Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (Volume 8) (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century)

History

Stone, Nomi

Military

University of California Press

Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.\nFrom the Back Cover\n"Welcome to Pinelandia—the historic training ground for US imperialism—where the violent ambitions of empire are rehearsed daily. Nomi Stone maps the fantasies and poetics supporting US militarism today—an astonishingly original book."—Joseph Masco, author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making\n"Nomi Stone vividly conveys the absurdities she observed in simulated wars in US military communities using ruminative poetry and poetic prose. A wonder of a book."—Catherine Lutz, author of Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century\n"An insightful, poetic, and ethnographic treatment of the workings and ambivalences of empire and its subjects, and a delicate exploration of the cooptation of Iraqi refugees in the US-led War on Terror in the Middle East."—Omar Dewachi, author of Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq\n"This is an extraordinarily original, timely, and powerful book. It traces the shifting lines of alliance and enmity that comprise the realities of Iraq in the days immediately following the American occupation in 2003 and through the subsequent years of disillusionment and renewed divisions. Nomi Stone does this in a highly inventive and unexpected way through ethnographic accounts crafted from the domestic landscapes of US military predeployment training. While remaining ostensibly safe within the 'homeland,' Stone’s account nonetheless manages to convey the profound brutality of militarism within as well as beyond US borders."—Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Lancaster University

Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century) (Volume 8)

Stone's moving debut collection of verse is inspired by her encounter with perhaps the last cohesive, traditional Jewish community in the Middle East and North Africa.

Stranger's Notebook: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

TriQuarterly

A collection of poems that features a stranger who arrives at an ancient community that is both at home and estranged on the island. It tells how the people occupy the uneasy space of all insular communities, deciding when to let the world in and when to shut it out. It describes the daily lives of the Jews of Djerba and the Muslims next door.

A poet and anthropologist explores the surprising world of war games in mock Middle Eastern villages in which the U.S. military trains. With deft lyrical attention, these documentary poems reveal the nuanced culture and violence of the war machine--alive and well within these basecamp villages, the American military, and, ultimately, the human heart. Kill Class is based on Nomi Stone's two years of fieldwork in mock Middle Eastern villages at military bases across the United States. The speaker in these poems, an anthropologist, both witnesses and participates in combat training exercises staged at Pineland, a simulated country in the woods of the American South, where actors of Middle Eastern origin are hired to theatricalize war, repetitively pretending to bargain and mourn and die. Kill Class is an arresting ethnography of American military culture, one that allows readers to circle at length through the cloverleaf interchanges where warfare nestles into even the most mundane corners of everyday life.

Kill class

Tupelo Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stone, Nomi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stone, Nomi

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Stone, Nomi. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (Volume 8) (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century)

Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century) (Volume 8)

Stranger's Notebook: Poems

Stranger's Notebook: Poems

Kill class