Insurgent Aesthetics: Cultures of Counterinsurgency, Security, and Struggle Insurgent Aesthetics is about the creativity and fugitive beauty that emanate from the shadows of terrible violence incited by forever war. Of freedom dreams flecked by inscriptions of wartime’s death and dispossession.25 The forever war is an assault on the human sensorium for citizens, subjects, survivors, and refugees of US empire alike.26 A time of ever more state security and imperial violence, the historical present necessitates more sensuous ways of knowing and feeling that challenge the militarized imperatives of the state and exceed the visual register alone. The global circulation of images of violence and social suffering has also intensified in our public culture over the past three decades. As a privileged regime of power, the field of vision is central to the manufacture and global supremacy of US war-making regimes and to the violent regulation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies under the conditions of state security and surveillance.27 Given the US state’s will toward quantified abstraction in counting, without ever being accountable to, those killed, diseased, displaced, traumatized, and/or maimed in its armed conflicts, how might we divine other, more sensuous and affective ways of knowing this forever war and its inhuman violences? This book asserts that we must demand a stranger calculus—what I term a queer calculus—that unsettles prevailing interpretations of the forever war, makes sensuous what has been ghosted by US technologies of abstraction, and endows the designs for seemingly impossible futures amid infinite aggression. A queer calculus of the forever war advances an account of both dominant knowledge apparatuses and data logics of the US security state as well as alternative logics, affects, emotions, and affiliations of diasporic subjects living and laboring in the heart of empire. One such embodied queer calculus can be found in the corpus of aesthetic forms created by contemporary diasporic artists from South Asia and the Greater Middle East. These imaginative works of art reassemble vision with the disqualified knowledges, histories, geographies, and memories preserved by the “lower” senses of empire’s gendered, racialized Others to fashion an insurgency against empire’s built sensorium. In so doing, these insurgent aesthetics craft a queer calculus of US empire that makes intimate what is rendered distant, renders tactile what is made invisible, and unifies what is divided, thereby conjuring forms of embodied critique that can envision a collective world within and beyond the spaces of US empire’s perverse logics of global carcerality, security, and war. This book engages a wide range of critical interdisciplinary paradigms to reveal the radical experiments, aesthetic strategies, and freedom dreams of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists. I argue that these works comprise a transnational constellation of visual art and aesthetics that together have animated new ways to think, feel, sense, and map the world amid US global state violence and its forever wars across the so-called Muslim world.28 Specifically, the book surveys the broader post–Cold War expansion of US militarism in the Greater Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine) and the domestic regimes of surveillance and repression in the US and other militarized sites mapped onto a transnational jihadist network. It contends that new and flexible forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, surveillance, and lawfare have built a distinctive post–9/11 infrastructure of gendered, racialized state violence both within and beyond US borders, which in turn marks the ongoing present as a distinct age within the longue durée of US settler colonial society. I explore this complex terrain through a contrapuntal queer feminist analysis of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic visual cultures and their critical intersections with the contemporary logics and tactics of global warfare.29 Although many scholars have studied the impact of liberal empires and late modern warfare in the Greater Middle East, including the militarized and racialized vision of US imperialism at its core, insufficient attention has been paid to how the state’s dominant necropolitical calculus of neoliberal security and warfare has been thwarted and reimagined.30 By contrast, this book foregrounds the conceptual works of contemporary artists from South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas, whose insurgent aesthetic acts refashion ascendant ways of knowing and feeling the forever war. My chief premise in this book is that if we want to apprehend (so as to ultimately arrest) contemporary transnational security politics and carceral practices, especially the prevailing biopolitical regimes of surveillance, imprisonment, and killing perfected at the domestic and international fronts of the forever war, then we need an alternate approach to the maps of strategic thinkers and security analysts who have been telling us how we should look, think, and feel about the world and its violences. By privileging a wide range of diasporic cultural forms—namely, visual and sound installation, performance, painting, photography, new media, and video—as a generative site for critiquing American war and empire, this book illuminates what I term insurgent aesthetics, an alternative articulation of minoritarian knowledge produced by those populations and their diasporic kin most devastated by the effects of the homeland security state and its forever wars.31 This book illustrates how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists in the US and Europe, including Mahwish Chishty, Wafaa Bilal, Naeem Mohaiemen/ Visible