Imagining Aerial Surveillance

(Eco)Poetics and War in Solmaz Sharif’s Look

Bibliographic Data

ID11272151
AuthorsHaley M Eazor (0009-0003-9619-8655, The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume49
Issue2
Pages24-43
Publication date2024-09-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlae028
OpenAlexW4398391722
LanguageEN
References cited24

This article considers militarized drone and satellite imaging through Solmaz Sharif’s 2016 debut collection of poems, Look. Drawing on discourses of warfare, environment, and surveillance studies, Look demonstrates the material entanglements of war and environment through aerial military technology such as thermal satellite imaging and drones used for surveillance and violence. Sharif’s poems "Look" and "drone" reimagine the sights and sites of US military surveillance through a reconceptualizing of visuality: Sharif’s multivocal, lyrical "I," her use of punctuation and lineation, and her poetic and military diction ruptures the militant gaze through a centering of the targeted body as present, articulable, and multiple. Utilizing Jonathan Skinner’s definition of ecopoetics as a homemaking, or an act of making-with, this article understands the speakers of Sharif’s poems as preserving both the image caught (the human and nonhuman targets) and the image they create (the poetic body). In these extralinguistic encounters with machines, Sharif’s poetics do what drones and satellites could never truly do: surveil themselves in an intimate manner and make known their own subjecthood as not a faceless blur on a screen but alive and lively in the space of the poem. By invoking the sensorium-sight, touch, and smell-alongside domestic material objects and spaces, Sharif’s poems highlight the peripheral and habitual perspectives, undermining the military’s potent, methodological, and calculated gaze through what is embodied, intimate, and proximate

Art · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Turkey's Politics and Society

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