69 The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 4(1), pp 69–87 January 2017. © Cambridge University Press, 2017 doi:10.1017/pli.2016.32 The Genres of Guantánamo Diary: Postcolonial Reading and the War on Terror Yogita Goyal This essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’ s Guantánamo Diary (2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Reading Guantánamo Diary in relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the pol- itics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present. Keywords: postcolonial, slavery, race, genre, comparative reading At one moment in his wrenching account of unlawful detention and abuse, Guantánamo Diary (2015), Mohamedou Ould Slahi muses on his condition: “I often compared myself with a slave. Slaves were taken forcibly from Africa, and so was I. Slaves were sold a couple of times on their way to their final destination, and so was I. Slaves were suddenly assigned to somebody they didn’t choose, and so was I. And when I looked at the history of slaves, I noticed that slaves sometimes ended up an integral part of the master’s house.” 1 In a powerful analogy evoking Atlantic slavery to describe his own extraordinary rendition from Mauritania to Guantánamo, Slahi links a shameful past to an abusive present, suggesting paths to imagine lines of connection between then and now, here and there. Doing so fundamentally challenges the premise under which he was detained—that he represents, as Donald Rumsfeld claimed, the worst of the worst—and so deserves neither trial nor tribunal, accused of no crime but liable nevertheless for his race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and religion, a figure Yogita Goyal is an associate professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010), editor of the journal Contemporary Literature, and guest-editor of a 2014 special issue of Research in African Literatures on “Africa and the Black Atlantic.” She has received fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and the University of California’s president’s office. Her current project, Slavery and the Transnational Reinvention of Form, traces contemporary ideas of the global to the Atlantic slave narrative to rethink race and racial formation in a global frame. (Email: ygoyal@humnet.ucla.edu.) 1 Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary, ed. Larry Siems (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 314, further citations in text. https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2016.32 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. UCLA Library, on 03 Apr 2017 at 21:43:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at