Collective, Rajkamal Kahlon, Index of the Disappeared, Mariam Ghani, and Larissa Sansour, have grappled in their work with the neoliberal state of exception and the national security state’s use of gendered racial violence. Insurgent Aesthetics documents the impact of present-day militarized security practices and historical legacies of imperial violence on diasporic, (im)migrant, and refugee communities in the US who have been besieged both by domestic wars on terror, crime, drugs, and immigration as well as military and foreign policies directed at their homelands. These artists, in turn, have produced sensuous affiliations and political imaginaries that critique the simultaneous proliferation of gendered racism, neoliberal capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and Islamophobia in the post–9/11 period. These concepts represent intersectional systems of power and violence that fuel the ideological engines that legitimate the homeland security state’s use of global prisons, confinement technologies, overt killing, and permanent warfare as inevitable features of a political economy that seeks to “solve” our multifarious contemporary crises. In this context, what role can expressive culture and aesthetics play in struggles over hegemony of the contemporary neoliberal carceral, security, and warfare state? This book answers this question by centering the expansive world-making knowledge practices of diasporic visual and multimedia artists who hail from societies besieged by war but live and labor in the heart of empire. In short, the book investigates how South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporic artists challenge violent histories of US militarism, sustain critical opposition to the global war machine through the realms of art and culture, and create alternative systems of knowing, feeling, and living with and beyond forever warfare. The theoretical strategy and interpretive framework that I name “insurgent aesthetics” brings together diverse histories, geographies, and archives organized around several unifying themes. First, the book argues that insurgent aesthetics is a collective and relational praxis. Insurgent Aesthetics represents the first sustained effort to analyze contemporary works of conceptual art across the South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas as a coherent social, cultural, and political formation challenging the explanatory power of dominant “expert” knowledge about US empire and its forever war. Second, these artists share a collective concern with revealing the gendered racial violence at the heart of the US security state. My close readings of their artworks make visceral and palpable what artist and cultural geographer Trevor Paglen calls “the black world,” the contradictions and disavowals of official archives of US global warfare.32 In this study, I grapple with the contradiction between the US state’s claim to rational security and the material orders of brutality, misery, ruin, detention, confinement, and extermination upon which that claim continuously is made. For instance, the US state has, on the one hand, come to “know” the so-called human terrain33 of global conflict in the war on terror by using abstract vision and limitless data to map racialized “Muslim” populations and innovate surveillance and intelligence-gathering procedures. On the other hand, the US state persistently disavows imperial violence in efforts to disappear the corporeality of its wars through “black sites,” redactions of classified documents, so-called touchless torture of detainees, denials of civilian death counts in drone attacks, and bans on images of the coffins of US soldiers killed in combat. This imperial paradox of transparency and opacity in discourses of state security reveals what political theorist Laleh Khalili calls “the contrasts and connections between that far twilight realm in which sovereign violence occurs without concealment and the domestic liberal order in which the same violence is concealed in broad daylight.”34 This incongruity is manifest in both the gendered racialization of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian communities in the US and in the aesthetic works highlighted throughout this book, which cast light on the manifold unseen and disembodying technologies of secrecy and terror that define the forever war. Third, as theorists and practitioners, these artists exemplify the significance of insurgent aesthetics by utilizing official archives and technologies of war, such as declassified government documents and surveillance cameras, as resource and inspiration for their experimental and conceptual art practices. Many newly released government documents detail widespread US military practices of torture, interrogation, kidnapping, and rendition. The artists’ direct engagement with the “black world” of US statecraft is central to the book’s contention that insurgent aesthetics not only expose the contradictions of the warfare state but also make available more capacious ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing states of security. However, I reject a strict sociological reading of these artists’ contributions in line with approaches that would view them as native informants for the international art world. The US-based minoritarian art practitioner is routinely seen as merely transmitting information rather than pushing aesthetic boundaries. By contrast, a focus on aesthetic aims, innovations, and formal manipulations of these cultural forms is, as queer critics Kadji Amin, Amber Musser, and Roy Pérez contend, “the very substance of many of these artists’ engagement with legacies of social violence. Aesthetic form offers resources of resistance to the violences of interpretation that prematurely fix the meaning of