A. Naomi Paik, Postdoctoral Fellow, Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Wednesday, October 7, 2009. 12 noon – 1:00 PM, AACC Lounge.

Topic: “You Don’t Have the Right to Have Rights”: Testimonial Representations of Enemy Combatants at Guantánamo
This talk considers how the U.S. state has produced rightless people through its practices of imprisonment in camps. It examines two cultural productions that represent the stories of “enemy combatants” imprisoned in Guantánamo—the docudrama film The Road to Guantánamo and the documentary play Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. Based on the testimonies of detainees and their advocates, these productions seek to uncover what lies behind Guantánamo’s barbed wire and intervene in a context in which the camps and their captives were both very visible, yet shrouded in secrecy and illusory information. This talk examines what is at stake in these productions’ basis in testimony and their translations of this form of evidence into the aesthetic mediums of film and theatre.

Biography: A. Naomi Paik is a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she will teach AAS 390: Race, Immigration, Rights, and Culture in spring 2010. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies and a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University. She recently completed her dissertation, Testifying to Rightlessness: Redressing the Camp in Narratives of U.S. Culture and Law, which reads testimonial narratives of subjects rendered rightless by the U.S. state through their imprisonment in camps..