Guantanamo and U.S. Imperialism

This week's readings, Amy Kaplan's "Where is Guantanamo?" and Giorgio Agamben's "What Is a Camp?" both point to questions of nationhood, exceptionalism, sovereignty, and imperialism. I did not know the full history of Guantanamo, so reading about how the Platt Amendment set the groundwork for the United States to maintain authority over this land, without applying American constitutional limits to the practices that the U.S. employs there. That the U.S. was still sending checks of about 4 thousand dollars (which the Cuban government refused to cash) is so telling of the formalities that the American government recognizes as proof of our right to the globe. As Kaplan so wonderfully puts it, there is an intense "hierarchy between recognition and consent, rendering Cuban sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay contingent on the acknowledgment of the United States, in exchange for which Cuba agrees to cede sovereignty over part of the territory it never controlled" (Kaplan 863). The idea of Guantanamo as a "launching pad" for military interventionism signals the ways that Cuba and other Latin American countries have been subjugated by treaties couched in international diplomacy, when in actuality they are codifying American global imperialism.

Agamben's essay "What Is a Camp?" references his work on the State of Exception. We can read Guantanamo exactly in the context of the camp that Agamben describes: "the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live" (Agamben 38.8). He says, "The camp is the space that opens up whe nthe state of exception starts to become the rule" (38.9). We see this in Kaplan's article, when the courts rule repeatedly that the territory of Guantanamo is exempt from constitutional boundaries, or when the courts refuse to officially name where in the world Guantanamo lies. In addition, the racializing of bodies and the racializing of non-citizens that takes place in Guantanamo only serve to further establish the permanence of the camp that Agamben names. I came out of this wonder, are we in "a period of permanent crisis," as Agamben might suggest (42.3)?


I did some research because I wanted to know what happened to the detainees from Guantanamo who, according to Obama, are supposed to be released by now.
I stumbled upon this article, written today, that concludes with a statement from the Obama administration recognizing that their projected deadline for shutting down the camp will most likely not be met. Though Obama made it clear that one of his first intentions in office was to shut down this camp and end these unlawful, undefined, unregulated, and unsituated practices, the "camp" at Guantanamo Bay remains today:

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/15/content_12458768.htm