Desktop versionMobile version

Terror and its Representations

 | 
Larry Portis
, 
Joseph Zitomersky

Part II. Terror and cultural expression

Terror and Territoriality: Imperial Sovereignty and Jurisdictional Ambivalence in Early American Discourse

Gesa Mackenthun

Full text

1The American history of terror begins in the early settlement period, long before the American Revolution. In order to understand the phenomenon, it must be shown how two concepts—terror and territoriality—are somehow related in American (and maybe not only American) cultural history. The two following textual instances serve to demonstrate how the terms can be seen to blend.

2In The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692), written during the Salem witch hunt, Cotton Mather writes how the devil descends with great wrath upon New England:

  • 1 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693. Reprinted in The Witchcraft Delusion in Ne (...)

The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those, which were once the devil’s territories; and it may easily be supposed that the devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a people accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus, that He should have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession. [...] I believe that never were more satanical devices used for the unsettling of any people under the sun, than what have been employed for the extirpation of the vine which God has here planted, casting out the heathen, and preparing a room before it, and causing it to take deep root, and fill the land, so that it sent its boughs unto the Atlantic Sea eastward, and its branches unto the Connecticut River westward, and the hills were covered with a shadow thereof.1

  • 2 Ibid., p. 17-19.

3Mather reads the witchcraft cases as evidence of a “horrible plot against the country” by the devil, as “his hellish design of bewitching and ruining our land” and “rooting out the Christian religion from the country.”2

  • 3 Stephen King, Pet Sematary, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1983.

4The second example is a much more recent text, Stephen King’s horror novel Pet Sematary.3 The Devil’s territory is here represented by the uninhabited land in the woods of Maine that lies behind the pet cemetery. The cemetery, in turn, is some kind of liminal zone between the realm of the cannibal spirit Wendiigo and the neat home of the American family, which is eventually afflicted by the intrusions of the evil power from beyond the graveyard (deceased family members and pets return as cannibalistic zombies). Asking an old settler (Jud) for the nature of that strange place, the protagonist Louis Creed learns that

  • 4 Ibid., p. 259-60; see also p. 4, 29-30, 114.

that place was always considered to be a kind of holy place to [the Micmacs] [...] but not in a good way. [...] Now the Micmacs, the State of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows... Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim ever stuck... There’s lots of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never gets unravelled and only the lawyers end up makin’ money. [...] I suppose the Indians will get it back in the end, and I think that’s the way it should be.4

5The holy place, we further learn, may once have been a scene of cannibalistic rituals among the Micmac in honor of the deity Wendiigo. The suggestion is that the evil powers thus evoked have stayed with the land ever since and now cause havoc with the innocent American family. Like all good horror fictions, the novel cunningly leaves it open whether the evil is natural or man-made. But the tendency is to trace its origin to the unspeakable rites of the Indians and thus to translate the horrors of colonial dispossession into a horror emanating from the country and its inhabitants. Like the Puritans’ “vast and howling wilderness” and the degenerate New England villages of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictions, the Maine wilderness of Pet Sematary is a place where savage powers lurk, waiting to destroy—“ruin” in Mather’s words—the integrity of Christian society.

  • 5 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, New York, Meridian, 1975, p. 66.
  • 6 Ibid., p. 71.

6In spite of the almost 300 years between them, these two examples are united in their common assumption that evil forces emanate from the “devil’s territory” beyond human settlement. The notion that the devil reigns over his own territory—either an area beyond the earth inhabited by men, or, in Puritan writing, as sharing the same earth—only emerged relatively late, according to Norman Cohn in the late Middle Ages. It is not found in the Bible. St Augustine (fourth and fifth centuries AD) locates the habitat of the devil in a dark airy zone directly above the earth in which he is caught “as in a prison.”5 But as the influence of Christianity grew, and with it the frequency of internal crises and schisms, the devil and his fellow-demons were increasingly imagined to inhabit the same world as human beings, even invading their bodies and souls in order to afflict them.6 The devil’s territory became increasingly indistinguishable from the space inhabited by human beings. The borderlines between the habitations of men and those of the devil became fuzzy and permeable.

