Introduction: The First Glimpse
In January 2002, the first photographs of the GuantĂĄnamo Bay detention camp were released for public viewing. Taken by US Navy photographer Shane T. McCoy and released by the Pentagon, the photos showed the newly constructed Camp X-Ray, a makeshift prison designed to hold suspected terrorists rounded up in some of the first military campaigns in Afghanistan. In them, the world saw GuantĂĄnamoâs new arrivals for the first time: orange uniform-clad prisoners, arms shackled, and blindfolded, kneeling in the gravel as U.S. soldiers hovered above their bent bodies. One photograph showed a prisoner being dragged toward a staunch line of waiting soldiers. Behind the prisoners, the camp was gridded by chain-linked fences, rocky pathways, and spiky coils of barbed wire. With the release of these images, GuantĂĄnamo was no longer simply a geographic locale or a noun in a White House press release. It became a symbol of the confusion and panic of our post-9/11 world, embodying both dismay for the treatment of the prisoners and relief at a seemingly quarantined threat. It was a place where our political leanings and anxieties played out contradictorily and without remittance.
These early photographs of GuantĂĄnamo were among the most prominent visual renderings of the extensions of state power in a post-9/11 world. But while these extensions played out trenchantly in the treatment of GuantĂĄnamoâs detainees, they also, often invisibly, exerted effects on the daily lives of the American public. Increased surveillance of those suspected of terrorist activities, close monitoring of telephone calls and emails, and the creation of new bureaucratic bodies to manage airport and border security were among the multitude of policies and practices created under the Bush administration and rationalized in the name of a seeming national emergency. For the most part, public debate was silenced in the name of acting swiftly for the sake of public safety. In the post-9/11 climate of widespread panic and fear, the argument that we needed to take immediate and aggressive action was one easily made. Secrecy and tightly controlled decision-making processes replaced open deliberation. Soon such measures which were once abnormal and temporary became âpart of the taken-for-granted world of âhow things areâ⊠influencing how we perceive and talk about everyday life, including mundane as well as significant eventsâ (Linke and Smith 2009, 64). In the 13 years since 9/11, as Mark Danner (2011) writes in The New York Review of Books, we have existed in a âsubtly different country, and though we have grown accustomed to these changes and think little of them now, certain words still appear often enough in the newsâGuantĂĄnamo, indefinite detention, tortureâto remind us that ours remains a strange Americaâ (para. 2). The normalization and broad acceptance of such mechanisms poses a real challenge and mandate to create forums that stimulate a public response, one that, like the release of Camp X-Rayâs photos, works as a kind of âshockâ to public consciousness and provides a jolting reminder that we do in fact live in a âstrange America.â
A number of individuals and organizations have provoked these jolts of consciousness through their engagements with heightened national security post-9/11, many of which have had a significant impact on public consciousness. Journalists, filmmakers, activists, and artists have created forums and works of art that subvert the argument that extralegal practices during times of heightened national security are necessary and lawful. Films like Taxi to the Dark Side (Blumenthal and Gibney 2007), WikiLeaksâ (2011) release of classified documents on GuantĂĄnamoâs detainees, and former National Security Administration (NSA) contractor Edward Snowdenâs revelations about the NSAâs telephone and internet surveillance programs (Gellman 2013) are but a few examples of the potent efforts to defy the much-propagated image of post-9/11 security initiatives as safeguards that are limited in scope and âcleanâ (Van Veeren 2013). These mediums and media appear to effectively foment public outrage and awareness. However, it is unclear whether these forums, despite their availability, push the US public to wrestle with our vulnerability to the same extralegalities to which GuantĂĄnamoâs prisoners are bound. How do we, then, process and think through the notion that GuantĂĄnamo is not an instance of things that happen to other people but is one mechanism of a larger structure of state power that increasingly exerts its effects on us all?
