Call for Chapters

Guantánamo and the Empire of Freedom

America’s “founding father”
Thomas Jefferson championed a vision of economic prosperity and moral virtue
that was dependent upon an expansive “Empire of Liberty” with Guantánamo, Cuba
as one of its key sites.  The
haunting paradox of his words alludes to the many layers and contradictions
that cluster around the Caribbean site known today as the Guantánamo Bay Naval
Station.  

Guantánamo was a site of Taíno resistance to conquest, providing
ground for an indigenous response to physical violence, forced conversion to
Christianity—and ultimately, decimation. Later, during the Ten Years War, Creoles
and Africans formed alliances here against Spanish colonialism.  Soon thereafter, it figured in negotiations
concerning a US lease, and the autonomy that the Republic of Cuba would enjoy
as a free state.  In the years that
followed, Guantánamo became deeply symbolic of the socialist state’s opposition
to US imperialism.  


Guantánamo has also served as a staging ground for the US invasions
of Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. It served as a US detention
center for people fleeing their homelands in fear of persecution, including thousands
of HIV-positive Haitian refugees and political asylum seekers.  


In its current incarnation as “Gitmo,” a US military prison
and base of operations in the “Global War on Terror,” it is deeply implicated
in the redefinition of human rights, freedom of expression, international laws
and treaties, and understandings of universal democracy. 


Guantánamo has thus consistently been at the center of
changes in individual identities, as well as how powerful groups reconfigure not
only their relations with each other, but entire epistemologies.  


Guantánamo’s contemporary legacy compels us to reflect on
the concept of freedom in Western capitalist democracies—a freedom that is
founded on, and still struggling with, restrictions dating back to the onset of
modernity: early experiments in
colonization and plantation slavery;
achievements of emancipation and national liberation; and devotion to
commercial and military expansion. 
In so doing, it points to connections between the enslavement of
millions of people of African ancestry in the “New World” and the war on terror
stemming from the events of 9/11.  


The proposed volume, to consist of an introduction and 7–8
essays, will examine Guantánamo as a node of global contact and conflict in the
Caribbean using lenses traditionally associated with the Humanities.  Our project aims to reinvigorate these
disciplines as a necessary and highly practical platform for engaging some of
the most controversial political issues of the early twenty-first century.  

We
welcome contributions from scholars in the fields of American Studies, Cultural
Studies, Performance Studies, Caribbean Studies, Social Anthropology, Critical
Discourse Analysis, and related areas. 


We
also welcome contributions and input from former refugees, detainees, base
employees, military personnel, and others personally linked to Guantánamo.


The
editors encourage nontraditional and creative scholarly approaches, such as
those associated with fictocriticism, ethnopoetics, historical ethnography, and
related modes of interdisciplinary analysis. Essays might consider links
between Guantánamo and: 

 

 * Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” and the
Atlantic world

* People as property (e.g., the enslaved, the indentured,
soldiers, prisoners, detainees)

* The politics of subject formation (e.g., independentistas, patriots, refugees,
terrorists, the unlawfully incarcerated, detainees)

* Contemporary fiction and
literatures of confinement (e.g., detainee poetry and art, testimony, legal narratives)

* Cuban responses to the US military base, including those of writers,
artists, labor groups, and politicians

* US invasions of Haiti and policies toward Haitian refugees

* Post 9/11 realities in societies in the circum-Caribbean
(e.g., restrictions on freedom, movement, dissent, trade, debt)

* The War on Terror and Barack Obama’s promise to close “Gitmo”


* Ideologies of resistance, solidarity, and
sacrifice in the Middle East and “Global South”

* Performance and protest (e.g., Mos Def’s response to force
feeding, hunger strikes, and peaceful protests)

* New media, surveillance, and technologies of power

* Specific awareness-raising academic
initiatives (e.g., Columbia University’s Guantánamo Public Memory Project, the UC
Davis Guantánamo Testimonials Project)

* Caribbean Studies as a political project

* Commemoration, remembrance, reconciliation, and restorative
justice

 

 

A major university press has expressed interest in
this project.  The editors will confirm the publisher once precise content
has been determined.  


Please send
one-page abstracts to project editors Jessica Adams and Don E. Walicek at [log in to unmask]
by August 1, 2014.  Abstracts
should identify what is new and helpful about the proposed contribution. The
deadline for full articles is December 1, 2014.  Potential contributors should
feel free to write with any comments or questions.