Drone Cultures - From Surveillance and Warfare to Literature and Art

The drone is an object of contradiction. On the one hand, it is a tool of dominance, destruction and death while on the other, as this book shows, it is a tool for education, creativity and entertainment. Encouraging us to think more critically about the figure of the drone, we begin by tracing the rise of drone warfare in the twenty-first century during the Bush administration, before touching on topics such as issues of surveillance culture and political oppression, biopolitics, AI, the role of the digital humanities in examining drones, and literary and artistic representations of (and using) drone technology. Demonstrating why we should stop thinking of drones as agents of chaos and death, we are asked to consider how they are fundamentally transforming our ideas of art, privacy, space, time, dignity, transparency, accountability, and democracy.

Product details

• Authors: John Muthyala, Muthyala John
• Assisted by: Jenny Kidd (Editor), Anthony Mandal (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 01.01.2026
• EAN: 9781350530461
• ISBN: 978-1-350-53046-1
• No. of pages: 248
• Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Popular Culture, LITERARY CRITICISM / Comparative Literature, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Impact of science & technology on society, Impact of science and technology on society, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Privacy & Surveillance, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Privacy & Surveillance, Literary studies: postcolonial literature, Literary studies: from c 2000