Abstract
This chapter explores the role that art made by Guantánamo Bay detainee Moath al-Alwi plays in building an alternative visual archive of the detention camp. It asks: How can art made under such circumstances both reveal and challenge the conditions of possibility that both form and sustain the camp? I argue that Moath’s art offers powerful moments of counter-visualization that disrupt the visual archiving work of the state, where this visual archive is central to the structures and forms of violence that characterize the detention camp. Moath’s boats mount and build an alternative visual archive of the camp that ruptures the complicity of the visual to power, and in doing so, seizes a right to look, to see, and to be seen.
Art’s transformative potential … does not recede with time; it banks up like storm clouds; it deepens like a coastal shelf.
—Manderson (2018, 15)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Within carceral confinement, Tina Campt refers to “the racialized index” as producing prisoners as “subjects to be seen, read, touched, and consumed as available and abject flesh objects and commodities, rather than as individual bodies, agents, or actors” (33).
- 2.
Anden-Papadopoulos refers to such visuals as “‘pegs’, not to [a] particular event but to larger stories that reflect[ed] and reinforce[d]” narratives around the narratives of the War on Terror.
- 3.
In his use of the term (non)scene, Wall draws on the work of Dylan Rodriguez, who coined this phrase. See Dylan Rodríguez, “(Non) scenes of captivity: the Common Sense of Punishment and Death,” Radical History Review vol. 96 (2006), pp. 9–32.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Anden-Papadopoulos, Kari. 2008. The Abu Ghraib Torture Photographs: News Frames, Visual Culture, and the Power of Images. Journalism 9 (1): 5–30.
Biber, Katherine. 2018. The Art of Bureaucracy: Redacted Ready-mades. In Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, Critique, ed. Desmond Manderson, 286–310. University of Toronto Press.
Brown, Michelle. 2014. Visual Criminology and Carceral Studies: Counter-Images in the Carceral Age. Theoretical Criminology 18 (2): 176–197.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso.
———. 2005. Photography, War and Outrage. PMLA 120 (3): 822–827.
Campt, Tina. 2012. Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Daulautzai, Sohail. 2007. Protect ya Neck: Muslims and the Carceral Imagination in the Age of Guantánamo. Souls 9 (2): 132–147.
Fleetwood, Nicole R. 2020. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Fortin, Jacey. 2017. Who Owns Art from Guantánamo Bay? Not Prisoners, U.S. Says. The New York Times, 27 November. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/us/guantanamo-bay-art-exhibit.html.
Grant, Daniel. 2022. US Government Withholds Art Made by Detainees at Guantánamo Bay. The Art Newspaper, 31 October. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/10/31/guantanamo-detainee-art-withheld-us-government.
Gregory, Derek. 2006. The Black Flag: Guantánamo Bay and the Space of Exception. Geografiska Annaler: Series, Human Geography 88 (4): 405–427.
———. 2012. Dis/Ordering the Orient: Scopic Regimes and Modern War. In Orientalism and War, ed. Tarak Barkawi and Keith Sthanski, 151–176. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gregos, Katerina. 2020. The Transformative Power of Art in the Prison Context and Its Perception. The Art of Crime, November. https://theartofcrime.gr/the-transformative-power-of-art-in-the-prison-context-and-its-perception/.
Gunter, Joel. 2022. The Sudden Silencing of Guantánamo’s Artists. BBC News, 29 August. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62399826.
Imtiaz, Saba. 2018. Footprints: Artworks From Guantánamo. Dawn, 2 January. https://www.dawn.com/news/1380170/footprints-artworks-from-Guantánamo.
Kaplan, Amy. 2005. Where is Guantanamo? American Quarterly 57 (3): 831–858.
Kell, Dara, and Veena Rao. 2021. A Ship from Guantanamo. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007783198/a-ship-from-guantanamo.html.
Liu, Jasmine. 2022. Guantánamo Detainees Ask Biden to Free Their Art. Hyperallergic, 13 October. https://hyperallergic.com/769470/Guantánamo-bay-detainees-ask-biden-to-free-their-art/.
Manderson, Desmond. 2018. Imaginal Law. In Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, Critique, ed. Desmond Manderson, 3–23. University of Toronto Press.
McClintock, Anne. 2009. Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Small Axe 13 (1): 50–74.
McKay, Carolyn. 2018. Video Links from Prison: Court ‘Appearance’ Within Carceral Space. Law, Culture & Humanity 14 (2): 242–262.
Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton et al. Indiana University Press.
Miller, James. 2017. Art Made in Guantánamo is Now US Property. Art Newspaper, 4 December. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2017/12/04/art-made-in-guantanamo-is-now-us-property.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011a. The Right to Look. Critical Inquiry 37 (3): 473–496.
———. 2011b. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke University Press.
Pink, Sara. 2012. Advances in Visual Methodology. Sage.
Rochelle, Safiyah. 2022. This is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law’s Afterlife in Guantánamo. Humanity 13 (3): 378–398.
Rodríguez, Dylan. 2006. (Non) Scenes of Captivity: The Common Sense of Punishment and Death. Radical History Review 96: 9–32.
Rose, Gillian. 2007. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. Sage Publications.
Rosenberg, Carol. 2008. Photos Echo Years Later. Miami Herald. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article1928720.html.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science 2: 87–109.
———. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, 2009.
Wall, Tyler. 2014. Staring Down the State: Police Power, Visual Economies, and the ‘War on Cameras’. Crime Media Culture 10 (2): 133–149.
Young, Alison. 2018. Illicit Interventions in Public Non-Spaces: Unlicensed Images. In Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, Critique, ed. Desmond Manderson, 310–330. University of Toronto Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rochelle, S. (2024). A Sea Without a Shore: Toward Building an Alternative Visual Archive of Guantánamo Bay. In: Moore, A.S., Swanson, E. (eds) The Guantánamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath Al-Alwi . Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37656-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37656-6_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-37655-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-37656-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)