of what Wynter (1995) labels “Man2”—the new bio-centric figure of homo oeconomicus (see also Wynter, 2003). His formation rested on the code of eugenics-inspired “natural selectedness/dysselectedness” (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 17; see also Wynter, 2003) (which corresponded to the consolidating Darwinian theory of evolution, that is, the “Man2’s” mythoi), establishing a categorized order of races and resulting in writing non-white people out of what was considered “humanness.” Within thus conceived humanism, racism has worked as a systematic dehumanizing mechanism while the notion of a human originating in a Eurocentric culture has never stood for the entire species, instead being the “overrepresentation” of what Wynter (2003: 317) calls the “ethnoclass of Western-bourgeois” variant of the (white) human. Relying on such radically exclusionary logic, humanism has produced practices of not seeing, or ignoring, certain things/people to such an extent that these things/people are no longer possible to be seen at all, as their invisibility has already belonged to this system as its driving force. Within this framework, Wynter (1995) asserts, such omissions cannot be simply undone, as they remain constitutive of humanism itself. An entirely new logic is necessary to acknowledge (and remember) these disregarded (unspectacular) stories beyond the extant structures of humanist (dualistic) ordering.

Situating it within the context of posthumanist/planetary thinking, Kaiser and Thiele (2017) place Wynter’s historiographical elaborations in dialogue with memory studies scholarship. They acknowledge that much work has been done within this field of inquiry to reveal the complexity of mnemonic processes from different perspectives and critical positionings, which found articulations in such concepts as Négritude (Césaire, 2000), Antillanité (Glissant, 1981), Créolité (Bernabé, 1992; Bernabé et al., 1989), and Black Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993; cf. Kaiser and Thiele, 2017: 404). Certainly, also much more recent conceptual elaborations, such as the previously mentioned “cosmopolitan” (Levy and Sznaider, 2002), “multidirectional” (Rothberg, 2009), and “travelling” (Erll, 2011) memory, as well as the notion of the “implicated subject” (Rothberg, 2013, 2019), have further contributed to the pluralization and complication of the global mnemonic landscape, revealing the various convergences, interconnections, and contradictions among the different memorial contexts and (historical) political settings. Nevertheless, as Kaiser and Thiele (2017: 404) insist, Wynter’s work offers yet another dimension to these (re)formulations, calling for “the systemic transformation of our conception of humanness” (original emphasis). As the two authors explain,

Less concerned with the conflicts and confluences of narratives from different communities, her [Wynter’s] work brings to the fore the Euro- and anthropocentric “initial conditions” from which humanness has been thought and which even a dynamized and multiplied paradigm of memory leaves largely unquestioned. (Kaiser and Thiele, 2017: 404)

So, for Wynter, the systemic omission of blackness in hegemonic historiographies “is not an amnesia that could be redressed by turning the tables or by including forgotten voices as a now acknowledged group” (Kaiser and Thiele, 2017: 407). Racialized foundations of humanism can never be undone “by merely including within the category of Man what this very category requires to be kept outside” (Kaiser and Thiele, 2017: 408; original emphasis). As Colebrook (2017: 419) further clarifies, “Adding other stories or perspectives, or aiming for maximal inclusion will only reinforce the sense of ‘Man’ as an already universal being” (original emphasis). A gesture toward other than oppositional dynamics is thus necessary to effectuate a true transformation of the discriminatory ways of thinking/remembering associated with humanist exclusionist and extractivist logic, and to genuinely move beyond it. Perhaps, the recent turn to posthumanist ethics creates a momentum for such cautious and situated theoretical transmutations, yet ones that must necessarily acknowledge the racialized genealogy of the current environmental condition which keeps the human (Anthropos), and its (geo-logical) agencies, at its very center.

