Analyze

Ortmann (2023, p.8):

The Formosa protest one year later provides a contrasting case study [to protest against the Vinh Tan coal power plant] to understand when repression is a strategic choice by the regime. The protest occurred in response to massive pollution caused by the Taiwanese steel producer Formosa-Ha Tinh Steel. Perhaps the most important difference was the media coverage. While the Vinh Tan protest had garnered significant, relatively objective coverage in the Vietnamese press, the Formosa case was highly censored, and whatever can be found is highly biased against the protesters who were supposedly only interested in harming Viet Nam’s national interests. To understand what happened, it is necessary to draw on foreign media, which covered the protests over many months, as well as other academic sources.

In social science literature, the Formosa Vietnam disaster is considered a key example for the importance of transnational environmental advocacy networks (Fan et al. 2021). Catholic priests and the US-based organization Justice for Formosa Victims (JfFV) have called for the release of imprisoned activists and for adequate compensation of impacted fisheries. More recently, after several attempts to gain jurisdiction in Vietnam, a group of 7,800 plaintiffs launched a civil lawsuit against Formosa in Taiwan’s supreme court. Beyond the repression experienced by activists in Vietnam, lawyers involved in the case have cited limited recourse to international law in Taiwan, expensive court filing fees, and other bureaucratic measures as challenges to the lawsuit.

• TS: From April 6, 2016 until the end of the month, hundreds of tons of wild and farmed fish died along about 250 kilometers of coastline around the periphery of Formosa Steel, and the pollution spread to the south, affecting a total of four provinces (Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri and Thua Thien Hue). The fishermen of the northern province of Nghe An claimed they had also been impacted, but the government denied that the pollution spread to the north. (Jobin & Ying 2020)

• TS: In April 2016, a dive by fishermen also found a 1.5km long drainage pipe of one-meter diameter coming from Formosa Steel that was discharging yellow wastewater onto the seabed. (Jobin & Ying 2020)

• TS: The Vietnam Fisheries Association pointed out that red tide generally kills shallow-sea fish, but in this case there were many deep-sea fish involved, so the red tide seemed to have little to do with this case, and the cause was therefore most likely human pollution (Green Trees 2016; Maodun 2016). (Jobin & Ying 2020)

• TS: In July 2016, the Vietnam Environmental Protection Agency (VEPA) provided the Vietnamese National Assembly with a 20-page report detailing the results of a survey conducted in central Vietnam the previous May by over one hundred scientists (including several foreign scholars): 115 tons of wild fish, 140 tons of farmed fish, 67 tons of oysters, 10 tons of crabs and 7 tons of shrimp had been lost; 450 hectares of the ocean, 40% to 60% of the coral, and 40% to 60% of the seabed were destroyed (Jobin & Ying 2020)

• TS: According to the Vietnam Environmental Protection Agency (VEPA), the pollution prevented 17,682 fishing boats from going to sea, causing 40,966 people (176,285 people including fishermen’s families) to suffer a major economic loss.  (Jobin & Ying 2020)

• TS: According to an official statement made by the Vietnamese government in June 2016, followed the next month by a report from the Vietnam Environmental Protection Agency (VEPA), the main causes of the massive deaths of fish and shrimp were the high concentrations of benzene, cyanide and ferric hydroxide emitted by Formosa Steel. The two most serious violations of Formosa Steel’s 53 violations were its wastewater treatment system and the release of hydrogen cyanide, a colorless but extremely toxic substance. Zyklon B, a colorless but highly toxic hydrogen cyanide also known as prussic acid, was used by the German Nazis in their “Final Solution” during World War II to kill millions of Jews. Benzene corrodes the skin and can damage the lungs, liver, kidneys, the heart and the central nervous system, possibly causing coma. On April 24, 2016, divers employed by a contractor of Formosa Steel suffered health problems; one of them died on the way to hospital. Although the release of pollutants such as hydrogen cyanide could certainly have caused the sudden death of the divers, the divers were actually protected by oxygen masks and diving suits, so the causality between the pollution and the death remains mysterious. (Jobin & Ying 2020)

Scholars argue that Vietnamese environmental movements and civil society have been stifled by one-party authoritarian rule, resulting in short lived and fragmented activist campaigns (Ortmann 2017; 2021; Bruun 2020; Wischermann et al. 2021). Notably, the government has established its own environmental organizations, efforts of which keep getting undercut by close business ties and other conflicts of interest (Ortman 2021, 275). Independent NGOs and journalism, in turn, have been tolerated, but all organizations are required to register with the government, preventing funding expansion and growth (ibid). This asymmetry has led to competition with established international organizations like Greenpeace that offer better job opportunities and resources (2021, 292). Finally, though all media in Vietnam are owned by the government and subject to censorship, journalists benefit from a certain degree of freedom that has enabled critical coverage of environmental pollution (Ortmann 2021, 280).

I think Spivak's "Subaltern Studies Deconstructing Historiography" could offer two interventions:

(1) First, her notion of "cognitive failure" is helpful to understand how COVID-19 is unfolding. For her, it is not being able to grapple the object of analysis: “Unless the subject separates from itself to grasp the object, there is no cognition, indeed no thinking, no judgment.” She writes this statement to talk about the Marxist and anti-humanist tendency to abhor cognitive failure and see it as inducing paralysis. For Marx and Gramsci, for example, this has been a question of the proletariat class recognizing that they are excluded from the labor of their own bodies, through which their shared consciousness can arise.

For Spivak, however, through her critique of the Subaltern Studies collective,  there is no escape from cognitive failure. Just as it is okay that the collective will not be able to speak for the subaltern as much as there is value in it, it is alright to not be able to grapple. The COVID-19 moment is instructive of failures upon failures: failure of neoliberalism, of the nation-state, of parochial activism, of scholarly projects. It is a failure of not being able to do anything even though we have a shared consciousness of failure. It is a failure of being able to be a person, or even being mourned with dignity. Spivak, through her stubborn insistence on being able to build from failure and residues, says that our usual ways of performing scholarship, activism, and subalternity will not work. We have to be able to come together from a point of exhaustion and failure. 

(2) Second, Spivak opens up the question of how we construct oppression and exclusion in the archive, especially if the oppressed and excluded figure is not present. The way COVID-19 is unfolding builds upon histories of institutional and informational opaqueness. How do we read absences of the archive, or "against the grain", against institutional and informational opaqueness?

The training of and role for the (humanist?) intellectual in the world seems to be a relevant take-away point of discussion from postcolonial theory. I have been noticing a proliferation of thought pieces and various genres of writing by engaged scholars in this COVID-19 moment. While indeed there is lots to think and write about, the Late Industrial times we are in are also marked by a heavy saturation of information. Rather than feeling enlightening and motivated by the increased proliferation of opinions on COVID-19, I find it has the opposite effect. What other (new) forms of knowledge, processes for knowledge making, and ways of engaging in the world (not to mention education for critical consciousness) are needed in this moment? Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the value and strength of new research collectives like this one to be rich spaces from which to start thinking about this question.

Ahmed describes the importance of a "humanist education" that trains the “ethical reflex” to open one up to forms of consciousness fundamentally different from one’s own. He notes that such openness eventually requires one to “rebel” against one’s training itself (developing critical consciousness?).

Ahmed also writes about the relationship where the intellectual refuses to speak for the subaltern--where the intellectual enters into a relationship with something foreign to him about which he will absolutely refuse ever to produce authoritative knowledge. "The point of the relationship is, in fact, "to question the grounds of knowledge itself."