Life in the Age of Drone Warfare

"This book is in an exciting and innovative collection that promotes a critical reading of drones and does much to break down the static and realist assumptions that frequently inform this issue." -- Michelle Bentley * Politics, Religion & Ideology * "Both appealing and relevant to a large audience and offers an exemplary model for continued interdisciplinary research within the critical humanities. . . . The contributions to this book are exemplary of well-researched, critical, and interdisciplinary work in the humanities." -- Hugo Ljungback * International Journal of Communication * "Life in the Age of Drone Warfare is an eclectic collection of fascinating articles. . . .Together, these voices show that while we don't yet know everything we need to about military drones, we do know they are over-determined." -- Chris Hables Gray * Technology and Culture * "The collection of essays in Life in the Age of Drone Warfare offers a nice corrective to the over-proliferation of studies and artistic practices using drones in contemporary media studies . . . Taken together, the pieces map a fairly comprehensive landscape of the discourse and lived realities around the drone war, in particular the militarization of consumption across the racialized divides of the Global North and the Global South." -- Patrick Brodie * Synoptique * "A comprehensive feminist and critical intervention. . . . A decisive feminist and anti-racist contribution to security and surveillance studies that provides a diverse range of interdisciplinary lenses." -- Abigail Curlew * Surveillance & Society * "A masterful document, as fraught and anxiety-inducing as its topic is, the book is, as they say, required reading. . . . I am eager to read more from any one of the authors included in it." -- Matthew Chambers * New Americanist * "An extensive and thorough compendium." -- Aurelio Cianciotta * Neural * "This truly interdisciplinary work will challenge conventional understandings of a quickly emerging academic area. Those seeking a purely empirical analysis of how drone technology has changed the landscape might be left seeking slightly more, but they will be exposed to a series of well-constructed, timely arguments throughout this volume. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." -- W. Miller * Choice *

Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author and coeditor of several books, most recently, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the author and coeditor of several books, including Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above, also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan 1 Part I. Juridical, Genealogical, and Geopolitical Imaginaries 23 1. Dirty Dancing: Drones and Death in the Borderlands / Derek Gregory 25 2. Lawfare and Armed Conflicts: A Comparative Analysis of Israeli and U.S. Targeted Killing Policies / Lisa Hajjar 59 3. American Kamikaze Television-Guided Assault Drones in World War II / Katherine Chandler 89 4. (Im)Material Terror: Incitement of Violence Discourse as Racializing Technology in the War on Terror / Andrea Miller 112 5. Vertical Mediation and the U.S. Drone War in the Horn of Africa / Lisa Parks 134 Part II. Perception and Perspective 159 6. Drone-o-Rama: Troubling the Temporal and Spatial Logics of Distance Warfare / Caren Kaplan 161 7. Dronologies: Or Twice-Told-Tales / Ricardo Dominguez 178 8. In Pursuit of Other Networks: Drone Art and Accelerationist Aesthetics / Thomas Stubblefield 195 9. The Containment Zone / Madiha Tahir 220 10. Stoners, Stones, and Drones: Transnational South Asian Visuality from Above and Below / Anjali Nath 241 Part III. Biopolitics, Automation, and Robotics 259 11. Taking People Out: Drones, Media/Weapons, and the Coming Humanectomy / Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves 261 12. The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators / Peter Asaro 282 13. Letter from a Sensor Operator / Brandon Bryant 315 14. Materialities of the Robotic / Jordan Crandall 324 15. Drone Imaginaries: The Technopolitics of Visuality in Postcolony and Empire / Inderpal Grewal 343 Bibliography Contributors Index