7Mather and King also agree in characterizing the devil’s territory as having an ambivalent legal status. Mather describes New England, that he knows is inhabited by diverse indigenous tribes, as the “room” made by God by “casting out the heathen” (a reference to the mass mortality by disease prior to the Puritan arrival). The Puritan settlers thus regarded the lands in which they settled as “vacuum domicilium.” Maine, in King’s novel, is a legally embattled ground which that may eventually have to be returned to the Micmacs because of a ‘postcolonial’ transformation in legal principles.

8It is important to consider certain conceptions of the notion of territorial ambivalence, or the ambivalent legal status of territory, and the sensation of horror, or terror, with which such embattled ground is sometimes associated in American culture. First, some definitions are in order. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term “terror” is derived from middle English: “terrour,” old French “terreur,” and Latin “terrorem.” It is defined as 1) “the state of being terrified or greatly frightened; intense fear, fright, or dread” (since c. 1375); 2) “The action or quality of causing dread; terrific quality, terribleness; spec. this action or quality in fiction, esp. in novel (or tale) of terror...” (since 1528). [...] The “reign of terror” was then keyed to refer to the reign of the Jacobins between March 1793 and July 1794 (Terreur). “Terrorism” is defined, first, as “Government by intimidation as directed and carried out by the party in power in France during the Revolution of 1789-94; the system of the ‘Terror’ (1793-4).” This came into use in English in 1795 as a synonym of “reign of terror” (above). Second, “terrorism” refers to “[a] policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized” (in use since 1798). The word “terrorist” is similarly in use in English since 1795, with origins in the French Revolution and the Jacobin “reign of terror.” What is interesting is that, in one of its early uses, in the context of the French Revolution, “terror” refers to state power. In the words of Robespierre, “La terreur n’est autre chose que la justice prompte, severe, inflexible” (Petit Robert).

9The word “territory,” the OED tells us, is “etymologically unsettled.” It is usually taken to derive from Latin “territori-um: ” “the land round a town, a domain, district, territory.” But there is also evidence of the form “terratorium,” deriving from “Terra” = “earth.” The original form (“territorium”) “suggested a derivation from terrere to frighten, whence territor frightener, territorium, a place from which people are warned off.” (emphasis added). “Territory” has been in use in English since 1432, with the general meaning of “[t] he land or district lying round a city or town and under its jurisdiction.” In 1598, however, we find a slightly different meaning. In Manwood’s Lawes Forest we read that “this word [Territorie] is most properly a circuit of ground, contayning a libertie within it selfe, wherein diuers men hauing land within it, and yet the Territorie it selfe doth lie open and not inclosed.” (emphasis added). This reference to the legal ambivalence of a piece of land called “territory” is repeated in another definition: “2. A tract of land, or district of undefined boundaries; a region.” In this form, “territory” is applied to maritime areas, to forest areas, or to the “limitless mulga-downs” (in 1890). In a US context, “territory” also refers to the legal state of a “region in the West belonging to and under the government of the American Republic, and having some degree of self-government, but not yet admitted as a State into the Union” (according to the OED, in use since 1799, John Adams).

  • 7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 17 (...)
  • 8 Ibid., p. 54.
  • 9 Ibid., p. 55.

10What is most striking is the possibility that the two terms may actually share a certain semantic ground. The Latin “territorium” as “a place from which people are warned off” immediately recalls Mather’s use of the term, which likewise evokes the “devil’s territory” as a place of terror. What is also interesting is the notion of the juridical openness of a tract of land referred to as “territory.” This openness and undefinability is a quality which “territory” shares with the term “terror” as it is used in Edmund Burke’s description of the sublime. Burke finds in the idea of “infinity” or “greatness of dimension” a “tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime.”7 The best example in nature for inflicting the mind with a sense of the sublime Burke finds in “a vast extent on land” or better still, in the ocean. The ocean, he writes, “is an object of no small terror. Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.”8 Finally, sublime sensations are also evoked by darkness and uncertainty, as for example in Milton’s description of Death as “The other shape, /If shape it might be called that shape had none.” Here, in this description, Burke writes, “all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.”9

