Opacity, Repair and Relation in an Age of Telepresence

Kareem Estefan

Tuesday 23 June 2020

This talk will examine the drone as the emblematic medium of the age of telepresence, inquiring into its transformation of myriad domains of society, including warfare, surveillance, and, in a moment of global pandemic and economic crisis, public health and supply chain management. How do drones reshape human perception and political life? What ideologies are embedded in their manufacture and their uses? And how can we recover forms of relation that are not imbued with the imperial logics they enable? Contesting racialized and colonizing ways of seeing, the talk will consider Édouard Glissant’s proposition of a “right to opacity,” Simone Browne’s notion of “dark sousveillance,” and various practices of repair and resistance in the arts and in social movements.