Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War, reviewed by Emilia Sawada

Abstract

A year ago, President Joe Biden announced that the United States had withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan after 20 years, supposedly ending the longest war in US history. In Insurgent Aesthetics, however, Ronak Kapadia insists that the US has been waging a ‘long war’ throughout history, including the last century, and furthermore, that it is not simply ‘at war’, but is war itself (p. 5). Moreover, he proposes that contemporary South Asian, Middle Eastern, and diasporic multimedia artists resist the violence of the US empire by inspiring alternative ways of knowing and feeling, beyond the forever wars of US security statecraft. Kapadia redeploys the term forever war to critically describe, not only the United States’ global war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but also its domestic war on crime and, by extension, drugs (p. 5). While the US empire – the machine behind these affiliated wars – has often projected itself as borderless, monolithic, and everlasting, the artists of Insurgent Aesthetics demonstrate that even empire fails to last forever, that ultimately the powers of the US security state are evanescent. These artists’ embodied practices of opposition, refusal, and escape in the realms of installation, performance, photography, painting, video, literature, and new media shed light on their insurgent aesthetics, the book’s titular concept. Kapadia proposes that the artists’ insurgent aesthetics constitute a relational, collective aesthetic praxis that enables them to rearticulate the subjugated knowledges of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian populations and, in so doing, craft a queer calculus of the forever war. A queer calculus, Kapadia suggests, troubles dominant knowledges about the forever war; it renders intimate, sensuous, or affiliated what has been estranged, disappeared, or divided by US technologies of abstraction, such as aerial surveillance or statistical calculation; and it envisions new ways to inhabit the world, if not new worlds entirely.