‘Extraordinary renditions’: tales of Guantánamo, a review article

Abstract

The opening of Guantánamo as a US detention centre in the initial phase of the ‘war on terror’ in January 2002 and its continuing existence almost a decade later have spawned a vast body of literature and cultural production: political commentary, personal accounts of detainees, memoirs, fiction, legal analysis, film, documentary, reconstruction, and so on. In this major review of Guantánamo literature, which foregrounds work by Moazzam Begg, Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, Anna Perera and Clive Stafford Smith, the author analyses the whole field to shed light not simply on the interconnections and disjunctions between the various modes of representation, but also on how the works serve, in different ways, the aim of closing Guantánamo for good, and what they reveal about the nature, imperatives and relationship to international law of the US state.