Military Detention

This essay examines contemporary South Asian diasporic feminist visual art practices in response to the U.S. military’s global carceral archipelago. I analyze collaborative works by the Index of the Disappeared (Brooklyn-based artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani) and solo works by Berlin-based American artist Rajkamal Kahlon, focusing on their aesthetic incorporation of declassified documents detailing widespread abuses in military practices of imprisonment, torture, and interrogation. Unlike the state’s quest for abstraction, the artists affix warmth, touch, and sound to otherwise “cold” data, thereby transforming the administrative violence of the security state into an imaginative alternative archive of the disappeared. In so doing, their archives of “warm data” conjure alternate modes of knowing and feeling how empire’s gendered-racialized others resist and reiterate the U.S. forever warfare.

Keywords:
US military imprisonment, forever war, indefinite detention, medical autopsies, torture, aesthetics of transparency, warm data, marbling, collage, South Asian diasporas, insurgent aesthetics, archives

In this paper, I explore the complex economies of violence that circulate through the US military’s enactments of battlefield capture and military detainment. I highlight the ways that these practices relate to the humanitarian objective of carrying out warfare both for and with humanity. I first outline the emergence of an explicitly protective custody within the landscape of war, describing the broad historical contours of war prisoner treatment. I then detail the ways in which humanitarian law’s call to care for detained enemy bodies has itself become linked with highly specific forms of political and bodily violence. Next, I argue that this co-practice of care and violence in the camps is underpinned by a relational understanding of humanitarianism. Finally, I turn my attention to the ways in which the battlefield encounter has become an increasingly technical enterprise, one in which questions surrounding the ethical treatment of prisoners are subsumed into an evolving assemblage of spaces, means of data collection, and discursive performances that reframe the limits of military violence and generate new vulnerabilities.