In my reflections on the logic of unspectacular violence’s invisibility, as well as on such violence’s absence from the dominant mnemonic landscape, I read Wynter’s work together with Yusoff’s ideas elucidating how the entanglement of racial and environmental damage has for long been embedded in a humanist framework. The aim is to unwrap the often-neglected racialized interfaces of natural and human history (to paraphrase Chakrabarty (2009, 2014)). Yusoff (2018: 52) recognizes “the formative role of race in the genealogy of an Anthropocenic subject and the set of environmental processes that accrue in the new subjective mode of geologic force.” Indicating the structural proximity of black and brown bodies to the inhuman, she claims that this relation has been shaped by “historical geographies of extraction, grammars of geology, imperial global geographies, and contemporary environmental racism” (Yusoff, 2018: xii). Such structural intimacy “is predicated on the presumed absorbent qualities of black and brown bodies to take up the body burdens of exposure to toxicities and to buffer the violence of the earth” (Yusoff, 2018: xii). This observation corresponds to highly racialized geographies of harm generated by slow violence’s unspectacular operations, identified by Nixon (2011). Challenging the racial blindness of the Anthropocene rhetoric, which laments the looming end of the world (inhabited by white communities), Yusoff (2018: xiii) pays attention to the fact that “imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence,” except that harm—of dispossession, genocide, exploitation, post-nuclear contamination, environmental toxicity, desertification, forced displacement, and so on—has been exported to non-white communities.

Engaging with the racialized impact of environmental damage, Yusoff renounces framing the Anthropocene as a new condition that forgets its histories of oppression and extraction; instead, she points to the humanism-inspired division of matter into nonlife and life as pertinent to the racial organization of power, foundational to New World geographies. Thus, for Yusoff (2018: 5), tracing “the traffic between the inhuman as matter and the inhuman as race, is to examine how the concept of the inhuman is the connective hinge in the twinned discourses of geology and humanism” (original emphasis; see also Yusoff, 2013, 2016). In the categorization of matter as a commodity with properties, but without subjective will or agency, both “dispossession of land (for extraction) and dispossessions of persons in chattel slavery (as another form of spatial extraction) are enacted” (Yusoff, 2018: 6). Since different kinds of extractive genealogy are closely related to each other (and to Eurocentric, humanist modes of thinking), the strategy of approaching race “as a geologic proposition” (Yusoff, 2018: 6) opens new ways of conceiving of the racialized genealogies of the Anthropocene and to think geology as a relation of power founded on the division between life (human, white) and nonlife (inhuman, flesh, non-white). After all, as LeMenager (2014: 5) reminds us, oil has figured as a replacement of slave labor (see also Nikiforuk, 2012), which aligns the practices of extracting fossil fuels with the complex socio-economic machinery enabling appropriation of energy generated by the enslaved bodies—a process willfully hidden under the banner of development, progress, and civilizational change, and performed for the sake of their advancement. Such a conceptualization calls for an explicit acknowledgment of the (historical) role of racialization and (settler) colonialisms in the production of global spaces that constitute what is now called the Anthropocene. In both Wynter’s and Yusoff’s understandings, violence against the inhuman is built into the structure of humanism, while the way in which inhuman matter has been defined makes this form of violence invisible and unacknowledged in the dominant (memorial) discourse.

It seems that in its future-oriented rhetoric, dystopic as it may be, the turn to planetary sensitivity in memory studies risks failing to acknowledge the current condition’s own histories of “colonial earth-writing,” violent dispossession “under the auspices of colonial geo-logics,” and of the “extractive grammars of geology” (Yusoff, 2018: 2) instrumentalized for imperial purposes. These violent amnesias manifest in today’s naturalized hierarchization of spectacular versus unspectacular violence, a structure in which certain processes’ belonging to one of these categories is not only premised on the character of experienced violence (e.g. slow vs fast), but by who/what is affected by its very operations. Acknowledging the genealogies of social stratifications, as well as recognizing their ongoing legacies, enables the understanding that what counts as unspectacular violence is in fact quite spectacular; however, these (un)spectacular developments remain concealed from view by the constant operation of structures of exclusion shaping the global economies of attention, memory, and care.