Locating GuantĂĄnamo in Virtual Place
Located on a 45-square mile spread in Cuba, the site has operated as a US naval base since 1903, when Cuba and the United States entered into a perpetual lease agreement that permitted its sole jurisdiction and control over the area. The base was subsequently converted into a detention camp for Haitians and Cubans seeking asylum in the 1990s, which prepared the space for its present function as a repository for âunlawful combatants,â most held without charge or trial (Johns 2005; âReporter reflects On Obamaâs stalled effort to close GuantĂĄnamoâ 2014). Soon after September 11, 2001, inmatesâpersons suspected of terrorist activity and arrested in military campaigns in Afghanistanâwere brought to GuantĂĄnamoâs Camp X-Ray, the temporary outdoor prison space that soon gave way to a âstate of the artâ prison facility named Camp Delta.
At the time of this writing, GITMO holds 40 detainees, with approximately 780 persons detained over the course of its operations. Despite promises from the Obama administration, GITMO remained open. The complicated process of repatriation to their former home countries has slowed the transfer of âlow-threatâ prisoners. In January 2018, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to maintain the prisonâs operations, later asking Congress in his State of the Union address âto continue to have all necessary power to detain terroristsâ (Neuman 2018, para 3).
GuantĂĄnamoâs critics consider the prison as indicative of a âstate of exception,â or a legal climate put into effect when the normal legal order is suspended, and new policies, practices, and structures are folded into the legal order by an executive body, often in the name of national security or emergency (Danner 2011; Hussain 2007). This broad outline of the state of exception originates with the German political philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt (1922), who argued the survival of the state depends on its capacity to target and eliminate an âenemyâ who poses a threat to the stateâs territories. In cases of âextreme peril, [which constitute] a danger to the existence of the stateâ (Schmitt 1922, 6), the stateâs sovereign power puts the existing legal order aside and institutes a state of exception. The theory of a state of exception was expansively reconsidered by the continental political philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998, 1999, 2005). In Agambenâs formulation, an executive authority determines whose life is worth living and who will be abandoned by the polity, left to persist in a suspended state between life and death, inclusion and exclusion.
The state of exception is, however, more than a legal concept or analytic construct. It materializes in the concentration camp, in prisons, or in other kinds of buildings that exclude and hold persons during times when exceptional laws and practices become the norm. What happens when these places of exception become places for teaching and learning? When visitors enter and walk through these places, they take in the outlines and shape of the landscape, the architectures, and constraints of the built environment. They immerse in the palpable sensations of a prison camp, exposed to the stories and memories of those who were incarcerated while being in the actual site.
As GuantĂĄnamo stretches the limitations of intelligibility, so does the pedagogical challenge it poses in representing the âbare livesâ (Agamben 1998) that inhabit its environs. Deborah Britzman (1998) describes a âdifficult knowledgeâ in which the learner must âengage in the limit of thoughtâwhere thought stops, what it cannot bear to know, what it must shut out to think as it doesâ (156). In yet another line of thinking, Elizabeth Ellsworthâs (2005) body of work on outside-of-school pedagogy instructively posits structures of thinking and feeling that allow learning the unbearable. According to Ellsworth, âanomalousâ places for learningâsuch as public art, memorial sites, and museumsââinvite sensations of being somewhere in between thinking and feeling, of being in motion through the space and time of learning as a lived experience with an open, unforeseeable futureâ (Ellsworth 2005, 17).
In this chapter, I examine two virtual materializations of the prison at GuantĂĄnamo Bay, Cuba: Gone Gitmo and the GuantĂĄnamo Bay Museum of Art and History. In 2007, journalist and filmmaker Nonny de la Peña and the media artist Peggy Weil created Gone Gitmo, a virtual re-creation of GuantĂĄnamo in a platform called Second Life. In this blazingly colorful digital replica of GuantĂĄnamo, visitors could experience the prison âfirst-handâ on the web. A few years later, in 2012, the GuantĂĄnamo Bay Museum of Art and History, a web-based art museum premised on the imaginary closure of the prison, opened its digital doors. The website features the work of several artists who respond to the prison via mixed-media, photography, and art installations. It also provides articles and other educational materials, as well as detailing a speculative hi...