"What activism can learn from poetry": Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK

Keegan Cook Finberg

doi:10.31261/rias.12446

Published: 2022-06-15

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2022)

"What activism can learn from poetry": Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK

Keegan Cook Finberg

Section: FEATURES

https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.12446

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.

Keywords:

Solmaz Sharif , Drones , Surveillance , Recognition , Opacity , Lyric

Download files

Download PDF

Citation rules

Finberg, K. C. (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

Cited by / Share

References

Adelman, Rebecca A. “The Limits of Recognition: Rethinking Conventional Critiques of Drone Warfare.” American Studies, vol. 59, no. 1, 2020, pp. 93–112.
Google Scholar

Akbar, Kaveh. “‘This Isn’t Just Theoretical for Me’: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif.” Divedapper, July 2016, https://www.divedapper.com/interview/solmaz-sharif/.
Google Scholar

Brady, Andrea. “Drone Poetics.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, vol. 89–90, 2017, pp. 116–36.
Google Scholar

Brady, Andrea. Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Google Scholar

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015.
Google Scholar

Bryant, Brandon. “Letter from a Sensor Operator.” Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, edited by Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 315–23.
Google Scholar

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2016.
Google Scholar

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006.
Google Scholar

Butler, Judith. “Precariousness and Grievability—When Is Life Grievable?” Verso Books Blog, 16 Nov. 2015, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability-when-is-life-grievable. Accessed 1 Jul. 2021.
Google Scholar

Clemmons, Zinzi. “The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif.” The Paris Review, July 2016, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/07/27/the-role-of-the-poet-an-interview-with-solmaz-sharif/.
Google Scholar

Department of Defense. Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. 17 Oct. 2007.
Google Scholar

Dowdy, Michael. “Shakeout Poetics: Documentary Poeitcs from Men of Fact to Data Bodies.” College Literature, vol. 47, no. 1, 2020, pp. 155–84.
Google Scholar

Dworkin, Craig Douglas. Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography. Fordham University Press, 2020.
Google Scholar

Fraser, Nancy. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.” New Left Review, no. 86, Apr. 2014, pp. 55–72.
Google Scholar

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Google Scholar

Hall, Rachel. “Terror and the Female Grotesque: Introducing Full-Body Scanners to US Airports.” Feminist Surveillance Studies, edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Magnet, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 127–49.
Google Scholar

Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Google Scholar

Jackson, Virginia. “Lyric.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Greene et al., Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 826–34.
Google Scholar

Jackson, Virginia Walker, and Yopie Prins, editors. “General Introduction.” The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 1–10.
Google Scholar

JR. #NotABugSplat. Apr. 2014, https://notabugsplat.com/.
Google Scholar

Leong, Michael. Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2020.
Google Scholar

Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 36–39.
Google Scholar

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 2007, pp. 53–59.
Google Scholar

Martin, Randy. An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Duke University Press, 2007.
Google Scholar

Mill, John Stuart. “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” Autobiography and Literary Essays, edited by John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, University of Toronto Press, 1981.
Google Scholar

Parks, Lisa. “Vertical Mediation and the US Drone War in the Horn of Africa.” Life in the Age of Drone Warfare, edited by Caren Kaplan and Lisa Parks, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 135–57.
Google Scholar

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press Books, 2007.
Google Scholar

Rhee, Jennifer. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Google Scholar

Rosen, David, and Aaron Santesso. Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood. Yale University Press, 2014.
Google Scholar

Schnepf, J.D. “In Sheep’s Clothing: Mammalian Morphologies and Aerial Infrared Surveillance.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, Mar. 2020, pp. 297–99.
Google Scholar

Sharif, Solmaz. LOOK. Graywolf Press, 2016.
Google Scholar

Sharif, Solmaz. “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure.” Evening Will Come: A Montly Journal of Poetics, no. 28, Apr. 2013, https://thevolta.org/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html.
Google Scholar

Sumner, Tyne Daile. Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance. Routledge, 2022.
Google Scholar

Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2002, pp. 49–90.
Google Scholar

White, Gillian C. Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Google Scholar

Keegan Cook Finberg

kfinberg@umbc.edu
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0971-7991

Affiliation:

University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA United States

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary American Literature in the English Department at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she is also affiliate faculty in the departments of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, and Language Literacy and Culture. She studies poetry, experimental literature, intermedial arts, feminism, and critical theory. She is currently writing a book about how post-1960s poetry responds to the US government’s facilitation of capitalism. Her scholarly essays can be found in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Textual Practice, and Canada and Beyond. She has published public criticism in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket 2, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2022)
Published: 2022-06-12

eISSN: 1991-2773

10.31261/RIAS

Publisher

University of Silesia Press

Submit

"What activism can learn from poetry": Lyric Opacity and Drone Warfare in Solmaz Sharif’s LOOK

Abstract

Keywords:

Keegan Cook Finberg

Developed By