Beyond the Crosshairs: Reimagining Drone Museum Exhibitions for a Post-Imperial Future

• In Event: Militarism, Memory, and Media

Abstract

As museums continue to shape public perceptions of U.S. military projects overseas, the challenge of representing drone warfare still remains an urgent ethical and curatorial concern. This paper critically reimagines the museum space and its possibilities by using the Intrepid Museum’s 2017 “Drones: Is the Sky the Limit?” exhibition as a case study while proposing an alternative curatorial framework that resists the normalization of U.S. military drone operations. The Intrepid Museum, a former aircraft carrier turned military and space museum in New York City, framed its 2017 drone exhibition as an exploration of both military and civilian applications of drone technology. While the exhibition showcased the historical evolution of drones and their increasing role in modern society, it largely downplayed the ethical concerns associated with military drones, focusing instead on their technological advancements and future applications. The exhibit’s narrative contributed to the blurring of distinctions between military and civilian drones, portrayals of drone technology as an inevitable and beneficial, and the minimization of civilian casualties and surveillance by focusing on the traumas of American drone pilots.
Drawing from Museum Studies, Visual Culture Studies, and War Studies, this paper explores how a decolonial approach could challenge audiences to grapple with both the physical and affective realities of drone violence: What happens when exhibitions center the perspectives of those targeted by the drones daily rather than those who control them? How might museums shift from celebratory narratives of drone technology to critical interrogations of empire, surveillance, and violence? Inspired by works such as National Bird (2016), Insurgent Aesthetics (Ronak K. Kapadia, 2019), and the Aesthetics of Drone Warfare project, this paper proposes an alternative exhibition model that incorporates interactive installations, archival materials, and multimedia art to help visitors visualize the structural and racialized violence of drones. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of those surveilled and targeted by drone warfare, the exhibition aims to disrupt the prevailing narratives that cast drones as technological marvels or inevitable tools of modern warfare.
Ultimately, this paper argues that drone exhibitions must move beyond passive ethical contemplation and actively confront the imperial logics that sustain contemporary drone warfare. By centering counter-narratives and decolonial perspectives, museums can serve as sites for imagining futures beyond militarized airspace and perpetual surveillance.

Biographical Information

Sarah Jung is a first-year PhD student in American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, with a BA and an MA in English Literature from Boston College. Her research focuses on the representation of military history and technology in popular culture. In 2024, she defended her MA thesis, The Cultural Politics of Drone Warfare, which examines contemporary war films, museum exhibits, and video games that engage with the ethics and aesthetics of drone technology. Her work interrogates how cultural narratives shape public understandings of military violence and surveillance, as well as exploring the production of counter-narratives in reinforcing or contesting hegemonic representations of warfare. Her previous research projects include the representation of US-Asia relations in Life magazine articles prior to the Korean War and South Korean-produced Vietnam War films in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This semester, she is teaching an introductory American Studies writing course, in which she is incorporating discussions on racialization, indigenous narratives, gender, and sexuality. In the last three semesters, Sarah has taught an undergraduate course on "American Culture and the Arts" that focuses on various aspects of U.S. pop culture such as captivity narratives, Western films, tourism and militarism in Hawai'i, Fu Manchu narratives, WWII photography, plantation museums, and post-9/11 American cinema. She also has experience as a teaching assistant for a freshmen American Studies course and Asian and American cinema courses.

Author

• Sarah Jung, University of Hawai'i at Manoa