The Tutelary Architecture of Immigration Detention Prisons and the Spectacle of ‘Necessary Suffering’

Pugliese, Joseph

doi:10.1080/13264820802216841

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 4 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…As it punishes, detention-as-spectacle also creates distance between the detainee and the citizen: the detainee is constructed as deserving of punishment and as the dangerous 'other' through rhetoric, practice and material infrastructure (cf. Pugliese 2008). Many politicians stigmatize migrants as exhibiting racial, religious, linguistic, or other culturally different attributes to make them appear socially inassimilable and thereby threatening and deserving of incarceration (e.g.…”

Section: Detention-as-spectaclementioning

confidence: 99%

Detention-as-Spectacle

Mainwaring

Silverman

2016

int polit sociol

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Using a combination of migration studies, political sociology, and policy studies, this paper explores the contradictions and violence of immigration detention, its architectures, and its audiences. The concept of 'detention-as-spectacle' is developed to make sense of detention's hypervisible and obscured manifestations in the European Union. We focus particularly on two case studies, the United Kingdom and Malta, which occupy different geopolitical positions within the EU. Detention-as-spectacle demonstrates that detention is less related to deterrence and security than to displaying sovereign enforcement, control, and power. A central aspect of the sovereign spectacle is detention's purported ability to order and even halt 'crises' of irregular immigration, while simultaneously creating and reinforcing these crises. The paper concludes by examining recent disruptions to the spectacle, and their implications.

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Section: Detention-as-spectaclementioning

confidence: 99%

Detention-as-Spectacle

Mainwaring

Silverman

2016

int polit sociol

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“…Guantánamo's architecture and control measures, highlights of its tours, not only reflected an iconography of the prison, but also actively shaped the visualities of the site. The razor wire, concrete walls, closed‐circuit televisions, and watch‐towers served as part of the “tutelary architecture” (Pugliese :210) of detention, with an important symbolic role to play in shaping understandings of Guantánamo. Its design and construction, however, also shaped the relations between those visiting and working and those detained by determining visualities.…”

Section: The Tourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materializing US Security: Guantanamo's Object Lessons and Concrete Messages

Veeren

2014

Int Polit Sociol

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While a growing body of literature working at the intersection of security and visual studies recognizes the value of studying images, how these visualities are produced is less theorized, especially with respect to materialities and their capacity to compel meanings. Analyzing the tours of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which have been arranged by the US military for VIP visitors since the site opened, this article argues that the selective organization and presentation of specific matter was image‐making and therefore meaning‐making. Through efforts to produce a spectacle of detention, Guantánamo was deliberately constructed as “safe, humane, legal, transparent”—in the process shifting the meaning of these very concepts. Guantánamo's tours as visual and material practices were therefore used to produce meaning in the debate over the future of the site and how best to secure the US state post‐9/11. They were part of the constitution of the war's legitimacy, leading, ultimately, to certain understandings of security. Guantánamo, with its “object lessons” and “concrete messages,” is therefore a useful case study for understanding security meaning‐making as produced by the interaction of linguistic, visual, and material domains and their elements.

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“…It is beholden not to have an objective but to prove its very existence' (Baudrillard 1995: 32). The information management characteristic of the tours and the military analyst programme was intended to communicate, to simulate through the 'telegenic spectacle' (Pugliese 2008) a reality of the GWoT as meaningful and purposeful. Second, this version of the reality of Guantánamo and the GWoT relied not only on the constitution of indefinite detention as necessary but also on a sanitized version of it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guantánamo does not exist: Simulation and the production of ‘the real’ GlobalWar on Terror

Veeren¹

2011

Journal of War & Culture Studies

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Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantánamo, the high-profile US military detention and interrogation operation, was established in January 2002 to house the 'worst of the worst' of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It nevertheless became a public spectacle that was essential for constituting the reality of a Global War on Terror. Through evolving media and VIP tours of the facilities coupled with the Bush administration's military analyst programme (a system of reverse embeds used to promote Pentagon messages within the U.S. media), Guantánamo became a simulation essential for producing the reality of the war. It became a key way to convince the public that the war was real and necessary, but also that its conduct was just and humane, and therefore, by extension, that the United States can be understood as 'good'. Through a triple screen of the tours, the visitors and their mediation, the telegenic spectacle of Guantánamo was transmuted into a reality of Guantánamo as 'safe, humane, legal and transparent'. The importance of this for producing understandings of the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT) bears closer examination. Without this triple screen, Guantánamo does not exist.

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The Tutelary Architecture of Immigration Detention Prisons and the Spectacle of ‘Necessary Suffering’

Cited by 25 publications

References 4 publications

Detention-as-Spectacle

Detention-as-Spectacle

Materializing US Security: Guantanamo's Object Lessons and Concrete Messages

Guantánamo does not exist: Simulation and the production of ‘the real’ GlobalWar on Terror

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