Description:
Co-edited by Aaron Hughes, Ronak K. Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Meranda Roberts, and Amber Zora, Surviving the Long Wars offers a groundbreaking exploration into the complex histories of US warfare and militarism, illuminating the pivotal role of art in cultivating justice, healing, and abolition.
This edited volume-featuring poetry, scholarly essays, exhibition documentation, and more-builds from and continues the profound impact and critical legacy of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit held in Chicago."We have much to learn about how questions of race, indigeneity, colonization, war, and survival are lived daily from our engagement with on-the-ground activists and artists who work with marginalized populations as well as veterans of US wars. It is not often that combat veterans get to sit down with artists and academics to think about the needs of these overlapping communities together," says co-editor Dr. Ronak K. Kapadia. "We hope Surviving the Long Wars' emphasis on social justice and shared meaning-making about complex topics can serve as a model for others."
"Through our artwork and connections with other Indigenous communities around the world, who also continue to be exploited for the purposes of warfare, greed, and natural resources, we are able to visualize a future world where these realities are no longer viable. This publication offers an opportunity for these connections to flourish while reflecting on the injustices of the past and creating new mechanisms towards peace," says Dr. Meranda Roberts (Northern Paiute), independent curator of Native American arts and culture and co-editor. As Aaron Hughes, an Iraq War veteran, artist, and co-organizer of the project explains, "This publication is about the transformative power of art. It's about the way art can create connections across differences, transform trauma into meaning, and inspire a more peaceful future."Bridge Books is honored to support the groundbreaking work of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit, and the creative work of our veterans," says Bridge Books publisher Michael Workman, "We hope that Surviving the Long Wars will help educate, and preserve the creative legacies of those who have experienced first hand the cost of endless militarization and war revanchism."
Brief description: Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, war, aesthetics, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Kapadia's award-winning first book, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press 2019) examines the radical experiments, freedom dreams, and queer world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the ongoing context of US war and empire in the Greater Middle East. In addition to co-editing the special issue of Surveillance & Society on "race and surveillance," Kapadia has contributed to numerous academic journals, edited volumes, and art catalogs. He is at work on a new book project, Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons, which examines queer and trans migrant futurisms in visual culture and performance art to develop a critical theory of healing justice and pleasure in the wilds of ecological chaos and US imperial decline.