Abstract
Erin Trapp’s essay, “Redacted Tears, Aesthetics of Alterity: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary” explores the (so far) only extensive narrative written in English by a detainee of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay Cuba. Trapp examines Slahi’s diary as an example of what she calls an aesthetics of alterity. This kind of aesthetic stance, according to Trapp, is one in which the modern liberal subject, one largely defined by the cultural logic of late-late capitalism, meets its complete antithesis in the alterity of the detainee—a subject that is not a subject in any conventional sense of the term. This alterity manifests itself in Slahi's diary through the numerous erasures and blackouts of the United States government censors. As Trapp argues, these erasures and absences are what speak to Slahi’s status as both a subject within the sphere of late-late capitalist logic and also as one who exists completely outside of that space. Trapp’s subtle reading of the redacted diary is an attempt to come to terms with a writing that is both a record of detainment and the record of an absence, a text that is both art and a political record of an ongoing struggle.
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Notes
- 1.
Angela Davis’s foundational Are Prisons Obsolete? develops this continuity.
- 2.
In 2011, the Associated Press reported that in the decade following 9/11, 35,000 people were convicted of terror worldwide. See Martha Mendoza, “Global Terrorism: 35,000 Worldwide Convicted for Terror Offenses Since September 11 Attacks”. A widely circulated article from MSNBC in 2005, “U.S. has Detained 83,000 in Anti-Terror Effort”, found that the United States had detained 83,000 people. The project Costs of War (Lutz et al.), first published in 2011, claims that the United States has detained hundreds of thousands of people since 9/11.
- 3.
As Sexton and Lee describe, structurally, the experience of blackness is qualitatively different from other experiences of subalternity because it is “constituted by violence in the first ontological instance” (1019). In “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”, Wilderson argues that prison abolition work that ignores the “unthought category of the slave” misidentifies capitalism’s primal desire—slavery, not exploitation; terror, not hegemony—and its “structuring metaphor and primary target”: the black body (28).
- 4.
This process is described in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s account in Toward a Global Idea of Race of the way that the transparent I produces the subaltern “other” as affectable I. Compare D.W. Winnicott’s account of destroying and then using an object in “The Use of an Object” in Playing and Reality.
- 5.
Thinking the continuity, as Avery Gordon does in “Methodologies of Imprisonment”, emphasizes the function of incarceration in empire and uses it to critique US imperial power. In “Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib”, Jared Sexton and Elizabeth Lee argue that focus on the “cruel and unusual” nature of torture in Abu Ghraib creates the possibility to focus on prisoner abuse rather than the “nature of imprisonment as such”.
- 6.
On March 22, 2010, US District Judge James Robertson ordered Slahi’s release as a result of the habeas corpus case. This decision was appealed by the Department of Justice and Slahi’s release has never been granted. See Lyle Denniston, “Caution Urged in Detainee Cases”, for details of the release order and its appeal. As Siems notes, his imprisonment depended upon the government’s ability, in 2010, to persuade the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to “accept a looser standard for judging whether a prisoner was ‘part of’ al-Qaeda” (xliii). See also Peter Tinti, “A Postcard from Guantánamo: How Mohamedou Ould Slahi Became a Suspected Terrorist, Then a Best-Selling Author”.
- 7.
See “Ex-G.I. Writes about Use of Sex in Guantánamo Interrogations” and Erik Saar and Viveca Novak’s Inside the Wire: A Military Intelligence Soldier’s Eyewitness Account of Life at Guantánamo.
- 8.
This representational scheme is perpetuated in consideration of the exceptionalism or trauma of post-9/11 culture. See for example Kristine A. Miller’s edited volume Transatlantic Literature and Culture After 9/11 and Literature After 9/11, edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn.
- 9.
In “Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment and the War on Terror”, Avery Gordon argues that the continuity between military prisons abroad and domestic US prisons can be materially located in the overlap of civilian and military prison personnel (45). For a discussion of the use of former state corrections officials in Iraqi prisons, see Sohail Daulatzai, “Protect Ya Neck: Muslims and the Carceral Imagination in the Age of Guantánamo”.
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Trapp, E. (2016). Redacted Tears, Aesthetics of Alterity: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary . In: Fragopoulos, G., Naydan, L. (eds) Terror in Global Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40654-1_4
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