To aid research on 'Human Technologies in the Iraq War,'

In a new contribution to contemporary scholarship on war, this project explores the ethical, epistemological, and affective dimensions of 'human technology'-local wartime proxies, mediators, role-players, and translators-employed by the US military as embodied repositories of Middle East knowledge to: 1) facilitate military forms of seeing; and 2) act as the faces or visible manifestations of partially masked American projects. These Iraqis are part of a broader phenomenon in contemporary war, which this study identifies as 'elsewhere-optics,' wherein seeing as well as bodily risk are outsourced: both machines (i.e. drones) and human bodies are situated and maneuvered remotely by the US military. Employed by the American Department of Defense as exemplars of their cultures, but ejected to the peripheries as traitors by their own countrymen and as potential spies by US soldiers, human technologies negotiate complex injuries and claims for recognition. Drawing on 26 months of fieldwork across the US and in Jordan, the project focuses on the wartime labor of Iraqi former interpreters and current role-players, as they theatricalize war for US soldiers in pre-deployment simulations in mock Middle Eastern villages across America. Zooming in on the haunted and uncanny spaces of the simulations, in tension with their wartime referents, the research delves into these Iraqi intermediaries' affective and imaginative worlds.