“WHAT ACTIVISM CAN LEARN FROM POETRY”: LYRIC OPACITY AND DRONE WARFARE IN SOLMAZ SHARIF’S LOOK
Loading...
Author/Creator
Author/Creator ORCID
Date
2022-06-15
Type of Work
Department
Program
Citation of Original Publication
FinbergK. (2022). "What activism can learn from poetry": Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK. Review of International American Studies, 15(1), 69-87. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.12446
Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Subjects
Abstract
The essay explores whether concealing humanness or emphasizing humanness is a more effective strategy for anti-drone activism that seeks to disrupt the conventional epistemologies of militarized surveillance. Building on Édouard Glissant’s decolonizing philosophy of relation and more recent theories of gender and surveillance such as Rachel Hall’s notion of “animal opacity,” the essay argues that poetry is one place we might find an answer to what seems like a binary problem of seeing versus unseeing humanity in technologically mediated aerial warfare. I illustrate that the 2016 poetry collection LOOK by Solmaz Sharif intervenes to suggest activism that steers readers away from the logics of recognition and toward the ethical potential of concealment. LOOK garners formal elements from lyric and experimental poetry traditions to employ a strategy of resistance-looking based in multiple valences of opacity.multiple valences of opacity.