The Spectacular and Slow Violence of Environmental Racism in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier

This essay investigates how eruptive interpersonal forms of state-sanctioned racial violence secure and enable insidious forms of “slow violence” and environmental racism in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier. The novel theorizes ways in which spectacular military violence and attritional environmental violence work in tandem to reify the lasting, deleterious effects of US imperial power at both the periphery and core of US empire. I argue that these different modes of violence are legitimated and enacted within the novel through similar rhetorics of state corporeality, environmental cleanliness, and purity in both Guatemala and the United States. The metaphors of bodily purity and hygiene in the novel highlight the shared genealogy of the systems of oppression targeting racial minorities, and they create environmental degradation in both countries. Understanding the role of environmental violence—both the violence done to physical environments and the violence emanating from state manipulation of those environments—suggests how studying armed conflict's environmental ramifications can lead to broader theorizations of social justice and oppression.