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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2017
This essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Reading Guantánamo Diary in relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the politics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.
1 Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, Guantánamo Diary, ed. Larry Siems (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 314 Google Scholar, further citations in text.
2 Katharine Seelye, “Threats and Responses: The Detainees; Some Guantánamo Prisoners Will Be Freed, Rumsfeld Says,” New York Times, October 23, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/23/world/threats-responses-detainees-some-guantanamo-prisoners-will-be-freed-rumsfeld.html.
3 Halliday, Fred, Shocked and Awed: A Dictionary of the War on Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
4 George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20, 2001. http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.
6 http://larrysiems.com/ and http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo. See also the ACLU campaign to #freeslahi at https://www.aclu.org/feature/free-mohamedou-slahi.
7 Mamdani, Mahmood, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Harmony, 2004)Google Scholar, and Puar, Jasbir, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 In The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), Derek Gregory shows the connections among the War on Terror in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, as well as their relation to a longer history of British and American political, military, and economic involvement in the Middle East. He argues that the global War on Terror since 9/11 has become “one of the central modalities through which the colonial present is articulated” (13).
9 Giroux, Henry, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006)Google Scholar.
12 The app was rejected by Apple numerous times, until Begley retitled it “metadata+.” Begley explains his motivation: “I want it to be a living archive of hauntings—those which ghost the landscapes we create, and those which ghost the landscapes some of us will never have to see.” http://mashable.com/2014/02/07/apple-app-tracks-drone-strikes/#EIfC088wXmqH.
13 See gitmomemory.org, https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/ and https://www.iraqbodycount.org/. WarDiaries.Wikileaks.org is a website released by WikiLeaks in 2010 that contains documents covering events in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009.
14 Zhang, Sarah, “Teju Cole on the ‘Empathy Gap’ and Tweeting Drone Strikes,” Mother Jones, March 6, 2013. http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/03/teju-cole-interview-twitter-drones-small-fates Google Scholar.
15 Ibid.
17 See Quayson, Ato, “Introduction: Postcolonial Literature in a Changing Historical Frame,” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
18 Moretti, Franco, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan/Feb 2000): 54–68 Google Scholar, quotation on 56.
19 Derrida, Jacques, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 55–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Moretti, “Conjectures,” 66, 68.
21 See for instance, Colleen Lye and Jed Esty’s special issue on peripheral realisms, Modern Language Quarterly 73.3 (2012) and the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).
22 Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
23 For postcolonial responses to 9/11, see Spivak, Gayatri, “Terror: A Speech After 9/11,” boundary 2, 31.2 (2004): 81–111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ray, Sangeeta, “Postscript: Popular Perceptions of Postcolonial Studies after 9/11,” A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 574–583 Google Scholar; and Behdad, Ali, “Critical Historicism,” American Literary History 20.1–2 (2008): 286–299 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Gopal, Priyamvada and Lazarus, Neil, “Editorial. After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies,” New Formations 59 (Autumn 2006): 7–9 Google Scholar.
25 Lazarus, Neil, “Postcolonial Studies After the Invasion of Iraq,” New Formations 59 (Autumn 2006): 10–22 Google Scholar, quotations on 10, 11. Harvey, David, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
26 Pankaj Mishra, “Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi Review,” The Guardian, February 13, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/13/guantanamo-diary-mohamedou-ould-slahi-review-global-war-terror-witness.
27 Boehmer, Elleke and Morton, Stephen, “Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial,” Terror and the Postcolonial, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 1–24 Google Scholar, quotations on 7, 8, 15.
28 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 384 Google Scholar, 317.
29 Stoler, Ann Laura, “Introduction: Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and the Unseen,” Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotations on 9, 12.
30 Jonathan Schell, “Letter from Ground Zero,” The Nation, May 5, 2003, 8.
31 Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2003)Google Scholar. In a similar vein, for Michael Ignatieff, the 9/11 attacks mean that “America has now felt the tremor of dread that the ancient world must have known when Rome was first sacked. Then and now an imperial people has awakened to the menace of the barbarians” (“The Burden,” New York Times, January 5, 2003).
32 Schell, “Letter,” 8.
34 In his study of slavery across ancient and modern societies, Patterson defines social death for the slave as a violent uprooting from a social milieu and depersonalization in order to create a kind of nonbeing. A change of name, shaving of the head, branding, or other visible marks of servitude often accompany the process of stripping the slave of natality, honor, and power (Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982]).
35 Quoted in McClintock, Anne, “Paranoid Empires: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe, 13.1 (2009): 50–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 71.
36 Hartman, Saidiya, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
37 Kaplan, Amy, “Where Is Guantánamo?” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005); 831–858 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 831.
38 McClintock, “Paranoid Empires,” 66.
39 Deborah Pearlstein worries about the “claustrophobic nature of the genre” in “Book Review: Guantánamo Diary,” Washington Post, January 20, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-guantanamo-diary-by-mohamedou-ould-slahi/2015/01/20/98196a40-9b40-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html?utm_term=.56778fe69265.
40 Slaughter, Joseph, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Anker, Elizabeth, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 Harlow, Barbara, “‘Extraordinary Renditions’: Tales of Guantánamo, A Review Article,” Race and Class 52(4), 2011: 1–29 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 2.
43 Scott Korb, “Guantánamo Diary and the American Slave Narrative,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2015. Korb cites the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (editor of The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: New American Library, 1987) to make his case.
44 Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1861] 1988)Google Scholar. For accounts of narrative features of slave narratives, see Andrews, William, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Carby, Hazel, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Fisch, Audrey, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Foster, Frances Smith, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
45 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), 62 Google Scholar.
46 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
47 Mishra, “Guantánamo Diary.”
48 Quoted in Weber, Elisabeth, “Guantánamo Poems: ‘Guantánamo, amas, amat,’” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, 2.1–2 (Spring/Fall 2013): 159–182 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 159.
49 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
50 Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 61–62 Google Scholar.
51 Quoted Butler, Precarious Life, 73.
52 The Amnesty International statement is quoted by Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo?” (831). Mark Danner, New York Times, January 20, 2015.
53 Stoler, Ann Laura, “Introduction: ‘The Rot Remains’: From Ruins to Ruination,” Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 1–35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 22.
54 Butler, Precarious Life, and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009).
