Media

On Oct 22.2013, I had the pleasure of briefly discussing the situation in Waziristan as well as the documentary:

Distinguished Professor of Geography, Derek Gregory, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver wrote up a thoughtful post on WOUNDS and connects it to his own work. It’s chock full of useful links and footnotes to other relevant readings on drone warfare. Here’s a snippet:

This matters so much – and reappears in a different form in ‘Moving targets’ – because the contemporary individuation of ‘war’ (if it is war) works to sanitize the battlefield: to confine attention to the individual-as-target (which is itself a technical artefact separated from the exploded fleshiness that flickers briefly on the Predator’s video screens) and to foreclose the way in which every death ripples across a family, a community…

Read the whole thing here.

With Wounds of Waziristan, Tahir tries to foreground the people who materially experience loss and absence — not as abstract body counts, but as the absence of a brother or a niece or a wife. “Haunting is the insistence by the dead that they be acknowledged, that the social conditions that brought about their demise be made known and rectified. So, haunting is about unfinished business. And, it’s thoroughly social and political. This film focuses on the people who live in Waziristan and who live among loss. Material conditions, whether it’s the rubble after a drone attack or the grave of one’s kin, persist in reminding the living of what they have lost,” she explains.

Full piece here.