This special session explores new visions afforded by aeriality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a series of literary, visual, and technical media, such as powered flights, artificial satellites, drones, and cameras and video systems. We open new archives and address questions that emerge when we take an aerial “turn” in literary and cultural studies to explore how this turn has changed the way wars, hot and cold, are fought and represented, and provoke new ways of thinking and writing about (human) races on the planet. Scholars such as Caren Kaplan, Rey Chow, and Ronak K. Kapadia have traced the history of aerial views and their intersection with military violence through examination of the art of war and its aftermath represented in aerial photography, literature, film, and visual art. We draw on and depart from these studies by using the term aerial archives of war for this session’s organizing concept. In our operational definition, aerial archives of war are materials that capture the traces of the aerial imaginary—associated with power, dominance, control, surveillance, and bombing—and the corollary shifting planetary imaginary that evolved in relation to each other in wartime. This panel examines the ways in which a shift in aeriality and corollary shifting grounds for race that it caused are represented in or mediated by these texts. It does so through readings of aerial archives in a range of cultural forms, from speculative fiction to speech, and to visual media ranging from aerial photography to film, and from visual installations to war games.

This panel features transpacific scholarship from East Asia and the United States. The session consists of three panelists who will be strictly limited to 13-minute papers, followed by a 10-minute response, to promote at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. Etsuko Taketani will begin the panel with her presentation “Futuristic Remains of Mother Planes: Malcolm X, Speculative Fiction, Hiroshima.” Through analyses of the transpacific aerial archives of war, she considers the evolution of the Mother Plane—the unseen gigantic aircraft carrier bearing infant planes equipped with bombs, presented as being built in Japan, a cosmological concept in the ideology of the Nation of Islam (NOI)—in Malcolm X’s speeches. She examines how, in 1964, after leaving the NOI, Malcolm X engaged directly with Hiroshima hibakusha, survivors of the atom bomb which President Truman called “a rain of ruin from the air,” illuminating the entanglement of the racism inherent in the technological atom bombs (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the infrastructures of racism producing genocide (Harlem and black America).

In “Formosa for Americans: Mapping Taiwan in the Age of Cold War Diplomacy,” Chang-Min Yu uncovers the long-forgotten publicity shorts of Taiwan circulated to win American hearts and souls: Majestic Island (1963), Defiant Island (1963), Magic of Taiwan (1964), produced by the Hamilton Wright Organization; and other advertisement campaigns coordinated with major magazines such as Life and Time. Yu argues that these Cold War promotional efforts provide a new way of envisioning the reach of, to paraphrase Daniel Immerwahr’s words, the hidden American empire in aerial imaging. The distant vision of modernization efforts in Taiwan creates a broader visual logistics of a world running on the American dollar. Selling Taiwan, back then and in the present, is a task that can only be achieved by highlighting the island’s emergent value in the cartographic division of global labor.

Kodai Abe’s presentation “Waging Global War Games after 9/11” reconsiders how the relationship between warfare and technology changed before and after 9/11. It addresses questions that are key to understanding a shift in aeriality: namely, as the primary media of warfare shifted from cinema to video games in the age of drone warfare, how has this transformation reframed our understanding of warfare? Likewise, as video game technology became increasingly integrated into real-world combat, how has this convergence redefined waging war and playing games? From the Bush administration’s deployment of cameras and GPS devices on missiles during the Gulf War (often referred to as the “Video Game War” or the “Nintendo War”) to the Obama administration’s refinement and redefinition of drone attacks in the global War on Terror—and spanning war films, visual installations, and war games—this presentation explores how American warfare has evolved its methods and meanings of targeting “enemies” with a controller and “virtually” killing from a distance, from above.

The presentations will be followed by a response from Anne McKnight, who will pose questions both to the panelists and the audience so that an engaged and generative discussion ensues.