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The Genres of Guantánamo Diary: Postcolonial Reading and the War on Terror

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2017

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Abstract

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.

Keywords

postcolonialslaveryracegenrecomparative reading
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Postcolonial Reading Publics , January 2017 , pp. 69 - 87
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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.

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5 https://www.theguardian.com/world/guantanamo-diary.

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.

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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).

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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.

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32 Schell, “Letter,” 8.

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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]).

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