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Chapter 16 - War and Drones

from Part III - Emerging Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2023

By
Debjani Ganguly
Edited by
Anders Engberg-Pedersen  and
Neil Ramsey
Anders Engberg-Pedersen
Affiliation:
University of Southern Denmark
Neil Ramsey
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
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Summary

This chapter explores literary and cinematic works that capture the emergence of technogenic life-forms in war zones through the artificial vision of the drone: that terror-inducing aerial surveillance apparatus and killing machine that is planetary in its reach and catastrophic in its impact. By technogenic life-forms, I mean machinic abstractions of the organic human form that are available for manipulation, expulsion, and annihilation. These life-forms are the product of a scalar transformation of ordinary human vision through the composite digital infrastructure of the drone. The aesthetic repertoire of the chapter ranges from novels such as Richard Clark’s The Sting of the Drone (2014) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), films such as Madiha Tahir’s Wounds of Waziristan (2013) and Atef Abu Saif’s war diary The Drone Eats with Me (2016).

Keywords

Dronesartificial visionsurveillancerepresentationsart
Type
Chapter
Information
War and Literary Studies , pp. 261 - 277
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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