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Encountering the “Muslim”: Guantánamo Bay, Detainees, and Apprehensions of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2019

Safiyah Rochelle Open the ORCID record for Safiyah Rochelle [Opens in a new window]
Safiyah Rochelle*
Affiliation:
Doctoral Candidate Department of Legal Studies Carleton Universitysafroc@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article focuses on the underlying sensorial entanglements that linger in spaces and moments of encounter between state violence and its targets. It argues that in Guantánamo Bay, these entanglements become routed through the bodies of the camp’s detainees, and they rely upon a particular reading of religion as being borne by bodies in such ways as to necessitate the use of specific techniques of detention and incapacitation. This discussion is framed using the notion of “apprehension,” in its affective and material forms, wherein perception, dread, and physical encounters in the camp unfold within a framing of Muslims as ontologically and materially distinct, and as being embodied in particular ways. In these processes of apprehension, the techniques and logics of violence deployed in the war on terror become further legitimated, and work reflexively to shape the ways in which the Muslim is known, encountered, and met with violence.

Résumé

Cet article se penche sur les interactions sensorielles fondamentales qui persistent dans les espaces et les moments de rencontre entre la violence étatique et ses cibles. Cet article suggère qu’au camp de Guantánamo Bay, ces interactions sont acheminées à travers le corps des détenus et que celles-ci reposent sur une interprétation particulière de la religion comme étant portée par les corps de manière à nécessiter l’utilisation de techniques spécifiques de détention et de neutralisation. Cette discussion s’appuie sur la notion d’« appréhension » dans ses formes affectives et matérielles. Dans ce camp, la perception, la peur et les contacts physiques se présentent en effet dans un contexte où les personnes musulmanes sont considérées comme ontologiquement et matériellement distinctes et comme étant incarnées d’une manière particulière. Dans ces processus d’appréhension, les techniques et les logiques de violence déployées dans la guerre contre le terrorisme trouvent une légitimité et agissent de manière réflexive afin de façonner la manière dont on connaît les Musulmans, entre en contact avec eux et les réprime.

Keywords

Guantanamo Baydetention campMuslim bodystate violencewar on terrorGuantanamo Baycamp de détentioncorps musulmanviolence étatiqueguerre contre le terrorisme
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 34 , Special Issue 2: Vers une déstabilisation du sensorium du droit: Étude de la jurisprudence des sens / Troubling Law’s Sensorium: Explorations in Sensational Jurisprudence , August 2019 , pp. 209 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association / Association Canadienne Droit et Société 2019 

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Footnotes

*

Prior versions of this research were presented at The Othered Senses: Law, Regulation, Sensorium, workshop held at Concordia University. The author would like to thank the workshop organizers, Sheryl Hamilton and David Howes, the participants, and the editors and anonymous reviewers of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society for their encouragement, comments, and suggestions. Research for this article was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) grant “Law and the Regulation of the Senses: Explorations in Sensori-Legal Studies.” Special thanks to Christiane Wilke, whose guidance and feedback greatly enhanced the work offered here.

References

1 See, for example, Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010);Google Scholar Butler, Judith, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising , ed. Gooding-Williams, Robert (New York: Routledge, 1993);Google Scholar Haley, Sarah, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Crenshaw, Kimberle, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Colour,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Threadcraft, Shatema, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wilcox, Lauren B., Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The notion of embodiment, as both Bernadette Wegenstein and Katherine Hayles argue, is one that can be understood as distinct from the body. Wegenstein notes that this distinction is rooted in the work of cultural theory, which sought to draw a “…differentiation between the body as a static concept – a biological given – and the body as the basis of concrete and historically situated experience.” The body, as Hayles holds, can be held in contrast to embodiment, which is “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment thus refers to how particular subjects live and experience being a body dynamically, in specific, concrete ways.” See Wegenstein, Bernadette, “Body,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. Mitchell, W. J. T. and Hansen, Mark B. N. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 20;Google Scholar Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993);Google Scholar Said, Edward, Orientalism (Middlesex: Penguin Press, 1978);Google Scholar Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1993.Google Scholar

4 Johns, Fleur, “Guantánamo Bay and the Annihilation of the Exception,” European Journal of International Law 16, no. 4 (September 2005): 613–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 While the creation of new legal categories like “detainee” and its predecessor label, “enemy combatant,” were attempts by the American government to circumvent international conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war, the genealogy of the legally ambiguous term “detainee” speaks also to the manner in which Guantánamo’s prisoners occupy a particular kind space between meaning and non-meaning, both legally and politically. See Center for Constitutional Rights, “Rasul v. Bush,” accessed July 20, 2015, https://ccrjustice.org/home/what-we-do/our-cases/rasul-v-bush; Fleur Johns, Non-Legality in International Law: Unruly Law (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013); Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013); Wilke, Christiane, “War v. Justice: Terrorism Cases, Enemy Combatants, and Political Justice in U.S. Courts,” Politics and Society 33, no. 4 (2005): 637–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State,” UCLA Law Review 57, no. 1477 (2010): 1480

