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
"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
"An extensive and thorough compendium." — Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural
"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, The New Americanist
"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 and Society
"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
"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
"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
"An extensive and thorough compendium." —Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural
"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, The New Americanist
"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 and Society
"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
"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
“As the presence of the drone in public imaginaries expands, its military/imperial paternities are overshadowed while the modes of violence that drone operations enable are progressively normalized. This thoughtfully curated collection definitively interrupts those trajectories. Putting the drone in its geopolitical place, it traces drone genealogies through histories of surveillance and killing from above, to the colonial presents in which we are all implicated, and that we need now more than ever to stand against.” — Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University, UK
“Life in the Age of Drone Warfare is an intoxicating whirlwind of a volume explicating the drone in history, law, culture, and geopolitics. Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan steer the way through an incisive feminist and critical lens partnered with startling material evidence. We find the drone coiled within matrices of relations, both distant and intimate, calculative, legal and bureaucratic, yet embodied and affective. Twisted in not only a vertical but vortical kind of power, the drone winds, distorts, corkscrews, and strangles—rewriting worlds as it goes.” — Peter Adey, author of, Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects
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