Rightlessness
Subtitle: testimony and redress in U.S. prison camps since World War II
By: A. Naomi Paik
Series: Studies in United States culture; Studies in United States culture
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 313
ISBN-13: 9781469626314
Subjects: War on Terrorism, 2001-2009; Detention of persons; War and emergency legislation; Law and legislation; Detention of unlawful combatants; Prevention; Terrorism; Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp; Refugees; Legal status, laws; Haitians
Description: "In this bold book, A. Naomi Paik grapples with the history of U.S. prison camps that have confined people outside the boundaries of legal and civil rights. Removed from the social and political communities that would guarantee fundamental legal protections, these detainees are effectively rightless, stripped of the right even to have rights. Rightless people thus expose an essential paradox: while the United States purports to champion inalienable rights at home and internationally, it has built its global power in part by creating a regime of imprisonment that places certain populations perceived as threats beyond rights. The United States' status as the guardian of rights coincides with, indeed depends on, its creation of rightlessness. Yet rightless people are not silent. Drawing from an expansive testimonial archive of legal proceedings, truth commission records, poetry, and experimental video, Paik shows how rightless people use their imprisonment to protest U.S. state violence. She examines demands for redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War II, testimonies of HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo in the early 1990s, and appeals by Guantánamo's enemy combatants from the War on Terror. In doing so, she reveals a powerful ongoing contest over the nature and meaning of the law, over civil liberties and global human rights, and over the power of the state in people's lives"--Unedited summary from book cover.
Notes: Based on author's thesis (doctoral - Yale University, 2009) issued under title: Testifying to rightlessness : redressing the camp in narratives of U.S. culture and law.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-291) and index.
Table of contents: title: Internment remains : the 1988 Civil Liberties Act and racism re-formed; title: Residues of rightlessness : ghosts and the afterlife of internment; title: Just to stay alive : Haitian refugees and Guantánamo's carceral quarantine; title: Not a place to live : resisting rightlessness through word and body; title: Creating the enemy combatant: performances of justice and realities of rightlessness; title: Living in a dying situation: preserving life at Guantánamo; title: Conclusion.