11Terror, then, is, at least in its romantic use (as in the “literature of terror”) occasioned by a feeling of uncertainty and confusion. “Territory,” on the other hand, is an area of uncertain extent and uncertain jurisdiction; a “circuit of ground” in which “diuers men” enjoy property rights (Manwood); or, in the most extreme case, a zone of interdiction. But as is also evident in Cotton Mather’s text, the American settlers have set out to pacify this terrible zone, to deprive it of its devilish ambivalence. In his description, the devil, though acting very aggressively, is in the defensive position against the Puritans who are gradually encroaching on his territory to “have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession.” Throughout American frontier literature and outer space fantasies, of course, the fear of foreign invasion is almost inadvertently coupled with the invaded party’s intention to expand.

12The implications of this conjunction of the terms “territory” and “terror” can be seen in two historical examples, the acquisition of Louisiana and the discussions about jurisdiction on the high seas in the midnineteenth century. Examination of them may offer some historical background to more recent cases of jurisdictional uncertainty over territory, such as the ambivalent territorial status of Guantánamo.

  • 10 Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain, Berkeley, Unive (...)
  • 11 Peter J. Kastor (ed.), The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, Washington, CQ Pres (...)
  • 12 Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, New York, Humanity Press, 1966, p. 74, passim.

13The sudden and, for many, unexpected acquisition of Louisiana from France in 1803 must be seen in the light of the defeat of France as a colonial power in the Western Hemisphere. As Michael Zuckerman has shown, the prerequisite for US-American continental expansion was the revolution in Saint Domingue that convinced Napoleon to withdraw from the American scene. However, the black insurgents’ appeal to the same “right of nature” which had been used by the Americans in ascertaining their independence did not produce enthusiastic solidarity in the US: “The triumph of indomitable blacks, even in the very causes they claimed as their own and in which they found their own distinctive identity, did not inspire Americans to celebration. It filled them with dread.”10 According to the reports of eyewitnesses, American planters were “terrified” by the events in Haiti. They lived in constant fear of slave revolts in the American South, and they found their apprehensions justified by the discovery of several “conspiracies” and actual insurgencies, one outside New Orleans in 1811—“probably the largest revolt in US history”11—and of course in Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, which led to a kind of mass hysteria manifested both in private documents and in a “frenzied legislative activity.”12

  • 13 Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indians in Western Legal Thought, Oxford and New York, Oxford (...)

14The territory whose acquisition the United States owed to the “terror” sparked in the Caribbean was swiftly subjected to manifest displays of ownership: negotiations were entered with the French inhabitants of New Orleans as to their new legal status, Lewis and Clark were sent across the Rocky Mountains to map out the new realm and discover a possible trade route to the Pacific, and messages of paternalistic care were sent to the Indians inhabiting the Louisiana Territory. Yet from a strictly international point of view that respects the sovereignty of Native American tribes over the lands they inhabited (which a large part of international legal discourse did at the time—e.g. Pufendorf13) we may doubt the legality of the purchase. The land was never conquered nor sold nor voluntarily rendered to either France or Spain before being sold to the United States; the display of occupation necessary to establish a claim over the new territory was limited to a few ritual gestures by La Salle, the settling of the lower Mississippi area, and the establishment of a few trade forts along the upper Mississippi. Large parts of the western lands remained unsettled and even unknown by Europeans. The American claim to Louisiana would merely seem to rest on the fact that they purchased it from France—who had before swapped it back and forth with Spain—and on the displays of ownership mentioned above.

  • 14 Enrico Milano, Unlawful Territorial Situations in International Law, Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff, 2006 (...)
  • 15 Ibid.
  • 16 See Georg Jellinek, Die normative Kraft des Faktischen, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2004 [1905].

