Forests of Forgetting, Faces of Erasure

Slow Violence, Racial Capitalism and Ecological Warfare in Northern America and Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This essay examines how whiteness operates as a constructed and materialised orientation that legitimises racial capitalism and settler colonialism through practices of erasure. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology of whiteness and Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” it argues that racial domination is sustained not only through spectacular acts of force but through attritional, mundane infrastructures that naturalise exclusion across time and space. Through an ethnographically staged encounter with three objects - a Kodak “Shirley Card,” a Jewish National Fund (JNF) collection box, and a media excerpt framing Israel as an environmental “startup nation” - the essay traces a shared logic of racialisation that renders Black, brown, and Indigenous bodies and landscapes as absent, deficient, or in need of redemption. Across these objects, the essay argues that erasure is not accidental but systemic: a racialised ordering of visibility and belonging that privileges certain bodies while rendering others out of place. Yet it concludes by attending to embodied acts of remembrance and resistance, suggesting that while slow violence is enduring, it is not absolute.