What Is a Camp?

This week's reading illuminated the duplicitous nature of the 'camp', which was further exacerbated when a character on the TV show I was watching (Gossip Girl) threatens, "...What happens at camp doesn't have to stay at camp." Though it often does, hence the purpose of creating camps in the first place.

Agamben explores the modern development and historic application of concentration camps, beginning with the Schutzhaft of Prussian government in the mid-19th century. Here, the Schutzhaft meant 'protective custody', unique in that it was internment outside the jurisdiction of state and martial law. The attrocities commited within state-regulated camps are allowed, even approved, because camps are "...born out of the state of exception" (Agamben). They are the physical realization where exception becomes the rule of thumb, unregulated by the laws and common sense of 'normal space'.

I found my jaw dropping as I read through "Where Is Guantanamo?" The acts committed against detained Arab and Muslim terrorists are still part of recent memory, but those committed against the immigrating Haitians and Cubans constituted new knowledge. Forced HIV testing? Three years in a barbed wire shack? 30,000 Cubans? Moreover, the arrogance and deviousness of the Bush administration in declaring Cuba's "ultimate sovereignty" was new as well, as I had been unaware of the language that dictated the sovereignty of Guantanamo. I was reminded as I was reading; Obama shut down Guantanamo. But I found myself wondering, if Guantanamo is indeed at such a convenient nexus between Latin America and America, the border of the U.S. amidst a communist regime, is it actually closed? Or is it simply easier to say it's gone and pretend the inhumane containment of humans never existed?

Either way, it's like summer camp, where tweens are thrown together at random for a summer and eventually let loose. What happens at camp stays at camp. But it doesn't have to.