The drone imprint: literature in the age of UAVs

This article is composed of the schema of Barbara Harlow’s final but unfinished book project, The Drone Imprint: literature in the age of UAVs. Harlow had drafted a proposal, given a version of it as the keynote address at the South Asian Literature Association meeting at the University of Texas, Austin in 2016, and taught many of the materials in it as an undergraduate studies signature course. This piece draws on her proposal, expands it with notes she made and parts of composed text for the talks, and attempts to flesh out and complete the citations. It reveals Harlow’s ongoing commitment to thinking through the dialectical relationship of literary and cultural studies to both the political exigencies of the present and the long histories of Empire. The project is instructive in the ways that it concatenates an interdisciplinary archive – human rights reports, novels, films, diaries, law cases, journalism – to elucidate both what drone warfare is doing to problems of literary and cultural representation and how literary modes are being redeployed in the understanding of the phenomenology of the drone. The project explores with some alarm and outrage what drone warfare is doing to questions of accountability and impunity in international human rights law, ‘kill lists’ as part of US foreign policy, questions of citizenship, habeas corpus and due process in the compressions and attenuations of sovereignty that UAVs accentuate