minority artistic production within prefabricated narratives.”35 As such, I opt to center a formal analysis of artistic techniques and forms in keeping with newer queer feminist approaches to visual aesthetics.36 Fourth, these artists embody insurgent aesthetics’ public dimension through site-specific visual, installation, and performance art practices that often extend beyond gallery walls. They use common aesthetic strategies to coimplicate audiences, thus closing the distance between state violence and its afterlives. I am drawn to these artists in particular because they comprise an important part of my own scholar-activist relational orbit. Much of their work has been informed by deep contact with a legacy of urban grassroots activism, legal advocacy, and civil and human rights work. They encompass a group of artists (as activists, scholars, lawyers, curators, journalists, architects, and multimedia cultural producers in their own right) who, in the main, came of age in the cultural and political organizing milieu of New York City and other cities across the US in the 1990s. This pre-9/11 period spawned an efflorescence of urban multiethnic activist and creative cultural production against a range of violences such as urban police brutality; immigrant detention; and feminist, lgbtq, and labor struggles. This invigorating milieu had profoundly politicizing effects on successive generations of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists and activists in the US and North America.37 In this sense, the contemporary art of social practice featured in this book draws on activist traditions and social movements, including prison abolition, immigrant justice, antiwar activism, US Third World feminism, and Black liberation, which often predate the global war on terror and stem from earlier encounters with US military, security, and penal regimes. Fifth and finally, in my analysis of contemporary US war and empire, I focus on intimacy, affect, and sensation in ways that exemplify hallmarks of postcolonial, Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminist inquiry in American studies. It is worth recalling that feminist and queer studies have the longest critical engagement with the figure of the body as a gendered, sexualized, and racialized entity.38 Insurgent Aesthetics examines how the body is implicated in the workings of US global warfare and in the diasporic visual art and aesthetics that challenges counterinsurgent knowledge. This focus critiques how security states turn counterinsurgency into an abstraction that has no visceral, physical, or psychic impact on the victims of security. In contrast to the security state’s will to abstract knowledge, these artists illustrate how war is felt on the flesh and how the corporeal is a key site for acquiring political knowledge. The body and the senses thus become vehicles to affectively “know” the circumstances of security, carcerality, and counterinsurgency. It is important to note that I treat the body not as an abstract entity but as a social formation differentiated by race, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and religion. By making the body and its sensory states the primary focus of the formation of security states and the challenges to that formation, my book extends this critical intersectional queer feminist legacy. It does so further by arguing that an analysis of what I term “the sensorial life of empire” is an urgent question of a just and equitable future. I ultimately argue that the insurgent aesthetics of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic cultural producers are crucial not only for their diagnosis of the dominant maps of exclusion and political violence characterizing the US forever war, but also for the open-ended and sensuous models of subjectivity, collectivity, and power that they imagine and inhabit. At once a critical formalist examination of how diasporic cultural producers have innovated new directions in contemporary American art and visual media, Insurgent Aesthetics prioritizes a transnational queer feminist account of the effects of the US forever war on the racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies that are its targets. Drawing on and advancing frameworks in critical ethnic and postcolonial studies, queer and feminist studies, and visual culture and performance studies, Insurgent Aesthetics outlines alternative maps for exposing violent global histories of US militarism in the Greater Middle East and designing collective futures. It further argues that critical analysis of insurgent art and culture can excavate subjugated forms of knowledge about the US and its forever wars, a vital resource for policy, activism, and social transformation. Theorizing Culture in the Age of Neoliberal Security and Warfare My approach to the study of insurgent aesthetics as a mediation of material conditions builds on works across disciplines that understand visual art and expressive cultures as offering a critical and sensuous intervention in the context of debates on neoliberal security and late modern warfare. To date, global security has been a rich topic of critical analysis in the social sciences, but not yet fully for the humanities. Rather than cede an engagement with these issues to the social sciences, I explore in this book how contemporary social, political, and economic processes of security governance can be understood through the lens of South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporic visual and performance art practices. I contend that the global politics of imperialism, war, terrorism, and militarism cannot be extracted from practices and processes of cultural mediation. In this way, insurgent aesthetics do not literally represent social crises and contradictions, but rather do