In Foucault’s lecture series, Society Must be Defended  (1975-76) he shifts his analysis of power from the framework of discipline to security. Contained within this differentiation, is an assertion of militarization as the dominant mode of organising power relations; structuring habitual compliance, regulation, and discipline. This analysis of biopower and militarization has been affirmed and revised by Achille Mbembe, who concluded similarly in 'The society of enmity'(2016) that the security state’s primary motivation is “control over human life in general.” Mbeme argues that the security state produces a state of insecurity; in order to naturalise its own disciplining apparatus. These critical ontologies of militarization and security offer opportunity for a substantial consideration of militarization in relation to the environment and inhabitancy.  

This seminar is concerned with interrogating the effects of militarization, in the sense of a biopolitical regime of power, on ecosystems. It asks; how do aesthetic modalities, form, and genre unfold within, and yet disturb these networks? Building from Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s reading of James George’s Ocean Roads (2006) as disturbing the realist conventions of ecocritical discourse which refract the “technologies of militarized modernity,” we welcome contributions that engage with literary form in relation to the form of militarization itself. How does Yusef Komonyakaa’s “The Devil’s Workshop,” (1998) textually and figurative recreate the panoptic, computerised vision of warfare and the inescapabilty of planetary realism? How does militarization truncate and restrain speculative potential and narrative development in Charles Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out (1958)? In other words, how does militarization inflect itself in form and language? 

Potential topics are not limited to, but may include: 

• The colonial and imperial legacies that have shaped military geographies, and the broader cultural construction of military bases as peripheral, experimental spaces. 

• Literary and artistic production that interrupts metaphors of natural or organic defence, and documents histories of ecological militarism.  

• Histories of activism in the collection of military and environmental data. 

• Ontologies of militarization in the works of Paul Virilio, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rob Nixon, Achille Mbembe, Jairus Grove, Friedrich Kittler, James Der Derian and Kathy Ferguson. 

Abstracts should be between 250-300 word. Please include with submission a brief author bio. All inquiries can be sent to Scarlett Croft (PhD Student in English Literature at the University of Glasgow.) [email protected].