Across the pine forests and deserts of America, there are mock Middle Eastern villages, mostly hidden from public view. Containing mosques, restaurants, street signs, graffiti in Arabic, and Iraqi role-players, these villages serve as military training sites for cultural literacy and special operations, both seen as crucial to victory in the Global War on Terror. In her gripping and highly original ethnography, anthropologist Nomi Stone explores US military predeployment training exercises and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players employed within the mock villages, as they act out to mourn, bargain, and die like the wartime adversary or ally. Spanning fieldwork across the United States and Jordan, Pinelandia traces the devastating consequences of a military project that seeks to turn human beings into wartime technologies recruited to translate, mediate, and collaborate. Theorizing and enacting a field poetics, this work enlarges the ethnographic project into new cross-disciplinary worlds. Pinelandia is a political phenomenology of American empire and Iraq in the twenty-first century.
Nomi Stone is an award-winning anthropologist and poet. An Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas, she was most recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton. She is author of two ethnographic collections of poetry, Stranger's Notebook and Kill Class, and her poems appear in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and widely elsewhere.
"Welcome to Pinelandia—the historic training ground for US imperialism—where the violent ambitions of empire are rehearsed daily. Nomi Stone maps the fantasies and poetics supporting US militarism today—an astonishingly original book."—Joseph Masco, author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
"Nomi Stone vividly conveys the absurdities she observed in simulated wars in US military communities using ruminative poetry and poetic prose. A wonder of a book."—Catherine Lutz, author of Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century
"An insightful, poetic, and ethnographic treatment of the workings and ambivalences of empire and its subjects, and a delicate exploration of the cooptation of Iraqi refugees in the US-led War on Terror in the Middle East."—Omar Dewachi, author of Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq
"This is an extraordinarily original, timely, and powerful book. It traces the shifting lines of alliance and enmity that comprise the realities of Iraq in the days immediately following the American occupation in 2003 and through the subsequent years of disillusionment and renewed divisions. Nomi Stone does this in a highly inventive and unexpected way through ethnographic accounts crafted from the domestic landscapes of US military predeployment training. While remaining ostensibly safe within the 'homeland,' Stone’s account nonetheless manages to convey the profound brutality of militarism within as well as beyond US borders."—Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Lancaster University
308 pp.6 x 9
9780520344365$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Oct 2022