the work of defamiliarizing or queering the social order. Put differently, they implicate their audiences in the violence of the forever warfare and in turn engage our collective critical analysis of its existing hegemonic formation. As such, insurgent aesthetics poses a critique of the knowing subject at the center of dominant Western aesthetics and the social exclusions at the heart of that project.39 By radically challenging who the subject is that gets to “know” the endless emergency of the forever war and its gendered racialized regimes of institutionalized terror and violence, this book illuminates a method for knowing and sensing otherwise. The dissident works of art under investigation here are not about inclusion or assimilation, or even civil or human rights, but rather about advancing a rebellious aesthetic depiction of the “impossibility of such resolutions”—to paraphrase literary critic Christina Sharpe—by representing the paradoxes of brownness within the legacies of the forever war.40 Although the first chapter of this book develops a historical genealogy of contemporary twenty-first-century US counterinsurgency and global warmaking regimes, my primary goal is to shift attention away from the dominant imbricated structures of US gendered racial and imperial formation to focus instead on the capaciousness and creativity of insurgent aesthetics. That is, I wish to spotlight the affective structures and aesthetic forms of resistance found in Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic cultures. This analytic shift is about foregrounding the alternative so as to identify, interrogate, and animate race radical and decolonial queer feminist experiments with speculation, fabulation, and otherworld imaginings in the midst of and in spite of the forever war. However, the diasporic cultural field of art and performance that I seek to enliven through this book does not have an obvious or indexical relation to the logics and tactics of US global warfare. Furthermore, insurgent aesthetics are not uniformly oppositional or resistant to the violent practices of the counterinsurgent state. Yet, when read through the lens of critical theory, these works of art produce a radical cultural archive that, while illegible within prevailing discourses of foreign relations, make visible the contours of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship in US forever wars. They further allow us to articulate social visions and political imaginaries that are incompatible with dominant counterinsurgent and counterterrorist solutions to crisis. I thus see these cultural forms as offering epistemological and affective interpretations that expose, without ever succumbing to, the contradictory logics of the US security state. The notion of insurgent aesthetics of the forever war challenges a state-based security framework. In this fundamental paradigm, security is defined as “the quality of being free from threats” (whether those threats come from external invasion or internal rebellion), a status ensured through the state’s historic monopoly over violence. In my queer feminist analysis of the cultural politics of national security and the securitization of everyday life, I draw upon critical security studies and international relations scholarship that embraces poststructuralist insights to interrogate the rhetoric, grammar, and motives of key terms and concepts such as “security,” “terror,” “danger,” “targets,” “bodies,” and “expertise” in the forever war.41 In so doing, I expose how prevailing conceptual framings contribute to US imperial and identity formation across the contemporary period. My analysis of insurgent art and performance practices further challenges the so-called proper objects and conventional reading practices of the social sciences. Rather than taking the notion of “security” as a given, I ask instead, who does this normative framework make “secure”? Who does it target for killing, abandonment, or humiliation? US global counterinsurgencies (gcoin) and militarized regimes often work to obscure evidence of the proliferating and intersectional forms of racialized, gendered, sexualized, xenophobic, Orientalized, and Islamophobic violence they inaugurate. By contrast, the artists I study find complex and creative ways to account for the subjects who are murdered, detained, disappeared, tortured, abstracted, ignored, or otherwise dispossessed by the forever wars waged in the name of security and freedom. Closely reading their art is my way of locating ethical practices and perceptual regimes that access those subjugated knowledges, histories, geographies, and memories absented by the abstractions of war. Analyses of insurgent aesthetics thus provides a “trace,” material and affective evidence of the redacted archives of security wars and their affective afterlives. Insurgent Aesthetics is also informed by scholars of race, war, and empire who have traced how the neoliberal state of exception enables the post–9/11 war on terror and its national security regime.42 These critics argue that the emergence of the US national security state in the mid-1940s43 is closely tethered to the subsequent neoliberal political and economic restructuring starting in the early 1970s that has led to mass criminalization, securitization, and inequality in the US and globally.44 More specifically, this set of interconnected historical, political, and economic shifts over the latter half of the twentieth century has intensified racialized, gendered, and regionalized class disparities and led to the militarized retrenchment of multiple freedoms through the dismantling of the welfare state, the social wage, and the broader “liberal-pluralist distributive order” characterizing the mid-twentieth century.45 In this context, transnational feminists