Cataloguing Destruction in Sinan Antoon's Book of Collateral Damage" - Mark Firmani (Amherst College)
Our first talk is with Mark Firmani from Amherst College.
Abstract: In this paper, I argue that studying fiction can help us excavate the relationship among international law and state violence in our contemporary moment. Through my reading of Sinan Antoon’s novel, The Book of Collateral Damage (2018; published in Arabic as Fihris in 2016), I demonstrate how the International Humanitarian law doctrine of collateral damage relies on narrative mechanisms for its legitimacy. These mechanisms erase the specificity of individual Iraqi civilians killed during the invasion and occupation, subsuming them into an anonymous mass whose deaths—deemed collateral to purportedly legitimate military aims—fail to interrupt the exercise of U.S. state violence. While the logic of collateral damage long has sustained imperial power, its naturalization as a moral operation largely remains unchallenged in liberal theories of international law. Turning to fiction illuminates the moral inadequacy of the doctrine of collateral damage and offers paths beyond it. Antoon’s formally innovative novel, I argue, restores Iraqi civilians to a central position in international legal discourse and practice, challenging the erasure that licenses their death and destruction. Such restoration, I posit, destabilizes both the purported moral stability of this particular doctrine as well as the purported moral integrity of the international legal system as a whole. In doing so, Antoon’s novel exemplifies how literature can expose the imaginative economy of international law as a space of struggle with material stakes.