Teaching Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary in the Human Rights and Literature Classroom

Abstract

This essay provides a case study of Slahi's Guantanamo Diary in order to demonstrate how a literary approach to contribute to the study of human rights by both demonstrating the necessity of human rights discourses and the ways in which they must be reconsidered in the current geopolitical moment. More specifically, I argue that reading the book in its larger legal and political context unveils the ideologies that promote torture in the name of state security. And, it offers a rebuttal to those ideologies through a critical analysis of the distribution of legal personhood and literary subjectivity in the context of Guantánamo.