7 I draw here on the work of Lauren Wilcox, who argues that the historical trajectory of liberal notions of subjectivity or subjecthood, rooted in the rational, autonomous, and free individual, have led to “a radical disjunction between subjects and bodies; bodies are the necessary condition, the sine qua non of politics, but are outside politics itself, as their use is to fulfill the aims of subjects.” See Wilcox, Bodies of Violence, 22.

8 See Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” The British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2008): 1–23; Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Amy Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 831–58; Anne McClintock, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe 13, no. 1 (2009): 50–74; Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49 (2002): 1575–1600.

9 Alexa Koenig, “From Man to Beast, Social Death at Guantánamo,” in Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration, and Solitary Confinement, ed. Alexa Koenig and Keremat Reiter (London: Palgrave, 2015), 225. The identity of the detainee is anonymized.

10 Derek Gregory, “The black flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 414. It is worthwhile to note that these images also worked to iterate detainees as specific kinds of raced subjects, in keeping with Guantánamo’s location and its specific colonial history. Under lease to the United States since 1903, the bay has been used variously as a signpost of American imperial presence and as a detention center for unwanted refugees. As Amy Kaplan argues, these photographs conjured up “stereotypes of the colonized, immigrants, refugees, aliens, criminals, and revolutionaries [which] intertwined with those of terrorists and identified [detainees as] racially marked bodies in an imperial system.” See Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo,” 840.

11 Butler, Judith, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising , ed. Gooding-Williams, Robert (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18–20Google Scholar

12 See Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Shadow and the Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003). This, of course, does not mean that visual practices and photography cannot be otherwise. As Coco Fusco notes, “photography offers the promise of apprehending who we are, not only as private individuals but as members of social and cultural groups.” Coco Fusco, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003): 13.

13 Pugliese, Joseph, “Compulsory Visibility and the Infralegality of Racial Phantasmata,” Social Semiotics 19, no. 1 (March 2009): 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 74, emphasis added.

15 Chad Shomura, “‘These are Bad People’ – Enemy Combatants and the Homopolitics of the ‘War on Terror,’” Theory & Event 13, no. 1 (2010): 11. https://muse.jhu.edu.

16 Butler, Precarious Life, 73–74.

17 Kaplan notes that “although the government has lumped them together as terrorists, al Qaeda members, and Islamic extremists, their identities are extremely varied. They speak as many as seventeen different languages; many are immigrants or the children of immigrants to different nations around the world.” Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?”, 840.

18 McClintock, “Paranoid Empire,” 58.

19 It should be noted here that a central justification for transporting prisoners for detention to Guantánamo Bay was the “fact” that these men were members of the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda (and therefore enemy combatants) or were connected in some (often indirect) way to the 9/11 attacks. However, framing this detention as therefore a form of collective punishment is complicated by the American government’s failure to prove these links in any substantive way when it comes to a number of detainees. For example, wearing “drab olive clothing” was used as evidence of a detainee’s enemy combatant status; in the case of Uighur detainees, the fact that they “were Muslim,” and “were in Afghanistan” was initially considered sufficient evidence of their status. See Mark Denbeaux, Joshua Denbeaux, David Gratz, John Gregorek, “Report on Guantánamo Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data,” Seton Hall Law Review 41, no. 4 (2011): 1224, 1229.

20 Colin Dayan, “Legal Terrors,” Representations, 92, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 65, emphasis added.

21 Gregory, “The black flag,” 415.

22 Butler, “Sexual Politics,” 13.

23 Shomura, “These are Bad People,” 10.

24 Ibid., 11.

25 Ibid., 18.

26 Michael Welch, “Guantánamo Bay as a Foucauldian Phenomenon: An analysis of penal discourse, technologies, and resistance,” The Prison Journal 89, no. 1 (2009): 7.

27 Joseph Pugliese, “Biotypologies of Terrorism,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 1 (January 2008): 52.

28 Ibid., 54.

29 Ibid., 54.

30 Butler, Precarious Life, 74.

31 Pugliese, “Biotypologies,” 53.

32 Wilcox, Bodies of Violence, 104.

33 Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA interrogation, from the cold war to the war on terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006).