15International law distinguishes between animus occupandi—the intention to occupy or take possession of a tract of land—and corpus possessionis—the effective display of possessive activities, like cultivation, establishment of a government, trade forts, military posts, etc. The transitional status between these two states is referred to as inchoate title. This intermediate status was to be overcome “within reasonable time” by effective occupation.14 But legal concepts are themselves subject to historical change; thus there exist differing opinions as to the length of time in which an area could remain in the “inchoate” state, about which activities count as “effective,” and about the question of indigenous property rights. Obviously, the establishment of a colony in an empty stretch of land (terra nullius) only requires legitimatizing action towards other European contenders while settlement was more problematic in an area already occupied by indigenous tribes. In this case, the legitimacy of occupation depended on the contemporary definitions of legitimacy and effectiveness. As Enrico Milano shows, the nineteenth century witnessed a transition within legal discourse from an earlier principle of legitimacy (based, for example, on hereditary rights) to the principle of effective occupation, which can be traced back to a concept from Roman Civil Law that considers the ability to maintain civil order as a sign of sovereignty (uti possidetis: “as you possess, so you possess”).15 With the demise of territorial sovereignty based on hereditary title in the age of nationalism, the principle of effective occupation gained the upper hand, which it retains until contemporary legal discourse. To put it simply, the concept of effective occupation amounts to a mere authorization of factual power relations (“die normative Kraft des Faktischen,” as Jellinek has it).16 The best example we have for this in American legal discourse is the series of Supreme Court rulings accompanying the Indian Removal of the 1830s, in one of which (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831) Justice Marshall states:

  • 17 Edward H. Spicer, A Short History of the Indians of the United States, Malabar, Florida, Robert E. (...)

If it be true that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future.17

  • 18 See the Indians’ speech to Jefferson and Henry Dearborn, January 4, 1806, in Kastor, op. cit., p. 2 (...)

16While the Supreme Court in 1831 could present itself, in accordance with modern post-Hegelian and proto-Darwinian legal parlance, as the willing executioner of a predestined fate (a position that would not remain uncontested), I would suggest that the situation was more ambivalent in 1803 when the United States was facing a territory of a vast extent, of an unknown natural layout, and of unknown western and southern boundaries. Jefferson, for example, hastened to “domesticate” the area, by sending off Lewis and Clark on their expedition (and three more before 1807), and by sending messages to the indigenous inhabitants informing them about their new status of pupilage. Their replies, it seems from the scant written evidence, widely differed between assertions of allegiance to the white “father”18 and obvious signs of recalcitrance and assertions of sovereignty, as in the speech of Dehahuit, a Caddo chief, to William Claiborne on September 5, 1806. Acknowledging Jefferson’s message, Dehahuit replies:

  • 19 Kastor, op. cit., p. 225.

Your words resemble the words my forefathers have told me they used to receive from the French in ancient times. My ancestors from Chief to Chief were always well pleased with the French; they were well received and well treated by them when they met to hold talks together, and we can now say the same of you, our new friends.
If your nation has purchased what the French formerly possessed, you have purchased the country that we occupy, and we regard you in the same light as we did them.19

17The fact that the text, containing not a grain of submissiveness, breaks off shortly after this passage reminds us of the extremely fragmentary nature of the surviving records by indigenous actors affected by the territorial transaction. The history of westward expansion, after all, is the history of the victor.

  • 20 Ibid., p. 226-227.

18In his speech to the Wolf and Mandan nations in Washington (December 30, 1806), Jefferson seems to adapt to the new situation. Although he retains the paternalistic rhetoric (expressing his wish for symbolic domestication), he now also admits that the country between Mexico and Canada is held in common by the United States and the various Indian tribes (“the country which you and we hold between Canada and Mexico”). It may strike us as a case of unconscious irony that he then refers the tribal leaders to discuss further details with the Secretary of War.20

19The uncertain property status is further suggested by Jefferson’s unpublished draft for a constitutional amendment (which he did not submit in the end). In the draft we read:

  • 21 Ibid., p. 193-194.

The province of Louisiana is incorporated with the US and made a part thereof. The rights of occupying in the soil, and of self government, are confirmed to the Indian inhabitants, as they now exist. Preemption only of the portions rightfully occupied by them, & a succession to the occupancy of such as they may abandon, with the full rights of possession as well as of property & sovereignty, in whatever is not or shall cease to be so rightfully occupied by them, shall belong to the US [...]21

  • 22 Ibid., p. 194.

