The Center for International History and Qalam Pakistan Initiative Present:
Deferred Extermination: Jonathan Swift and Drone Warfare by Peter DeGabriele

Date: Thursday, October 10th, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: 411 Fayerweather Hall (1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027)

Peter DeGabriele is Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University and the author of “Drone Englightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare” (Virginia University Press, 2023). DeGabriele specialises in the study of eighteenth century literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on the relation between literary texts and the political philosophy and epistemology of the period.

Madiha Tahir is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale. Tahir’s current book project explores U.S. drone warfare and transnational militarism in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands. A former journalist, she is the director of Wounds of Waziristan, a short documentary essay film that tracks 2 drone survivors as they reflect on the afterlife of bombardment.

Drawing from Drone Enlightenment: The Colonial Roots of Remote Warfare (UVA Press, 2023), this talk will draw on the Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels to discuss the phenomenon of drone warfare. Taking up Swift’s description of a political situation in which the decision to exterminate a racialized colonial population is indefinitely suspended while the serial killing of those same people is permitted, the talk will look at the way this structure works in the drone warfare practiced by the United States and by Israel. It will argue that this form of sovereignty is essential to the “political technology” of the drone, which links the technical capacities of remote bombing to forms of colonial and liberal sovereignty which have their roots in the Enlightenment. The talk will conclude by thinking about the use of AI by the Israel Defense Forces in the current war in Gaza and how this produces a radical asymmetry between two legacies of the Enlightenment: mediation and publicity. In particular, it will argue that the velocity of technical mediation produced both by AI and by drones overwhelms the use of public reason and claims for accountability.