Sargasso: Camps, (In)Justice, & Solidarity (2024)

Guantánamo What's Next? (an issue of Sargasso edited by Don E. Walicek and Jessica Adams)

Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, 2019

"Guantánamo and the Future"

Sargasso: A Journal of Literature, Language, and Culture, 2019

This Is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law's Afterlife in Guantánamo

Humanity, 2022

This article considers the role of visual materials in the afterlife of extraordinary state violence. It locates a series of drawings by Guantánamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah as embedded within and counter to the camp's existing visual grammar, where images of the camp and detainees work alongside state and legal violence to form the complex of forces that mark detainees as subjects to and subjects of (legal) death. Within these relations, detainee-produced drawings are vivid reminders of the tortured and forgotten bodies of state violence, and also the matter against which legal and political limits are both withdrawn and extended.

Guantánamo and American Empire; The Humanities Respond.pdf

Palgrave Macmillan, New Caribbean Studies, 2018

This 12-chapter volume explores the humanities as an insightful platform for understanding and responding to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, other manifestations of “Guantánamo,” and the contested place of freedom in American Empire. It presents the work of scholars and writers based in Cuba’s Guantánamo Province, Puerto Rico, and various parts of the US. Its essays, short stories, poetry, and other texts engage the far-reaching meaning and significance of Gitmo by bringing together what happens on the U.S. side of the fence—or “la cerca,” as it is called in Cuba—with perspectives from the outside world. Chapters include critiques of artistic renderings of the Guantánamo region; historical narratives contemplating the significance of freedom; analyses of the ways the base and region inform the Cuban imaginary; and fiction and poetry published for the first time in English. Not simply a critique of imperialism, this volume presents politically engaged commentary that suggests a way forward for a site of global contact and conflict.

CULTURAL RENDITIONS OF GUANTÁNAMO AND THE WAR ON TERROR

Humanity, 2022

This essay examines the Guantánamo Bay detention facility as a site and subject of intellectual and cultural production which can address aspects of the war on terror foreclosed by law and politics. The essay begins with prisoner Abu Zubaydah’s recent petition to the US Supreme Court and arguments there about state secrets privilege to shield evidence of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program (2002–2009) from disclosure. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s theory of democratic deliberative processes and “public things,” the essay then turns to Scottish creator/actor Freda O’Byrne’s one woman play, Rendition, for its efforts to make the public secret of the RDI program into a forum for public deliberation. Rendition‘s blend of evidentiary and imaginative discourses introduces the dossier’s larger themes of how prisoners used cultural expression to resist and survive abuse; cultural production as a window into Guantánamo’s situatedness in the Global South; and the obligations that come with cultural production for those who survive their Guantánamo imprisonment.

'This place is Australia itself': Manus, Guantánamo, and Embodied Literary Resistance in Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains

Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language & Culture, 2019

Manus Island in Papua New Guinea is called “Australia’s Guantánamo” by critics of its use as a detention site for refugees, including Behrouz Boochani, a poet, journalist, filmmaker, and refugee imprisoned there by the Australian government for almost six years. This essay explores the usefulness and limitations of Guantánamo as a metaphor to describe Manus and other sites in Australia’s offshore detention regime. In addition, it argues that Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) counters dis-placement and the dehumanization of refugees through literary language. Moving beyond testimony, Boochani produces a poetical, critical, and embodied response to Australia’s silencing and erasure of refugees. La isla de Manus en Papúa Nueva Guinea se conoce como "el Guantánamo de Australia" por las personas que critican su uso como lugar para la detención de refugiados, entre ellos el poeta, periodista y cineasta Behrouz Boochani. El gobierno australiano mantiene a Boochani preso en la isla, por casi ya seis años. Este ensayo explora la utilidad y las limitaciones del uso de Guantánamo como metáfora para describir Manus y otros lugares que forman parte del régimen de detención ultramarino de Australia. Además, sostiene que el libro No Friend but the Mountains (2018) de Boochani rebate el desplazamiento y la deshumanización de los refugiados mediante un lenguaje literario. Más allá del testimonio, Boochani responde a la invisibilización y al silenciamiento de los refugiados por el gobierno de Australia con una obra poética, crítica y empoderada.

Understanding Guantanamo Through Its Parallel with Slavery

Clean War, Invisible War, Liberal War

'Clean War, Invisible War, Liberal War: The Clean and Dirty Politics of Guantánamo' argues that the Global War on Terror (GWoT) now ranks as one of the costliest and most extensive wars of the last hundred years and is certainly one of the largest counter-terrorism operations in history. A war of this scale, however, ‘could not be initiated and sustained without widespread public consent or at least acquiescence … without beliefs and forms of knowledge [in this case] about the nature of terrorism and counter-terrorism’. And whilst there is an extensive literature exploring the GWoT in connection with the ‘Just War’ tradition and its interpretation, this chapter’s aim is to explore the ways in which ideas about what is ‘just’ are communicated, in this case to explore the interconnections between ‘just’, ‘humane’, and ‘clean’. As is argued here, Guantánamo in particular became a central plank in the US Administration’s efforts to produce constructions of the GWoT as a ‘clean war’ and maintain an image of the USA as a champion of human rights. To make this case, this chapter examines several of the ways in which Guantánamo served to physically embody the overall discourse of the USA as engaged in a ‘clean’ form of warfare. It did so through a construction of Guantánamo as precise, proportionate, legal, and ordered through practices of concealment, redefinition, and redirection, which are each addressed in turn. But it did so in the light of resistance to these practices, which are considered in the final section.

Indefinite Detention, Colonialism, and Settler Prerogative in the United States

Social & Legal Studies, 2018

Carceral Quarantine at Guantánamo: Legacies of U.S. Imprisonment of Haitian Refugees

Radical History Review, 2013

This article examines the case of nearly 300 HIV-positive Haitian refugees the US state indefinitely detained on its Guantánamo naval base from 1991 to 1994. It argues that the predicament of these refugees emerged out of a nexus of historical threads that became entangled at Guantánamo, including the US state's near absolute exclusion of Haitian refugees, the legacy of antiblack and anti-Haitian racism, the discourses of disease that were linked to Haitian bodies, and the history of US (neo)imperial interests in the Caribbean. Its analysis centers on legal discourses and key federal court cases leading to US anti-Haitian refugee policies, including Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti (1980) and Haitian Centers Council v. Sale (1993), while examining the history of Haiti's political economy and relation to the United States, as well as discourses of race, nation, and contagion as they relate to Haitian migrants.