The Enemy Combatant as Poet
The Politics of Writing in Poems from Guantanamo
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16715234 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Erin Trapp (0000-0001-8185-198X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2011-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Postmodern Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1053-1920 • E-ISSN: 1053-1920 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/pmc.2011.0023 |
| OpenAlex | W2058726570 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 22 |
Reviews of poetry written by Guantanamo detainees foreclose the aesthetic potential of the poems, and, as a result, contribute to contemporary human rights discourse’s depoliticization of the subject of human rights. Considering the poems within the field of “post-9/11 literature,” the essay proposes that the poems place the question of how to read the writing of the enemy at the center of this literature’s concern with the traumatic and affective consequences of 9/11. Instead of reading the poetic speaker within the framework of the “state of exception,” the essay asks how a political subject emerges from a position of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant denotes not only the unnamable negativity of empire, but the duplicity of this position of being assumed guilty and of assuming guilt for the crimes of others. The ambiguity of the enemy combatant as poetic speaker resists discernible efforts to provide a “close-up” of the figure of the terrorist turned victim. The poems work critically in a place otherwise rife with naïve assumptions about the self-evidence of testimony in expressive work. Along these lines, they are not merely documents of barbarism--neither of the barbarism suspected of them, nor of the barbarism of captivity to which they testify--but they are works that think through this “final stage” of the dialectic of culture and barbarism in post-9/11 culture
Art · Barbarism · Human rights · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Global Security and Public Health · History · Law · Philosophy · Torture, Ethics, and Law
Covering Islam
Modern Poetry of the Arab World
Intuitionists
Toward a Prison Poetics
Arabic Poetry
The Mute Immortals Speak
Ethnic Irony
Notes to Literature
Poems from Guantanamo
Giving an Account of Oneself
These Are Bad People" - Enemy Combatants and the Homopolitics of the "War on Terror
Autumn of the System
The Political Prisoner as Antihero
The Forgotten Face of Postcoloniality
Organic Shrapnel
Between past and future
The Close-Up
Paranoid Empire
Tortured Thoughts
War, Poetry, Mourning
Lyric Substance
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.13 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2018 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |