War and the Arts: Guantanamo, Twenty Years On

Catalog description

In January 2002, the first captives in the so-called “War on Terror” were flown to the Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for indefinite periods of detention that for some lasted over twenty years. More than a century earlier, in 1901, the Platt Amendment was signed into U.S. law, enabling the lease “in perpetuity” that gives the U.S. military exclusive use of the forty-square mile naval station, despite the Cuban government’s objection. Participants in this seminar will assess the legal and political arguments that have structured “Guantánamo” as an exceptional space, of grave concern to human rights advocates and scholars. At the same time, however, and drawing on poetry, art and memoirs by detainees and military personnel at the base and by Cubans living near its border, we will consider an alternative Guantánamo of sympathies, solidarities and shared space.