state of exception

Two years ago, when I took my first class in APA, a classmate said that he had never learned about Japanese internment in high school, had never known about it since college. Certain histories are ignored, erased, and conveniently forgotten: because how can we explain such gross violations of human rights and still believe in an ideal of American as an exceptional state when, really, it's a state of exception?

When we discuss concentration camps we think of Nazi Germany, images of evil dictatorships committing inconceivable acts of genocide. Racism on a grand scale. But racism removed from us, by time or place, things we think can never occur in our country, or our time. Yet in times of war, the boundaries of nations and national law become blurred, and (racial) difference becomes a marker of disloyalty. Racial profiling and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s or of Muslims in the present day create paradoxes of citizenship and foreignness, forming what Mae Ngai calls "alien citizens": those who are caught in a liminal non-space between belonging and not belonging.

Amy Kaplan frames Guantánamo Bay in a similar way: "Where in the world is Guantánamo?" she asks; "...to ask about the location of Guantánamo is to ask: where in the world is the United States?" (832) If the history of Guantánamo as a place caught between nations, both belonging and not belonging to both the United States and Cuba, then it also becomes an apt metaphor for the place of its detainees, who are and are not citizens of the United States, are and are not aliens. The creation of legal categories like "unincorporated territories" echoes Ngai's "alien citizens," conflating physical/legal spaces with physical/legal bodies. What better place to house undefinable subjects than in undefinable territories?