Genre’s Judgment

Abstract

This article investigates the published torture allegations of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen detained as a terror suspect in Guantanamo Bay for more than three years before his release without charge in January ZOo5. It considers the way in which particular genres (such as public speeches or television interviews) are able to confer or withdraw legitimacy from the one who tries to speak of torture. In particular, this article shows that the conventions of the interview (such as the modality of the question) effectively repeat rather than simply report the conditions of violence to which Habib bore witness, and frame him as a guilty man in advance of his testimony. Moreover, this genre deprives Habib of the power to testify in his own idiom, relegating him to the domain of the Differend (Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1988) In addition, the political and popular response to Habib’s testimony has focused principally on discrediting his claims. Despite these exceptional rhetorical challenges, this article argues that Mamdouh Habib has produced a manifesto of insurrectionary speech about torture in the War on Terror, and makes possible the future recontextualisation of his words into more hospitable genres.