Black Sheep: ISIS and the Smoke of Qayyarah

Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2018

War discourse commonly depicts the people and the terrain of opponent countries as intrinsically dangerous or threatening in order to justify the indiscriminate destruction of that land and its people. Building upon this idea, this essay uses Waheed and Aslam’s novels to analyse environmental Othering, which refers to the war strategies of codification and transformation that Other landscapes into militarized zones. Codification indicates reductive normalization of land whereby its ecological complexity is erased and instead it gets produced as threatening and hostile space. This codification gives way to transformation, whereby the land is restructured into a site of containment for the subjugation of enemy factions, as seen in the aggressive transformation of natural spaces into deathscape (The Collaborator) and military bases (The Blind Man’s Garden). In tracing the implications of this phenomenon, this essay posits that environmental Othering fulfils militant utilitarian goals but, in doing so, acts as a threat multiplier for natural spaces.

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2003

Annals of The Association of American Geographers, 2011

We examine the significance of a specific type of political violence—counterinsurgency—in the making of political forests, providing a link between literatures on the political ecology of forests and the geographies of war. During the Cold War, particularly between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, natures were remade in relation to nation-states in part through engagements with “insurgencies” and “emergencies” staged from forested territories. These insurgencies represented alternative civilizing projects to those of the nascent nation-states; they also took place in historical moments and sites where the reach of centrifically focused nations was still tentative. We argue that war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency helped normalize political forests as components of the modern nation-state during and in the aftermath of violence. The political violence also enabled state-based forestry to expand under the rubric of scientific forestry. Military counterinsurgency operations contributed to the practical and political separation of forests and agriculture, furthered and created newly racialized state forests and citizen-subjects, and facilitated the transfer of technologies to forestry departments. The crisis rhetoric of environmental security around “jungles,” as dangerous spaces peopled with suspect populations, particularly near international borders, articulated with conservation and other national security discourses that emerged concurrently. Counterinsurgency measures thus strengthened the territorial power and reach of national states by extending its political forests. En este estudio examinamos la significación de un tipo específico de violencia política—la contrainsurgencia—en el desarrollo de bosques políticos, creando así un vínculo entre las literaturas sobre ecología política de bosques y las geografías de guerra. Durante la Guerra Fría, particularmente entre los años 50 y el final de los años 70 del siglo pasado, las naturalezas se rehicieron a sí mismas en relación con los estados-nación, en parte por medio de confrontaciones con “insurgencias” y “surgencias” puestas en acción en territorios boscosos. Estas insurgencias se presentaron a título de proyectos civilistas alternativos para quienes tenían que ver con los nacientes estados-naciones; ocurrieron, además, en momentos y sitios históricos donde todavía era tentativo el alcance soberano de naciones enfocadas centrípetamente. Nuestro argumento es que la guerra, la insurgencia y la contrainsurgencia ayudaron a normalizar los bosques políticos como componentes del moderno estado-nación durante las épocas violentas. La violencia política también contribuyó a que la silvicultura con soporte estatal se expandiera bajo la rúbrica de silvicultura científica. Las operaciones de contrainsurgencia militar contribuyeron a la separación práctica y política de bosques y agricultura, promovieron y desarrollaron bosques estatales de nuevo racializados al estilo ciudadanos-sujetos, y facilitaron la transferencia de tecnologías a los departamentos de silvicultura. La retórica crisis sobre seguridad ambiental en torno de las “junglas,” como espacios peligrosos poblados por poblaciones sospechosas, particularmente cerca de las fronteras internacionales, se articuló con la conservación y otros discursos de seguridad nacional que emergieron concurrentemente. Las medidas de contrainsurgencia fortalecieron de esa manera el poder territorial y el alcance de los estados nacionales al extender el ámbito de sus bosques políticos.

The symbolic assignment of female deities as representatives of the natural world and the use of veils as instruments for protection and concealment are culturally ubiquitous. This essay specifically focuses on a particular conception of nature widely employed in early 19 th century romantic Germany together with the implications of a hidden and transcendental world reluctant to reveal its secrets. The analysis first uncovers its Egyptian roots and subsequent employment in freemasonry, before moving on to explain post Kantian philosophical notions, including reverence for and even awe of the environment and a holistic view of scientific advances. An epilogue recalls some personal motivations for writing about this topic, its emotional dimensions, and contemporary challenges.

2017

War by Other Means: Environmental Violence in the 21st Century This dissertation studies the intersections of militarism, climate change, and environmental justice in U.S. literature and popular culture since the end of the Cold War. The project identifies different mechanisms enacting environmental military violence through discursive analysis of literary and cultural texts, and considers the ideas, values, and beliefs that support environmental military violence. In each chapter I trace a different dynamic of environmental violence structured through the logics of U.S. counterinsurgency theory by examining what I call "narrative political ecologies"cultural texts that center concerns of ecology and broadly defined political economy. Chapter I establishes the stakes and questions of the dissertation. The next two chapters investigate the dynamics of environmental violence depicted within narrative political ecologies. Chapter II investigates how eruptive interpersonal violence secures more insidious, hidden forms of slow environmental violence in Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier. Chapter III considers the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the environmental military violence responsible for the deaths of undocumented migrants by examining Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway and the Electronic Disturbance Theater's Transborder Immigrant Tool. Chapter IV turns to potential f wars and conflicts that may v be caused by climate change as they have been depicted in speculative fiction. In novels depicting climate migrants, such as Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (2014), I show that even politically progressive, intersectional approaches to environmental endangerment naturalize conflict and occlude dialogic solutions to environmental change. The final chapter traces how the environmental refugee has become a paradigmatic figure in climate change discourse, particularly the aspects of this discourse where issues of national security are articulated. At the center of these texts is the figure of the migrant and narratives of migrations, and I argue that the figure of the environmental migrant offers a privileged vantage on the constitutive forces of the Anthropocene. The dissertation identifies the specific literary and rhetorical techniques that authors use to contest environmental militarization and expand the U.S. public's capacity to creatively and compassionately reason around increased flows of environmental migrants-issues of vital importance for humane climate change adaptation.

2021

In Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War, Matthew Leep develops a cosmopolitan account of war that blends sharp inquiry into interspecies politics with original poetry on animals, loss, and war. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, this book is not only a somber and sobering exploration of the loss of animal lives during the Iraq War—from the initial US invasion to later struggles with ISIS—but also an imaginative tracing of animal experiences in "spectral-poetic moments." By emphasizing elegies, poetic space, and multispecies belonging, Leep envisions the cosmopolitan text as a hybrid form of critical and poetic engagement with animal others. An insightful mix of cosmopolitan poetics, poetry, and analysis of the Iraq War in its multispecies entanglements, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War connects contemporary concerns with political violence, memory, and interspecies politics to imagine a more spectral, posthumanist, and poetic cosmopolitanism. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book will engage scholars of international relations, political theory, US foreign policy, animal studies, poetry, and Derrida, as well as those interested in human-animal relations in perilous times.

Critical scholarship on Sri Lankan - Canadian author Michael Ondaatje’s postmodernist novel Anil’s Ghost has primarily focused on human and spectral agencies that animate the postcolonial politics of the novel. In this paper, I seek to complicate and expand such predominantly anthropocentric lenses by contending that material objects in the novel supplement its witnessing ‘from below’ in critical ways. I establish how bicycles, forest spaces, plantation houses and bombs are invested in as seminal ‘actants’ in the novel that impel a complex narrative of conflict violence and imaginaries of the future. The physical makeup of these objects as ‘assemblages’ are harnessed in the novel to produce an eco-critical ethics of witnessing, narrating and engaging with the postcolonial conflict zone that decentres the spectacular violence to foreground lived experiences of war and subaltern resistance to it.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2018

Every war has grave repercussions for both the human and non-human elements in the geographical location where it erupts. Dramatic productions like Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (2009) highlight the consequences of war on the ecosystem of the conflict-stricken vicinity of Baghdad city. In the play, the chaotic world portrayed is an ecocentric site where the ghost of a tiger talks and the destruction of the garden, of Baghdad city and of human values are lamented. To illustrate the hazards of human conflict, Joseph incorporates ancient myths with the tragedy of the Iraq war to raise issues related to Eco-theology, Zoo-criticism, Speciesism, Green Criticism, Eco-Feminism and Environmental Racism against the backdrop of the Iraq War. The author integrates Grail legends, Greek mythology and monotheistic religious texts in the play’s structure to draw attention to the impending environmental doom. For example, the garden in the play reminds us of Biblical gardens, ...

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2018

Every war has grave repercussions for both the human and non-human elements in the geographical location where it erupts. Dramatic productions like Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (2009) highlight the consequences of war on the ecosystem of the conflict-stricken vicinity of Baghdad city. In the play, the chaotic world portrayed is an ecocentric site where the ghost of a tiger talks and the destruction of the garden, of Baghdad city and of human values are lamented. To illustrate the hazards of human conflict, Joseph incorporates ancient myths with the tragedy of the Iraq war to raise issues related to Eco-theology, Zoo-criticism, Speciesism, Green Criticism, Eco-Feminism and Environmental Racism against the backdrop of the Iraq War. The author integrates Grail legends, Greek mythology and monotheistic religious texts in the play's structure to draw attention to the impending environmental doom. For example, the garden in the play reminds us of Biblical gardens, the assault of a virgin brings to mind Ovid's story of Philomela's rape, and the quest for a golden toilet seat in the desert is a clear indication of the Grail motif in the play's narrative. All these instances insinuate the embedded mythical patterns and the current era's indifference to the safety of our fellow species. Moreover, the play does not only hint at war crimes, but also refers to the overall structure of the world as an outcome of human negligence and insensitivity towards the environment. In short, the play is a myth-ecological narrative of the dilapidated ecology of the contemporary world.