Disrupting “all the familiar geometry”: Drones, Settler Colonialism, and Nasser Hussain’s Difficult Questions

Abstract

U.S. citizens rarely feel implicated in the harm caused by the U.S.’s widespread use of drones, and both drones’ opponents and proponents focus on value calculus of their usage. Nasser Hussain’s “Phenomenology of a Drone Strike” looks at the problem from the wider angle of the harm continuous use of drones wages on affected communities. This article links inattention to drones’ effects to a related blind spot, “settler common sense”: the way non-native settler colonial subjects rely on framings of the world that normalize settlement as the background truth against which experience of the world is interpreted – and thereby render invisible other possible framings of justice and resistance. If U.S. citizens do not feel implicated in ongoing injustice toward Native Americans, how did that denial become possible? Looking at this problem may help us understand something about our capacity to ignore the use of drones as instruments of terror. In turn, Hussain’s points about how drones are experienced on either side of their usage may help us understand something about settler common sense and indigenous resistance.