Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War

Art History Publication Initiative

by Ronak K. Kapadia

In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

Genres: Art, Queer Studies, Queer

352 pages, Paperback

Published October 25, 2019

Reviews

[Onii]

The U.S. military, in order to expand their operational space, have devised numerous technologies to dominate every possible dimension: terrestrial and subterranean, aerial and naval, outer space and our inner psychic worlds. All of these and more, such as biology and cyberspace, are considered "battle-spaces." Whoever has the resources to occupy, operate on, or intervene in all these battlespaces can establish, in military parlance, "full-spectrum dominance." When we attend to the problem of how war came to saturate all spheres of existence, we also can map out how resistance takes place in these dimensions.

It's both fascinating and useful to look at the visionary aesthetics created by diasporic racialized bodies not only as art pieces and exhibits, but as insurgent consciousness that speculate and defy the rules and boundaries created by settler colonialism. The nature of drone warfare being remote and forever lurking further complicates the very concept of war. By its use of AI and robots in the battlefield, the U.S. is more easily able to detach from any connection and accountability that come with being human from its killings, and by keeping it over the skies of its enemies, it can now "put aside" the inconveniences of having to consider warfare on all levels, becoming eternal war itself. The insurgent aesthetics and artists highlighted in the book convey these concepts very well !

[Kavya]

This book provides a good overview of the politically engaging artworks of past few years, focusing on the U.S. role as an aggressor. I particularly enjoyed the analysis of the Congolese American woman's protest-as-Performance Art at the Statue of Liberty. She stayed there for hours to voice against the separation of children at the U.S.-Mexican border.
Yet obviously the U.S. is not the only player in our multipolar world. One of the artworks regarding black sites and torture debuted in a certain country which now is also one of the leading players for the war in Yemen, and also operates similar sites of covert torture (See The Intercept for more news on this development).
2) very thought-provoking to read about "post-Cold War" terms when there is clearly a new Cold War starting anew with NATO and Russia in 2022. Begging the question: How do we periodize art today?