This book examines the intersecting forces of nationalism, terrorism, and patriotism that normalize an acceptance of the global war on terror as essential to maintaining freedom and democracy as defined by white nation-states. Readers are introduced to speculative ethnography: an experimental methodology that bends time and space through the practice of avant-garde poetics. This study conceptualizes terrorism as a place of colonial encounters between soldiers, insurgents, civilians, and leaders of nation-states. The tactics of suicide bombings employed by the Tamil nationalist movement, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, are juxtaposed with drone strikes in asymmetric warfare where violence becomes a means of dialogue. Each chapter weaves seemingly disparate narratives from multiple experiences and sites of war, inviting readers to witness the condition of getting lost in that willful attachment to killing and being killed in service of patriotic pride and national belonging.
1. Introduction: A Speculative Ethnography of War.- 2. Another Brick in the Wall: The Cultural Value of Terrorism.- 3. Goodbye Blue Sky: The Ethical Demands of Suicide Bombing.- 4. In the Flesh: Abjection & Anarchy.- 5. Run Like Hell: Mullivaikkal.- 6. A Great Day for Freedom: Life Under Occupation. Yamuna Sangarasivam is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Women & Gender Studies Program at Nazareth College, USA.
