Teaching Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary in the Human Rights and Literature Classroom
PDF

How to Cite

Moore, A. S. (2016). Teaching Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary in the Human Rights and Literature Classroom. Radical Teacher, 104, 27–37. https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2016.263

Abstract

This essay provides a case study of Slahi's Guantanamo Diary in order to demonstrate how a literary approach to contribute to the study of human rights by both demonstrating the necessity of human rights discourses and the ways in which they must be reconsidered in the current geopolitical moment. More specifically, I argue that reading the book in its larger legal and political context unveils the ideologies that promote torture in the name of state security. And, it offers a rebuttal to those ideologies through a critical analysis of the distribution of legal personhood and literary subjectivity in the context of Guantánamo.
https://doi.org/10.5195/rt.2016.263
PDF

References

Ackerman, Spencer. 2015. “Bad lieutenant: American police brutality, exported from Chicago to Guantánamo.” The Guardian (London). 18 February.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/american-police-brutality-chicago-guantanamo.

_____. 2015. “Guantánamo torturer led brutal Chicago regime of shackling and confession.” The Guardian (London). 18 February. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-torture-chicago-police-brutality.

_____. 2015. “How Chicago police condemned the innocent.” 19 February.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/19/chicago-police-richard-zuley-abuse-innocent-man.

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

_____. 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Braziel, Jana Evans. 2006. “Haiti, Guantánamo, and the ‘One Indispensable Nation’: U.S. Imperialism, ‘Apparent States,’ and Postcolonial Problematics of Sovereignty.” Cultural Critique No. 64 (Autumn): 127-160.

Brooks, Peter. 2008. “The Humanities as an Export Commodity.” Profession: 33-39.

Brown, Wendy. 2002. “Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights.” In Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Wendy Brow and Janet Halley. 420-34. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Burkeman, Oliver. 2009. “Obama administration says goodbye to the ‘war on terror’, The Guardian 25 March.

Bush, George W. 2003. “Mission Accomplished.” Speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. 1 May.

_____. 2001. “You are either with Us, or with the Terrorists.” Speech before the US Congress. 21 September.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Cobain, Ian. 2015. “Shaker Aamer suffered ‘profound disruption of his life’ at Guantánamo.” The Guardian (London). 1 November. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/01/shaker-aamer-guantanamo-post-traumatic-stress-disorder.

Comaroff, Joshua. 2007. “Terror and Territory: Guantánamo and the Space of Contradiction.” Public Culture 19(2): 381-405.

Coll, Steve. 2004. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin.

Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate. 2008. “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.” 110th Congress. 20 November. Available at http://documents.nytimes.com/report-by-the-senate-armed-services-committee-on-detainee-treatment.

Danner, Mark. 2015. Review of Guantánamo Diary. The New York Times. 15 February.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/books/review/guantanamo-diary-by-mohamedou-ould-slahi.html?_r=1

_____. Forthcoming 2016. Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. New York: Simon &

Schuster.

_____. 2009. Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. New York: Nation Books.

Dawes, James. 2009. “Human Rights in Literary Studies.” Human Rights Quarterly 31(2): 394-409.

Douzinas, Costas. 2000. The End of Human Rights: Critical Thought at the End of the Century. Oxford: Hart Publishing.

The Economist. 2007. “Don’t Mention the GWOT.” 5 July.

http://www.economist.com/node/9441305.

Esmeir, Samera. 2012. Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Filkins, Dexter. 2008. The Forever War. New York: Knopf.

Greenberg, Karen J. and Joshua L. Dratel, eds. 2005. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Halliday, Fred. 2010. Shocked and Awed: A Dictionary of the War on Terror. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

“Interview with Lt. Colonel Stuart Couch.” 2007. Torturing Democracy. The National Security Archive and Washington Media Associates. 9 October.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/interviews/stuart_couch.html.

Kaplan, Amy. 2005. “Where is Guantanamo?” American Quarterly September 57(3): 831-858.

Melamed, Jodi. 2011. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Mullins, Greg. 2012. “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and Human Rights.” In Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature, ed. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. 120-32. New York: Routledge.

Naimou, Angela. 2015. Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures and the Debris of Legal Personhood. New York: Fordham University Press.

The New York Times. “The Guantánamo Docket.”

http://projects.nytimes.com/guantanamo/detainees/current.

_____. “Guide to the Torture Memos.”

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html.

Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. New York: Continuum.

_____. 2004. “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” South Atlantic Quarterly 103(2/3): 297-310.

Rejali, Darius. 2007. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press.

Slahi, Mohamedou Ould. 2015. Guantánamo Diary. New York: Little, Brown & Co.

Slaughter, Joseph R. 2015. “Vanishing Points: When Narrative Is Simply Not There.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, edited by Sophia A. McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. 109-125. New York: Routledge.

Taylor, Diana. 2007. “Double-Blind: The Torture Case.” Critical Inquiry 33: 710-33.