Divide and Conquer: Artistic Confrontations with Geographies of U.S. Militarism

2019

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.

Military Landscapes, 2021

Human Geography

2012

Examining works of contemporary art that have engaged with militarised landscapes, Matthew Flintham reflects on the ruination of outmoded military structures, the idea of landscape as an extension of the military imagination, and the investigative strategies of activist artists

Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2015

This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and altered. It surveys the increasing preoccupation with conflict art and war photography in the West during the twenty-first century due to Western enmeshment in ongoing conflicts since Vietnam and up to Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Libya, and Syria. It argues that different types of war image have emerged that blur the edges of art, document, and technology; in engaging with contemporaneity and contemporary art, war images have turned away from the traditional rhetoric of war art – both pro- and anti-war – and therefore challenge the public’s investment in evolving national stories that, it has been far too easily assumed, would be made manifest in official war art and photography.

cultural geographies, 2016

This article reconsiders the nature of art and geopolitics and their interrelations via a discussion of The Great Game, an artwork by War Boutique dealing with successive British military interventions in Afghanistan. As we discuss, The Great Game is richly suggestive in terms of the earthly materials and forces at work in geopolitics, or geopower. The main goal of our discussion, however, is to show how pursuing such concerns leads us back towards a consideration of the anthropic and thus beyond geopower. We argue that framing art and geopolitics in terms of the earthly, the affective and the inhuman is suggestive but underplays much of what art is otherwise taken to be, sometimes even within accounts framed in earthly terms. To develop this argument, we first provide an extended discussion of the The Great Game, in which we consider its entanglement of earthly and anthropic dimensions of geopolitics. We then bring this discussion to bear on work that rethinks geopolitics and art t...

Since 2006's bilateral US-Japan pact, the island of Guåhan (Guam) has been anticipating an unprecedented buildup of US military and civilian personnel, and a commensurate increase in anti-militarisation and decolonisation activism. This essay reviews the local resistance to the buildup, and examines how the literary strategies of Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez aim to expand the work of local activism. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's theorisation of political speech in the public sphere and on Arturo Escobar's extension of that public space into " public cyberspheres, " I argue that [guma'], the most recent volume of Perez's three-book project from unincorporated territory, extends the public space of appearance of Guåhan's anti-buildup activism to include the electronic space of online social media. By incorporating the speech emerging from that virtual community into poems, Perez structures and concretises what would otherwise be ephemeral, and invites new readers far from the island of Guåhan into the stakeholding community. Perez's poetic strategies illustrate the way literature can serve as a nexus of activism, charting a way to resist militarisation in Guåhan and beyond.-As geographer and military historian Sasha Davis has pointed out, the modern US military may be global but it " touches the ground " across the world in places that are always local sites (2011: 215). The location of those sites depends not only on the US military's preferences and on diplomatic relationships with other governments, but also on local support of and resistance to US military presence. Because of increasing resistance in sovereign sites like the Philippines and Okinawa, US military strength has been shifting in the last decades to non-sovereign spaces, whose inhabitants have less power to say no (ibid). Those non-sovereign spaces are particularly likely to be islands and, as the US enacts its 'Pacific Pivot', most likely to be in the Pacific region. As Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (2012: xv) have argued, contemporary militarisation, particularly in the Pacific, is an extension of American and Japanese colonialism: it is precisely the Pacific island sites that endured 20th Century military and colonial occupation whose contemporary non-sovereign political status makes them attractive and available to the US Department of Defense (DoD) as sites for increased militarisation. US military presence on islands and mainlands alike is usually characterised not only by service-members, munitions, and otherwise obvious military components, but also by a variety of commercial and other infrastructure, ranging from temporary construction housing and support facilities to more permanent expansions of ports, airstrips, service

Asian Affairs: An American Review, 2019

Cultural Politics: An International Journal, 2006