such as Inderpal Grewal have argued that US neoliberal and imperial policies can be understood through the “‘state effect’ of appearing like a security state,” which paradoxically signals “the rationale for militarized cultures of surveillance and protection that lead to insecurities, threats, and fears, which work at material, affective and embodied levels. Security is also a cause and effect not just of the relations of the United States with the world, but also of neoliberal policies that have contributed to the inequalities that create insecurity throughout the world, including in the United States itself.”46 Detailing multiple approaches to “security” as the shape-shifting keyword of contemporary governance across the period that she terms “advanced neoliberalism,” Grewal outlines how the concept has been appropriated in vast domains of welfare, militarism, criminalization, humanitarianism, and beyond in the production of “exceptional citizens” who claim responsibility for national security in the absence of the state’s dismantled social safety net and at the expense of its gendered racialized Others. This book’s approach is informed, moreover, by scholars who take the longer view to articulate the nexus of security, race, and capitalism in the US since its founding. Historian Nikhil Pal Singh pursues an approach to “America’s long war” that highlights the durable entanglements of race and war that gave rise to the US as a capitalist power well before the advanced neoliberal age of globalization. He writes, “The frontier wars, the wars of the early US empire, and the twentieth century’s world wars all illuminated affinities between war-making and race making, activating or reanimating distinctions between friend and enemy along an internal racial border.”47 The gendered racialization of enemies of the state was crucial to the so-called law and order policies of ensuing decades that led to the criminalization of both domestic and foreign populations and the formation of the neoliberal turn as early as the 1940s.48 As Singh adds, “new conceptions of inequality were realized and practiced in trials by violence: the wars on crime, drugs, and now terror. Through the 1990s, the success of neoliberal policies that rolled back welfare-state protections and market regulations in the name of austerity, efficiency, and individual responsibility carried a similarly sharp racial edge as they sought to separate the deserving from the threatening poor.”49 Singh’s critical reformulation of America’s long war echoes other scholarly arguments on how these fundamental social transformations were the state’s response to what sociologist Jordan T. Camp calls “the organic crisis of Jim Crow Capitalism.”50 Camp observes how “moral panics around race, crime, disorder, security, and law and order became the primary legitimating discourse for the expanded use of policing, prisons, and urban securitization in the state’s management of social and economic crises.”51 What he terms “neoliberal racial and security regimes” are the “outgrowth of a long counterinsurgency against the Black freedom, labor, and socialist alliance that took shape in the struggle to abolish Jim Crow racial regimes.”52 The resultant period of neoliberal political and economic restructuring (which has its roots in early Cold War bipartisan consensus) has given rise to uneven capitalist development, mass criminalization, and violent securitization in cities across the US and globally. I would add that worldwide counterinsurgency operations of the European great powers (developed in the wake of revolutionary decolonization movements across the Global South) also emerged at the precise moment in which antiracist and socialist critiques of domestic counterinsurgency (police surveillance and incarceration) “gripped the imaginations of radical social movements in the US.”53 In particular, the late 1970s and early 1980s mark the beginning of the explosive boom in the racialized US prison population and a turn toward mass incarceration, domestic counterinsurgency, and neoliberal restructuring that is part and parcel of the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime.”54 Putting my account of the forever war in conversation with this scholarly literature on racial capitalism and the Black Radical tradition provides more historical context for the domestic and international ends of US counterinsurgency warfare and its gendered racial targets into the twenty-first century. The work of Camp and Singh builds on the groundbreaking contributions of Stuart Hall and his students in edited volumes such as Policing the Crisis and The Empire Strikes Back. 55 These scholar-activist projects provide endlessly compelling blueprints for analyzing our ongoing crises of authority caused by police violence; mass and racialized incarceration; seemingly permanent foreign and domestic wars; and struggles for global economic, environmental, social, sexual, and religious justice. To better understand issues of crime, of terrorism, of immigration, of gender violence, of poverty, of forever wars, and so on, we need to adopt intersectional, interdisciplinary approaches to understand how presumably distinct spheres collude in producing dissident outsiders. By now, scholars take for granted this notion of “articulated categories,” or a framework of intersectionality (in works of Stuart Hall, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and countless others) that formulates an understanding of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and other categories of social difference as co-constituted, that is, coming into existence “in and through relation to each other,” to adopt Anne McClintock’s terms.56 But this understanding of articulated categories advanced by Hall and other Black British thinkers