Week 11

In order to fully understand the political, social, and racial implications of the Japanese Internment camps or the military camp at Guantánamo Bay, it is first necessary to make sense of the political nature of camps in general. Agamben defines a camp as a “permanent spatial arrangement that remains constantly outside the normal state of law.” They are areas where national paternalism over racialized bodies both undermines and attempts to eliminate culture, political rights, and legitimate legal statuses. The notions of internment and camps cannot, as Agamben argues, be seen “as a historical fact and an anomaly that belongs nonetheless in the past, but rather in some sense as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live.” The camps at Guantánamo Bay exemplify the “ambiguous space[s]” that Agamben describes, in that they occupy a space within an “indefinite legal borderland between the domestic and foreign” (Kaplan 833, 847) and are clear representations of the continued subordination of peoples that delineates United States history. Although the Japanese and Japanese American experience differs greatly from that of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, both are nonetheless narratives of racial and political subjection. And despite the fifty years that span between the two, they both present a conflation of American political power and racialized imperialism.

The space that the camp embodies and the bodies that it affects are illustrative of the “military and political might and economic and culture power” that the United States exerts and “intimately shapes the contours of U.S. national identity” (Kaplan 833). Thus, through the normalizing forces created within the camps and the “alien” bodies that are therefore produced, the United States is creating identity based on negation. Just as whiteness is defined as the negation of blackness, citizenship is defined by the negation of those people who reside in spaces of political indeterminacy, where they belong to yet are not a part of the body politic. And because camps, internment, and national identity are based so highly on the physical bodies and people being subjugated, “the camp is…the most absolute biopolitical space…a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation” (Agamben 401). Whether through “conflicts over the cultural content of citizenship” or through the creation of “less than human [subjects] and [therefore] less deserving of human, international, or constitutional rights,” camps and internment are a powerful means for subordination and removal of any power. (Ngai 201/Kaplan 853).