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The interrogation scenes of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party are often interpreted as absurd or symbolic. However, I argue that the scenes provoke recognition of complicity and theatrically position the audience as interrogator and interrogated through use of indeterminacy, laughter, nonsense, and terror. Moreover, torture techniques from the CIA Interrogation & Manipulation Manual are presciently executed in the play. The play's interrogators deploy nonsense and indeterminacy as torture, destroying the ontological certainty of the interrogated, and these methods mirror the CIA Manual's 'Alice in Wonderland' technique and 'theory' of 'regression'. In this essay, real interrogations emerge as dangerously theatrical, and nonsense as a potential means of grievous harm. Additionally, I consider the implications of this analysis in relation to Mohamedou Ould Slahi's memoir Guantánamo Diary. Slahi's memoir includes multiple instances of how unsettling metaphors of fictional works are invoked or paralleled by actual interrogation and torture. Furthermore, analysis of the memoir complicates this essay's examination of the roles of nonsense, laughter, and indeterminacy, as Slahi shows how laughter ties to normalisation, how nonsense relates to incompetence, and how that incompetence is a corollary of the fantasy of order and absolutes that interrogators enact, a fantasy with irreparable consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research article critically analyses the photographs and illustrations that have been used to support arguments about Omar Khadr. Khadr was a 15-year-old who was captured by the US in Afghanistan, transferred to Guantanamo Bay where he was charged with murder and submitted to US interrogation. Throughout this process both supporters and opponents of Khadr have used pictures to support their claims. By examining and discussing these images it is possible to detect biases and prejudices that attempt to sway and influence the reader to the particular ideology of the writers. The article studies in depth images both for, and against, Khadr. It shows the different, printing and illustrating techniques that add menace to existing photographs, or soften the image for a more peaceful approach. In particular, it subjects the image of Khadr's damaged body being assisted by soldiers to a critical analysis to reveal what it really shows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking its cue from Alexander Weheliye’s question ‘What does hunger outside the world of Man feel like?’ this essay examines the politics of hunger as exemplified in Omar Khadr’s refusal to eat in Guantánamo Bay prison during a series of interrogations in 2003 by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Drawing on Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez’s documentary You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo (2010), which uses the camera footage of these interrogations, the author locates Weheliye’s question in the context of Guantánamo to explore the political implications of what she calls carceral gastronomy, one that concerns how the imperial state and its functionaries mete out livability through the control and management of appetite. In this encounter between the state and the prisoner, viands serve a manifold function: mediating the relationship of power to those subjected to it; facilitating the emergence of bodies manageable through food; bringing out the colonial genealogies of the ‘War on Terror’; providing the means with which to resist the carceral regime; foregrounding the colonial life of food and feeding; and, finally, racialising the distribution of food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a reading of Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed movieHunger, which tells the story of the hunger strike of Bobby Sands in light of contemporary hunger strikes around the world and especially in Guantánamo (ongoing at the time of writing). The central concern of the essay is to readHungertogether with Horkheimer and Adorno'sDialectic of Enlightenment, showing how both works problematize the sacrificial subjectivity of enlightenment, its instrumental rationality, and sovereign temporality, while advancing a devastating critique of Western civilization. I argue thatHungersituates the high-security prison within the self-destructive tendency of enlightenment and depicts how self-sacrificial resistance emerges as a response to sovereign domination. Interpreting the figure of Bobby Sands as the reversal of Odysseus in the encounter with the Sirens, I explore how insurgent sacrifice interrupts the dialectic of enlightenment and points to a new configuration of subjectivity and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Kafka's fable ‘Before the Law’ the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo (2004–2005) similarly inscribed a territory, a space and a speculum where the sovereignty of the state was performed as the event of withholding of law. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the law itself is securitized and subjected to an extraordinary rendition and consigned to a black site from which all other black sites are authored and transmitted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines intra-Caribbean migration and transnationalism through the case of anglophone Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in Cuba. In seeking an explanation for the resurgence of English-speaking Caribbean associations in Cuba during the 1990s, it explores the historical trajectory of this group from the time of arrival through the 1959 Revolution to the present. In addition to providing a narrative of the experience of this particular group of Anglo-Caribbean/Afro-Latin American/African diasporic subjects and illuminating the continuities and discontinuities in transnational practices over time, I argue that this case of West Indian Cubans expands the notion of the transnational social field itself beyond the sending and receiving countries, particularly for those who lived in Guantánamo and worked on the US naval base. I also argue that this case clearly, and perhaps dramatically, demonstrates the primacy of the state in regulating transnational processes and provides insights into how second and third generation immigrants, who are very rooted in their national identity, can become agents of transnational and Diasporic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo, the high-profile US military detention and interrogation operation, was established in January 2002 to house the 'worst of the worst' of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It nevertheless became a public spectacle that was essential for constituting the reality of a Global War on Terror. Through evolving media and VIP tours of the facilities coupled with the Bush administration's military analyst programme (a system of reverse embeds used to promote Pentagon messages within the U.S. media), Guantánamo became a simulation essential for producing the reality of the war. It became a key way to convince the public that the war was real and necessary, but also that its conduct was just and humane, and therefore, by extension, that the United States can be understood as 'good'. Through a triple screen of the tours, the visitors and their mediation, the telegenic spectacle of Guantánamo was transmuted into a reality of Guantánamo as 'safe, humane, legal and transparent'. The importance of this for producing understandings of the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT) bears closer examination. Without this triple screen, Guantánamo does not exist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the likely mental and related physical health consequences of prolonged exposure to common stressors to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba? Significant distress leads to high rates of psychiatric disorders, medical problems, and functional impairments. The consequences are severe, physically and psychologically, affecting the individual, his or her family, and the culture at large. Damaging conditions endured by detainees are multiple and severe and are reviewed here in detail. The author identifies parallels between Guantanamo detainees and similarly mistreated populations (e.g., prisoners of war, asylum seekers, prisoners) to draw inferences from existing research regarding likely outcomes for Guantanamo detainees. Protective factors normally present are systematically disrupted at Guantanamo. Overall, it is likely that detainees and their families are experiencing significant mental and physical health problems as a result of overlapping severe and chronic stressors related to detention and that this will worsen over time, particularly in the absence of appropriate assessment and treatment. The author addresses political and ethical factors, as well as basic implications for assessment, treatment, and advocacy, although these are not the focus of the article. Researchers and clinicians will face challenges in providing care for this population and understanding the long-term effects of such mistreatment. Sources reviewed are current up to September 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piece explores the intimacies between U.S. prisons and the emergence of imperial imprisonment in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo. This global archipelago of imprisonment centers around the figure of the Muslim, who haunts the geographic and imaginative spaces of American empire. Whether it be the crackdown on African American Muslims within U.S. prison regimes or the emergence of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, this piece explores the cartographies of American power that link the domestic prison to the colony in the "War on Terror." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]