of the time went one step further to demonstrate the intersectional nature not only of social difference but of culture, politics, and the economy too. These realms are rendered too often as discrete spheres of inquiry rather than co-constituted social forces. In their classic volume Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Hall and his colleagues argued that the problems confronting advanced capitalist nations such as Great Britain and the US in the 1970s were not purely economic, but that the crisis of overaccumulation was a political and social crisis too. That is, they claimed that race and other salient categories of difference were at the heart of capitalist violence. Governments repeatedly scapegoat “outsiders”— whether undocumented Central American migrants, trans and gendernonconforming people, sex workers, the homeless, the seroconverted, Muslim refugees, and so on. The point here is that there is often an unseen cultural and ideological dimension to what is conventionally understood as “merely” political or economic.57 So too with the moral panics of security. It follows, then, that state surveillance and racism are deeply imbricated in the history of US capitalism. The saga of national security surveillance in the US, in turn, is inseparable from the history of US colonialism, gendered racism, and empire. As many scholars have argued, racialized surveillance has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire throughout US history, from the settler colonial period through to our advanced neoliberal era of forever war.58 According to Arun Kundnani and Deepa Kumar, What brings together these different systems of racial oppression— mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and mass deportation—is a security logic that holds the imperial state as necessary to keeping ‘American families’ (coded white) safe from threats abroad and at home. The ideological work of the last few decades has cultivated not only racial security fears but also an assumption that the security state is necessary to keep “us” safe. In this sense, security has become the new psychological wage to aid the reallocation of the welfare state’s social wage toward homeland security and to win support for empire in the age of neoliberalism.59 To their account of the neoliberal and racial regimes of security at the heart of empire, we can add the insights of US women of color and Third World feminists who have long argued that racial and imperial capital, in Grace Kyungwon Hong’s terms, “was always organized around gender, reproduction, and sexuality.”60 Indeed, debates on national security surveillance and warfare remain impoverished without an intersectional analysis of gendered racism, capitalism, and empire.61 To review, this book’s critical cultural studies approach to insurgent aesthetics and neoliberal security and warfare is indebted to at least three major intellectual formations. The first inspiration, as described above, is my reading of the work of the late Stuart Hall and his comrades in the 1970s and 1980s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.62 The second body of scholarship is the US Black Radical tradition, most often associated with the writing of Cedric Robinson.63 The third strand of critical cultural materialist influence on this book is the work of Lisa Lowe and other “post-Marxist” materialist feminists of color and queer of color critics who likewise reject the crude dichotomous thinking on cultural politics that emphasizes stale binaries between social control and resistance or incorporation and subversion of earlier cultural Marxist traditions. These writers also note how “culture” names “the field on which economic and political contradictions are articulated.”64 Under this formulation, diasporic visual art and related cultural forms are the sites where knowledge and meaning about the forever war are at once constituted and unraveled. These works can provide essential reserves for articulating ideological systems of difference across multiple national sites. “Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history,” writes Lisa Lowe, “it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. This is not to argue that cultural struggle can ever be the exclusive site for practice; [but] it is only through culture that we conceive and enact new subjects and practices in antagonism to the regulatory locus of the citizen-subject.”65 Moreover, for Hong, as for other materialist feminists of color in this rich intellectual tradition, culture is a “material force rather than a transcendental, autonomous, aestheticized separate sphere,” or “the site to express that which is unspeakable.”66 Insurgent Aesthetics thus presents a vital counterhegemonic site for constructing new political subjects and analytics that are materially and aesthetically at odds with the institutions of citizenship and national identity—the grounds from which insurgent alternatives and political coalitions against the forever war might emerge. As such, this book connects the intersectional theorizations of diaspora, migration, and insurgency in critical race, postcolonial, Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist studies to the long-standing scholarly tradition on the cultures of US imperialism.67 On the Queer Calculus of US Empire In this introduction’s opening account of the “collateral afterworlds”68 of US drone strikes in Af-Pak, I asserted that we require a stranger calculus to grasp the violence of the forever war and challenge the state’s dominant militarized logics—what I term a queer calculus—that unsettles normative analyses of the forever war and outlines blueprints for utopian future imaginings amid limitless violence. In this section I elaborate on queer calculus as an epistemological and