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Call for Papers for an Edited Volume
Title: Drone Warfare and Post-9/11 Cultural Practices
A major US-based, academic publisher has expressed interest in an edited volume on the representation of drone warfare in post-9/11 visual and graffiti art, film and documentaries, plays and stage performances, and poetry, memoirs and fiction.
Though the history of the drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) goes back to World War I, the literature on implications of drone warfare has multiplied more recently. Lisa Parks’ and Caren Kaplan’s edited book, Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (2017) is the latest constellation of perspectives on legality, politics, history, mediation, representation, automation, and temporality/spatiality of weaponized drones. Before this volume, Akbar Ahmad’s Thistle and the Drone (2013) argued that drones and the war on terror targeted tribal Islam in North West of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Grégoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone (2015) complicated the notions of distance-war and counterinsurgency through air, and revisited the genealogy and psychopathology of the drone-strikes. Ian Shaw in his Predator Empire: Drone Warfare and Full Spectrum Dominance (2016) contended that with the manufacturing and deployment of weaponized drones “American empire is transforming from a labor intensive to a machine- or capital-intensive system: the Predator Empire.” In Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone (2015), Scott Shane studied the drone-terrorist connection, explaining why Barack Obama, a technology-loving president of the US, preferred drones as an anti-terrorism tool.
Despite this rich literature already available, very little has appeared on weaponized-drones in literary and cultural discourse. This prospective volume tentatively titled Drone Warfare and Post-9/11 Cultural Practices aims to bridge the gap by producing critical, theoretical, and analytical debates on the literary and cultural representations of the weaponized drones. Within the broader context of the war on terror, contributors may wish to consider: How do drones complicate the conceptualization of human rights and war both in national and international discourses? How, and with what consequences, do UAVs bypass juridical procedures and normalize target-killing? What challenges do surveillance drones pose to the notions of privacy and biopolitical control? How do cultural artefacts view and resist the violence from above?
We seek 300-words abstracts for the papers of 5000-7000 length exploring how various art forms reimagine weaponized drones in connection with the topics like war on terror, militarized surveillance, 'us vs. them' binaries, state—citizen relationship, racialization, dehumanization and pixelization of targets, and PTSD of drone pilots and victims.
Please email your abstracts to [email protected] by February 15, 2019. You will hear about your abstract by the end of February and polished drafts of the paper will be due on September 30, 2019.
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