Book review: Ronak Kapadia,Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War

Throughout Insurgent Aesthetics, Ronak Kapadia makes apparent tools of imperial warfare that work from above. These epistemological, mechanical, interpretive tools zoom out to make generalisations about data, fly overhead to capture aerial images and drop bombs, and look from a distance to depersonalise humanity and redact multisensorial information into captive visuality. The book is a study of visual artists working to restore body, sensation and perspective to these violent and distancing practices of governance, which deform data in order to justify warfare, occupation and incarceration. More specifically, Kapadia explores visual artworks (including film and installation) by South Asian, West Asian, Middle Eastern and Muslim artists in the USA and Europe responding to the ‘forever war’. ‘Forever war’ disruptively extends the historical frame of a post-9/11 global war on terror to include the Cold War and the other US incursions into South and West Asia but also captures the condition of ever-present material, discursive and sensorial violence of warfare in the Asian diaspora.

The author’s visual analyses show how artists draw on the techniques, epistemes and archives of the security state to recalibrate ways to consider, literally calculate, the value of life. Kapadia posits that warfare is premised on a variety of calculations: How much collateral damage (civilian lives and infrastructure destruction) is permissible with impunity? How can drone strikes perform the most damage? What physical and social traits deserve surveillance? The artists he writes about offer a ‘queer calculus’, developing intimate and more sensuous ways of evaluating and interpreting bodies, demography, geography, land, built environment, habit and history.

Many of the artists whom Kapadia dicusses are extensions of a network of politically engaged makers and organisers in the New York area – a network in which the author includes himself. His focus on diasporic artists, some of whom have arrived from USA-invaded territories, makes clear the temporal and geographic breadth of the forever war. For example, Wafaa Bilal, who reached the USA as an asylee in 1992 during the Iraq War, uses body-centred art practices to critique not only bombings in Iraq but ongoing surveillance of Muslims and Arabs in the USA. Pakistani American artist Mahwish Chisty, trained in miniature painting at the National Academy of Arts in Pakistan, creates ornately crafted drones (featured on the book’s cover) that spectacularly reveal the drone’s disguise as an invisible or discrete mode of performing violence. In Driving While Black Becomes Flying While Brown the Visible Collective think through the comparative surveillance of black and brown people in the USA. Through this visual archive, Kapadia demonstrates the complicity between what seem like discrete sites of knowledge making: anti-black carceral logics, surveillance and forced disappearance of Muslim-Americans, military incursions into Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11, the Iraq War, and the securitisation of the Israeli settler state. Reading about collaborations between Indian and Afghan/Lebanese makers, Bangladeshi and Pakistani artists, alongside Iraqi and Palestinian, it became clear that we need more complicated cartographies for South Asian studies (a geography defined by Cold War logics), that do not just include diaspora—which our field seems to embrace more and more—but also ongoing practices of imperialism and warfare that extend our maps into West Asia/the Middle East/North Africa. This is resonant in the cartographic renditions of ‘places the USA has bombed’ by elin O’Hara slavick whose ink dropped onto wet canvas bleeds outward: ‘bombs do not stay within their intended borders’ (slavick quoted in Kapadia, p. 99).

The first two chapters work in twin logics. ‘Up in the Air’ explicates the aerial, distancing and self-effacing strategies of US warfare, while ‘On the Skin’ makes apparent imperial terror through the sensorial body. Opening with the 2011 capture of Osama bin Laden by US special forces, Kapadia discusses aerial images of the compound in Pakistan that circulated without contextualising information but with seemingly enough data to justify invasion. He continues to consider the aerial view by discussing drone strikes, more specifically vicious double-tap drone strikes that repeatedly bomb the same site so as to deter rescue of victims and inflict the most death. In these discussions of the aerial view and the hovering drone, Kapadia’s arguments about how the calculus of warfare depersonalises data toward necropolitical ends become not just clear but convincing. In ‘On the Skin’, Kapadia charts how Bilal makes warfare’s violence and pain apparent through his body: by surgically installing a camera to the back of his head, living in a gallery with a paint gun pointed at him so that web-users can ‘shoot an Iraqi’ and tattooing names and dots on his back that memorialise Iraqi and American deaths in Iraq. In addition to the ways that Bilal integrates blood, pain, surgery and smell into the calculus of warfare, sexuality and gender too become part of the ‘queer calculus’ in the many queerphobic epithets used by anonymous shooters against Bilal as he lived in the gallery.

In Chapter 3, Kapadia explores artists who confront the incarceration and surveillance of Muslims in America. As in ‘Up in the Air’, Kapadia makes clear the violence visuality performs on victims of warfare: disappearing people altogether, racial profiling based on phenotype and dress, and redacting autopsy reports of Iraqi and Afghan men who died while in detention. While the state’s visual strategies disappear or depersonalise the person, the artists in this chapter work to restore body, viscera and warmth. In Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh’s collaboration Index of the Disappeared, questionnaires used to populate surveillance databases are reimagined with ‘warm data’ of pleasurable and sensorial memories, and portraits of those disappeared are painted in lush watercolours. Ghani and Ganesh’s Index pairs well with Berlin-based Rajkamal Kahlon’s biological-style drawings of human anatomy drawn over autopsy reports. Her work restores viscera and tissue to people who have been tortured and killed, whose humanity seems unfathomable in these redacted reports, while her anatomical drawing style also reminds us of the longstanding use of racialised bodies as biological specimens.

London-based Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s oeuvre is the centre of Chapter 4, as she uses speculative fictions to imagine alternative geographies, histories and worldmaking conditions for a state under siege. In this chapter, Kapadia draws on indigenous studies and afro-futurist thought to link Palestinian liberation struggles against the Israeli security settler state to the critiques of racial imperialism he has articulated throughout the book. Kapadia charts the deliberate ways that Sansour confronts the various spatial regimes of occupation: below-ground, terrain and air space. Her work is especially exciting to read about, as she crafts in her film Nation Estate a skyscraper version of Palestine that allows for easy travel between cities via elevator – a hypercapitalist and fantastic Palestine must be built up in the sky because the actual ground of Palestine remains caught in a forever war below. The author’s discussion of Sansour’s spatial navigations that include skyscrapers, architectural digs and moon landings beautifully leads into the epilogue, where we meet Congolese American activist Therese Patricia Okoumou scaling the Statue of Liberty in 2018. As cultural critics, we tend to valorise critique ‘from below’ because governance is enforced ‘from above’. But Kapadia’s conclusion ‘Scaling Empire’ asks what might be achieved when we pay attention to scale (bringing close what has been made far), and also what are other physical and aesthetic locations from which to look anew, ‘to peer down at the ground queerly and with fresh perspective’ (201).

Insurgent Aesthetics’s argument about the violence of visuality and the capacity of artists to rethink the aesthetics of warfare track through the entire book; however, each chapter and all the art objects feel fresh and different from the previous. The arguments are sustained also by the inclusion of many colour images from each artist discussed. The book belongs in visual, art, media and performance studies classrooms, as much as in social science contexts studying globalisation, war and imperialism.