affective intervention, and in so doing dwell on the essential, if unexpected, reservoir of political inspiration and theoretical power that the field of queer studies affords this book’s account of the forever war. Queer calculus is a critical hermeneutic strategy through which racialized and dispossessed peoples, including Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the diaspora, have created alternative world-making knowledge projects to render visible or sensuous all that has been absented by the abstractions of the forever war.69 The constellation of contemporary art and performance works analyzed here produces an insurgent aesthetics by how it interacts and plays with viewers’ multisensory experiences of and responses to its aesthetic objects. This book questions the abstractions and rationalities of US imperial discourse and the statistical modes through which the forever war’s “collateral damage” is calculated, aggregated, and divided. In the process, I expose another calculus, a queer calculus, of bodies in pain and of bodies that imagine alternatives to that pain. Queer calculus is thus about inhabiting another arithmetic altogether, one that constructs a slantwise relation to how imperial warfare has been measured conventionally, including body counts, combat time, military budgets, and the price of oil. This critical hermeneutics is at odds with the US state’s necropolitical calculations, an investment in numeracy and counting that dates back to the early American slave period and further evokes what geographer Katherine McKittrick suggestively names “the mathematics of unliving.”70 If, as I contend in this book, global counterinsurgencies disorganize and destroy communal modes of belonging for racialized and diasporic populations targeted by US forever wars, then an antiracist, feminist, and decolonial queer calculus not only identifies an alternative frame from which to interpret these violent imperial practices but also signals an entirely new mode of inhabiting and feeling the world collectively and relationally in times of neoliberal security and war. Insurgent Aesthetics is indebted to the major paradigm shift in queer studies over the past two decades that situates the study of sexuality at the intersections of race, nationalism, (settler and franchise) colonialism, capitalism, liberalism, migration, militarism, and empire.71 The mode of critical inquiry (that is, antiracist, feminist, decolonial, and queer critique) prioritized in this project is in explicit conversation with the emergent formation known as critical ethnic studies.72 As Chandan Reddy, Grace Hong, and Roderick Ferguson have all argued, Third World and women of color feminisms and queer of color critique emerge from this intersectional, race radical tradition of scholarship rather than primarily from Eurocentric strands of queer theory.73 I use these broader theorizations of the social world from queer of color, queer diasporic, and queer Indigenous/Native studies to suggest that we can further de-link queer reading practices and analytics from putatively queer bodies. Moreover, the mode of queer studies I draw on in this project understands queerness not simply as an identitarian category (to describe lgbtqia populations), but as a critical set of interpretative practices or a decolonial praxis that makes possible the production of new knowledges, affects, and affiliations.74 Here, a willingness to accept that queer theory can be marshalled beyond studies of non-normative sexualities and genders becomes paramount.75 This is not at all to suggest that the decolonizing erotic project at the heart of queer theory should be abandoned. I likewise remain attentive to scholarly criticism that has called into question the wholesale valorization of sexual deviance and disorder that is endemic to contemporary queer studies and politics, and the genealogies of what theorist Kadji Amin calls “disturbing attachments” that sometimes ensue from the field’s idealization of the queer erotic.76 But I equally want to join other queer critics who hold on to the power of queerness as a complex sign for decolonization and radical pleasure, intimacy, fugitivity, coalition, and utopian futures despite (and perhaps also because of) these conditions of violent subjection.77 By asserting the sign and method of queerness centrally within this study, I bring the intellectual and political tools from queer of color and queer diasporic critique—intersectionality and assemblage theory and an attention to embodiment, sensation, and aesthetics—to address violent transformations in the sensorial life of US empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While the primary goal of this book is not to privilege an examination of non-normative gender and sexual subjects in a criticism of the forever war, this is not at all to imply that heteropatriarchal structures or non-normative sexual or gender subjectivities, expressions, and embodiments do not centrally undergird US neoliberal security state practices of racialization, war, and empire. In fact, US global security and surveillance regimes have long been concerns of at least radical feminist, if not queer and/ or trans*, studies.78 As literary critic Kyla Wazana Tompkins observes, one of the clearest insights of queer of color criticism is that as the “foundational racial violences” undergirding modern nation-states “were being laid down and concretized, categories of normative and non-normative sexuality were constructed alongside and over them . . . . Queer of color critique articulates queer theory from the heart of these and other histories.”79 Moreover, US, Israeli, and other settler colonial and biopolitical regimes have long rendered the sexualities of nonwestern and racialized Others (including Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, and Palestinians) as non-normative—that is, savage, repressed, and deviant—in order to legitimize settler colonial dispossession over people and lands. While attentive to the intersectional systems of social power and violence that structure the imperial and racial formation of the forever war, my primary goal in this book is to apply the conceptual traditions and tools of queer criticism to enhance a scholarly investigation of race, security, and empire. At the same time, this book explores how queer politics and queer studies themselves might be enriched and reimagined in light of violent practices such as aerial bombings and remote warfare, military detention and extrajudicial torture, and the atmospheric and subterranean politics of US/Israeli settler colonialism. Because these sites comprise the major flashpoints of neoliberal security and warfare examined in this book, I ask further, what are the effects of these violent practices on the gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies that are their targets? What alternative forms of being and belonging do such vulnerable queered and racialized bodies in turn enact and imagine through culture and performance? And finally, how do the insurgent aesthetics of South Asian and Arab diasporic artists “queer” the governing calculus of US empire to propose alternative modes of sensuous affiliation and fugitive coalition in the forever war? As my brief tripartite discussion reveals below, I aim my use of queer criticism in concrete ways throughout this book. “Queer calculus” thus names an alternative lens to analyze (1) logics and evidence, (2) affects and the senses, and (3) sensuous affiliations and coalition in the forever war.
der theories have played a vital role in this project and transformed our understanding of these collateral populations who face death and preciousness on a daily basis (Lamble 2013; Snorton and Haritaworn 2013). Partly in the light of Puar’s work, Jin Haritaworn (Haritaworn et al. 2015) has argued for a distinctive “queer necropolitics” that reveals how forms of life that are deemed worthwhile are sharply divided from those that are consigned to the garbage heap, as disposable and worthless. In an argument that recalls Judith Butler’s theorization of “precarious life” in post-9/11 America, we might consider the contrast between the wealthy, white gay and lesbian couples imagined in neoliberal advertising campaigns aimed at the “pink pound,” and an incarcerated transgender subject seeking urgent surgical interventions (Butler 2006). In a 2015 volume, Haritaworn and others (2015) have shown how working-class and marginal queers have repeatedly been marked by death as a form of social control. Like Puar’s studies of maimed and collateral populations, necropolitics reveals those who are not yet dead, their lives neglected and subject to the chance drone strike, the possible drive-by shooting, or a malfunctioning batch of fake black-market pharmaceuticals; in other words, the living dead. Mikdashi and Puar contend that following the lengthy US war in Afghanistan, the country was left with the world’s highest population of individuals relying on prosthetic body parts, often without adequate aftercare and support. The authors deliberately use the term crippled to distinguish between those who have received medical care and identification as disabled, and those simply left to live without any limb; Puar (2017) has recently advanced her theorization of physical impairment in this context. These are the lives of queer and collateral subjects; their deaths are as yet unrealized, but they are always already sanctioned. Deprived of legal protection, one thinks of villagers subjected to drone strikes, collateral subjects can die at any time. These queer life stories run at odds with core assumptions within Western LGBTQ rights discourses; they are deprived of the self-realization deemed integral to the emergence of a sexual subject. Queer forms of living death marked by permanent war clearly preclude the possibility of middle-class self-discovery. The mobilization of living death, as evinced separately in the work of Mbembe and Haritaworn, is in itself of considerable interest to queer theorists, who have long been concerned with the politics of life, reproduction, and futurity (Edelman 2004). To live without the privilege of a future, or to have children who are not privileged as the bearers of futurity, are conditions that must develop queer theory’s otherwise sophisticated accounts of biopolitics and reproduction. Queer theory from elsewhere challenges a certain stagnation within metropolitan queer theory, or what Mikdashi and Puar (2016: 215) term “queer theory as American studies”; forms of life and death in the South speak far more closely to the interests of earlier queer theorists than contemporary middle-class queer life in the West. Yet this point must remain secondary; queer theory from elsewhere should not be judged on what it offers “to” its Western counterpart. Work at the intersection of queer theory and area studies needs primarily to engage closely with the specificity of non-Western cultures, histories, and languages; there is a continual danger of becoming subsumed into a generalized notion of “world sexualities.” But given these caveats, interventions such as Mikdashi and Puar’s force queer theory out into the world; they anticipate a traveling queer theory able to engage with non-Western places and peoples, whether in Kabul, Beirut, Kinshasa, or Lagos. This deprovincialized queer theory has the potential to generate a type of reverse ethnography through which Western readers can appreciate their own domestic practices of exclusion, particularly in the prison and health care systems, through newly critical eyes.