Toward a minor remembrance

Rather than clinging to the somewhat universalizing move of “thinking big” (or “thinking spectacular”) in the context of the catastrophic planetary condition, my proposition here is to scale-down memory studies investigations with the aim of focusing on the more situated, localized, private, or indeed unspectacular, experiences of violence. Nevertheless, such a recalibration cannot be achieved without simultaneously keeping in mind larger scale temporal and spatial processes. Only a multiscalar analysis—something that, as Keightley et al. (2019: 5) argue, the discipline of memory studies has “failed” to do (see also Van De Putte, 2022)4—has the potential to reveal (and remember) the multiple facets of violence, to better understand how it unfolds, and to undertake actions to counter its ongoing detrimental effects. Thinking with feminist geopolitics5 could be productive in this regard, especially given the complex entanglement of the geo and the political within the current debates about both the roots and routes of environmental change.6

Critical of the implicit binarized framework of Nixon’s conceptualization, feminist geopoliticians Christian and Dowler (2019: 1067) argue for a more “relational” approach to violence, enabling a conception of “fast and slow violence as a part of a ‘single complex’” (see also Pain, 2015). Returning to the feminist theorization of continuities between different forms and modalities of violence (cultural, structural, direct), such an approach offers “a vital pathway to address the representational challenge of slow violence’s invisibility” (Christian and Dowler, 2019: 1068). As the two authors emphasize, feminists have consistently invested in explorations of the banal, the everyday, and the invisible, demonstrating how structural violence regularly and silently invades the ordinary and the intimate (Christian et al., 2016; Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Hyndman, 2001, 2004; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Pain, 2015; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Wright, 2008), as well as expounding in detail the structural reasons of the unequal distribution of concern among the spectacular/fast/public and unspectacular/slow/private operations of violence. They have also revealed the links between political violence and its aftermath (Belcher, 2018; Faria, 2017), as well as exposing parallel mechanisms of political violence (or military strategies) and domestic abuse in intimate contexts (Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Pain, 2015; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Pratt and Rosner, 2006). Drawing on these insights, Christian and Dowler (2019: 1072) argue that “slow [unspectacular] forms of violence imbricate with the fast [spectacular], and the fast [spectacular] inescapably shapes the slow [unspectacular].” Such a relational understanding, rather than focusing on the extrapolation of dissimilarities between different scales and modalities, enables comprehension of the continuity of diverse workings of (political/colonial/environmental) violence, “linking the invisible to the highly visible” (Christian and Dowler, 2019: 1072). Maneuvering across different scales of analysis—from global/planetary to intimate/local—advances a more encompassing view of the important continuities between colonial genealogies of environmental change and the racialized cartographies of exploitation, extraction, and implication. In the context of the reflections presented in this essay, I believe that the notion of the “single complex of violence”7 can offer a useful framework in at least two aspects. First, it enables the colonial and extractive dimensions of imperialist, Eurocentric expansion to be linked as two facets of the same logic. Second, it facilitates the connection of the violent legacies of humanist thinking to the ongoing racialized exposure to environmental damage. The routinized harms of racism accumulate in deadly ways (cf. Christian and Dowler, 2019: 1072), even if current racism’s consequences seem to be detached from its colonial origins. Such a situation produces conditions for a neat reproduction of exclusionary thinking. In that sense, treating spectacular and unspectacular violence as part of a single complex provides us with conceptual tools to challenge the (raced) epistemologies which tend to politicize what passes as spectacular while simultaneously depoliticizing what is deemed unspectacular, and to expose the multiscale, parallel, and entangled operations of different modalities and forms of violence. Keeping the two terms, however, is strategically salient, as it helps to critically unpack (and challenge) the causes and methods of affording a different degree of attention to what figures as spectacular and unspectacular developments (cf. Christian and Dowler, 2019).