34 Mark Benjamin, “The CIA’s Favorite Form of Torture,” Salon, June 7, 2007, https://www.salon.com/2007/06/07/sensory_deprivation/ (accessed April 20, 2018).

35 Wilcox, Bodies of Violence, 103.

36 David Smith, “Guantánamo Hunger Striker Accuses Officials of Letting Him ‘Waste Away’,” The Guardian, October 13, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/13/guantanamo-bay-khalid-qasim-hunger-strike (accessed January 28, 2019).

37 Muneer Ahmad, “Resisting Guantánamo: Rights at the brink of dehumanization,” Northwestern University School of Law 103, no. 4 (2009): 1755.

38 See Joseph Pugliese, “Reflective Indocility: Tariq Ba Odah’s Guantánamo hunger strike as a corporeal speech act of circumlocutionary refusal,” Law and Literature 28, no. 2 (2016): 121. Pugliese recounts the case of detainee Mohammed al-Tumani, who cut his wrists and smeared his blood on the walls of his cell, in order to write “country of injustice is America.”

39 Of the nine men who have died at Guantánamo, six are suspected of committing suicide. See “Guantánamo: Facts and Figures,” Human Rights Watch, March 30, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2017/03/30/guantanamo-facts-and-figures (accessed January 20, 2019).

40 See Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The politics of human weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Corinna Howland, “To Feed or Not to Feed: Violent State care and the contested medicalization of incarcerated hunger-strikers in Britain, Turkey and Guantánamo Bay,” New Zealand Sociology 28, no. 1 (2013): 101–16; Keramet Reiter, “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance within the structural constraints of a US supermax prison,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 3 (2014): 579–611.

41 Chandra Russo, “Witness Against Torture, Guantánamo, and Solidarity as Resistance,” Race and Class 58, no. 2: 18.

42 Jeremy Varon, “Fighting racism and torture from Ferguson to Guantánamo,” January 18, 2015, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/18/fighting-racism-and-torture-ferguson-guantanamo (accessed January 20, 2019).

43 Ahmad, “Resisting Guantánamo,” 1759.

44 Ibid, 1763.

45 George J. Annas, “Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo – Medical Ethics and Human Rights in a ‘Legal Black Hole,’” New England Journal of Medicine 355 (September 2006): 1377.

46 Ibid, 1377.

47 George J. Annas, “American Vertigo: ‘Dual Use,’ Prison Physicians, Research, and Guantánamo,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 43, no. 3 (2011): 637.

48 Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, “Gitmo is Killing Me,” The New York Times, April 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/15/opinion/hunger-striking-at-guantanamo-bay.html (accessed January 19, 2019).

49 Tim Golden, “Tough U.S. Steps in Hunger Strike at Camp in Cuba,” The New York Times, February 9, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/politics/tough-us-steps-in-hunger-strike-at-camp-in-cuba.html (accessed April 20, 2018).

50 Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt, “Force-Feeding at Guantánamo is Now Acknowledged,” The New York Times, February 22, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/world/middleeast/forcefeeding-at-guantanamo-is-now-acknowledged.html (accessed April 20, 2018).

51 Ibid.

52 Jason Leopold, “Guantánamo Now Calls Hunger Strikes ‘Long-Term Non-Religious Fasts,’” Vice News, March 11, 2014, https://news.vice.com/article/guantanamo-now-calls-hunger-strikes-long-term-non-religious-fasts (accessed April 20, 2018).

53 Golden, “Tough Steps in Hunger Strike.”

54 Kristine A. Huskey and Stephen N. Xenakis, “Hunger Strikes: Challenge to the Guantánamo Detainee Health Care Policy,” Whittier Law Review 30, no. 783 (Summer 2009): 795.

55 Ibid., 784.

56 Howland, “To Feed or Not to Feed,” 110.

57 Howell, “Victims or Madmen?,” 41.

58 Howland, “To Feed or Not to Feed,” 112.

59 Russo, “Witness Against Torture,” 17.

60 Julian Borger, “Donald Trump Signs Executive Order to Keep Guantánamo Bay Open,” January 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/30/guantanamo-bay-trump-signs-executive-order-to-keep-prison-open (accessed January 20, 2019).

61 See Sohail Daulatzai, who argues that making distinctions between domestic forms of penal detention and what occurs in other “structures of imperial imprisonment” takes away from the fact that “the legibility of ‘terrorists’ as detainees, as well as their treatment within (Guantánamo Bay) is made possible through the domestic politics of race and incarceration.” Sohail Daulautzai, “Protect Ya Neck: Muslims and the Carceral Imagination in the Age of Guantánamo,” Souls 9, no. 2 (2007): 139.

62 Russo, “Witness Against Torture,” 16.