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Abstract
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.”
Notes
Gil Scott-Heron, Secrets, Arista Records, 1976.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15(1) (Winter 2003): 11–40.
Loic Waquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration,” New Left Review 13 (January–February, 2002).
Kaplan, Amy The Anarchy of Empire In the Making of U.S. Culture (Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 1.
Ibid.
The comparisons between those held within U.S. prisons and those held within prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and other secret detention centers are complex. For example, how are those detained in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and other places “criminalized”? For challenging a racist occupation? Being swept up by U.S. military forces for being of age to potentially resist the American presence? Or simply being in the “wrong place at the wrong time?” Regardless, their imprisonment is an extension of a centuries-long model of colonial counter-insurgency, but what about African Americans in U.S. prisons—how have they been “criminalized”? If, according to Loic Waquant, they are a product of a whole apparatus of control that dates back to plantation slavery, Jim Crow segregation and the emergence of the “ghetto,” then can the criminalization and incarceration of African Americans be viewed similarly? I raise these concerns because to “criminalize,” to incarcerate, and to execute are all actions of state power that are the organizing logic of American hegemony that has racial, political, economic, and historic roots dating back to the eras of formal slavery and colonialism. And so those in captivity classified as “enemy combatants,” “prisoners of war,” “criminals” or any other category, must be viewed as political captives subject to the extremities of power of a white-supremacist state-building apparatus.
Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, p. 12.
See Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997): Thomas Bortelsmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2000).
Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, p. 12.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 8.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 24.
This rhetoric of multi- and trans-national state violence has centered itself around the Muslim body—a biopolitics of race and power that has insinuated itself within mainstream discourse in multiple ways and that sees the Muslim as menace and threat that is at once ever-present yet phantom-like in his invisibility. More specifically, I am interested in the post-9/11 public discourse and display of Muslim bodies—both literal and figurative—as the site of excess and the perverse. What do we make of the fascination with the Muslim body and the highly politicized nature of these discourses: the heightened surveillance and tracking of Muslims within and across borders and the gendered and sexualized metaphors that fear Muslim penetration into national bodies, the employment of biological metaphors about the threat of “cells” of terror, the continual discussion of suicide bombing and the fear of the Muslim body as a weapon itself, the continual manipulation of the discourses of Muslim women, of the veil, and the contested nature of their bodies as sites for projecting racist notions of freedom and repression, the brutal parade and spectacles of killed or captured “terrorists,” the heinous photos from Abu Ghraib, the “debates” about the efficacy of torture, and even the literal disappearance of thousands of Muslims both in the United States and abroad, including the legal no man's land of Guantánamo Bay?
Alan Gomez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972,” Radical History Review, Issue 96 (Fall 2006), p. 60.
Avery Gordon, “Supermax Lockdown” found at 〈http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=18365〉.
Ibid.
Leah Caldwell, “From Supermax to Abu Ghraib,” found at 〈http://www.counterpunch.org/caldwell10152004.html〉.
Gordon, “Supermax Lockdown.”
Caldwell, “From Supermax to Abu Ghraib.”
Quoted in Anne-Marie Cusac, “Abu Ghraib, USA,” The Progressive (August 6, 2004), found at 〈http://www.alternet.org/story/19479/〉.
Ibid.
Gordon, “Supermax Lockdown.”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Megan Garvey and Richard Winton, “City Declares War on Gangs,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2002, p. A1.
Pamela Hess, “Analysis: Police Take Military Counsel,” found at 〈http://lapd.com/article.aspx?a=4150〉.
Ibid.
Ibid.
These alarmist rhetorical strategies have a history that date back to the rise of the Nation of Islam, particularly in the 1950s and '60s as well as during the uprisings in Los Angeles in 1992 when the gang truce was brokered with the help of the Nation of Islam. In addition, the case of Jeff Fort and the El Rukns in the 1980s, an offshoot of the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago, is another prominent case in point.
Pamela Hess, “Analysis: Police Take Military Counsel,” found at 〈http://lapd.com/article.aspx?a=4150〉.
Waquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.”
“A Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Selection of Muslim Religious Services Providers,” from the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Justice, April 2004. Available at 〈http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/0404/final.pdf〉.
Hess, “Analysis: Police Take Military Counsel.”
Quoted in “US: Prisons Are Breeding Grounds For Muslim Terrorists,” found at 〈www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/002992.html〉.
Testimony before the World Affair Council of Pittsburgh, “Stopping Terrorists Before They Strike: The Justice Departments Power of Prevention,” April 16, 2006.
“Out of the Shadows: Getting Ahead of Prisoner Radicalization,” A Special Report by the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, p. iv, 2006.
Bill Berkowitz, “American Muslims: A Clear and Present Danger?,” found at 〈http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Jun2003/berkowitz0603.html〉.
Ibid.
Kathleen Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: American Law and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 84.
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 81.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 88.
Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, p. 12.
See Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) for an excellent history of African American Islam.
Personal interview, August 2006.
Marvin X and Faruk X, Islam and Black Art: An Interview With Leroi Jones,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: Black Arts Movement, Jeff Decker, ed. (Detroit: Gale, 1984), p. 128.
Nas, “Last Real Nigga Alive,” God's Son, Sony Music, 2002.
Amiri Baraka, “Somebody Blew Up America,” found at 〈http://www.amiribaraka.com/blew.html〉.
Michael Eric Dyson, Open Mike: Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion, (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), p. 27.
Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Rap DNA, unpublished.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.