Description
In analysing predominantly Anglo-American applications of a narrow set of drone technologies and practices, largely through a logic of Empire, early critical work on drones has made important contributions by relating the drone’s political impact to its materiality, dominant visual regime and articulation of colonial technologies (Gregory 2011). Still, a great deal of this work has emphasised particular understandings of space, technology and human agency. I argue that these assumptions reproduce and enable particular geopolitical futures not just through the drone’s material functioning, but also through the way drones are imagined. To think about how drones operate adjacent to, alongside and juxtaposed to this dominant imaginary, I re-conceptualise our multifaceted material-affective attachments to the drone and its promises. Concentrating on experimental practices of leisure and security in the city of Shenzhen, I argue we require new critical vocabularies to analyse China’s more-than-human drone entanglements and the unstable encounters that amplify, subvert and rework them. I show that this means considering how we encounter drones across a range of sites – certainly those that generate explicit violence such as borders and battlefields, but also those less obvious sites of leisure and entertainment that attach us to violence in much more implicit ways.
