Neoliberalism, Slow Violence, and the Environmental Picaresque
A quarter of a century ago, Raymond Williams called for more novels that attend to "the close living substance" of the local while simultaneously tracing the "occluded relationships"—the vast transnational economic pressures, the labor and commodity dynamics—that invisibly shape the local. To hazard such novels poses imaginative challenges of a kind that writers content to create what Williams termed "enclosed fictions" need never face, among them the challenge of rendering visible occluded, sprawling webs of interconnectedness (Writings 238). In our age of expanding and accelerating globalization, this particular imaginative difficulty has been cast primarily in spatial terms, as exemplified by John Berger's pronouncement, famously cited in Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies: "Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space and not time that hides consequences from us. To prophesy today it is only necessary to know men [and women] as they are throughout the world in all their inequality" (qtd. in Soja 22).