20Other signs of occupancy will be the installation of a police force (not requisite for “Indian inhabitants”) and the exploitation of natural resources (salt, coal, metals, minerals) “within the possession of the US, or in any other with the consent of the possessors”; to regulate trade, to ascertain the geography by exploration, to open roads for navigation and factories for commerce.22

21Read in the context of the changes in legal thinking, the document can be seen as trying to fulfill the requirements of both paradigms:—that based on inherited legitimacy and that based on effective occupation. What also becomes clear, I think, is that Jefferson fully accepts the Indian tribes’ priority of land title. Throughout the nineteenth century, American political practice would confirm this principal assumption in that hundreds of treaties were formed with the Indian tribes in order to legalize the transformation of property. This practice continued even after 1831 when the Supreme Court quite ambivalently defined Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations” in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.

22As should become clear, US politicians and judges of the early national period were grappling with the difficulty of reconciling territorial ambition with the rather strict international legal standards inherited from the Enlightenment. They were facing the crucial ideological uncertainty of feeling obliged to respect the human and territorial rights of America’s indigenous inhabitants on the one hand and the desire to expand into unknown territories on the other. My contention is that this situation of uncertainty created a philosophical unease finding its aesthetic expression in the language of the gothic and the sublime—that is, in the language of “terror.”

  • 23 Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Quoted after David Galloway, “Introdu (...)
  • 24 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1837, ed. Harold Beaver, Harmonds (...)
  • 25 Ibid., p. 63-66 and 104.

23The major gothic voice of early nineteenth-century America is Edgar Allan Poe who famously claimed: “terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.”23 Arthur Gordon Pym, the narrator of Poe’s exploration novel of the same title (1837), stows away in the hull of the merchant ship Grampus. His hideaway is comfortably equipped with food, drink, bedding, and books. When the ship leaves port, he “take [s] possession” of his “apartment” and proceeds to read “the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the mouth of the Columbia River.”24 After “amus [ing]” himself with it for some time, he falls “into a sound slumber” and when he wakes up his watch is run down, his meat is putrefied, and he gradually realizes that he must have been sleeping, Rip van Winkle-style, for a very long time. He is now affected by the suffocating atmosphere in the hull and when he falls asleep again he has a terrible nightmare of ghastly demons, immense serpents, of “deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, [which] spread themselves out before me.” The scene then changes and he finds himself “amid the burning sand plains of Zahara” and is attacked by a terrible lion which throws him into a “paroxysm of terror.” The “lion” turns out to be his own dog, and Pym is eventually rescued by his friend Augustus, only to find the ship in a state of piratical revolt, led on by the black cook Seymour.25

  • 26 Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood (...)
  • 27 Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process, New Haven, Yale University (...)
  • 28 Quoted in ibid., p. 114.

24In an interesting change of geographical scene, Pym’s original preoccupation with the Jeffersonian project of westward expansion is transformed into what Wilson Harris calls his symbolical “drowning at sea within the black hold of a slave ship.”26 In blending two different arenas of American colonialism, westward expansion and the transatlantic slave trade, Poe’s “schizophrenic sea” (Harris) at the same time points to another legally embattled space. While the Jeffersonian program of western settlement was getting into full swing to lead the Louisiana territory from an “inchoate” legal status into a state of full sovereignty, abolitionist activists would use cases of slave ship rebellions in the 1830s and 1840s to define the high seas as an extraterritorial zone in which human action was susceptible only to the law of nature. The Ohio congressman Josuah Giddings, for example, introduced a series of resolutions into Congress in order to define the Creole mutiny (1841) as legally and morally justified, arguing that the moment a ship leaves the territorial waters of a state whose law endorses slavery, the slave has passed into the jurisdiction where only nature’s law is valid.27 The abolitionist William Jay followed suit in a pamphlet, The Creole Case and Mr Webster’s Dispatch (1843), arguing that when slaves were shipped on the high seas, the protection afforded by the local law that created slavery would cease. Once beyond the limits of municipal law, the issue, Jay claims, is entirely one of superior force, and if the slaves should overpower their masters, the latter could apply to no rule of law to demand reparations. “[R] esistance of [...] force,” Jay argues, “even unto death, cannot be called mutiny or murder—because they are violating no law by such resistance, but on the contrary vindicating their natural freedom—the gift of God alike to all.”28 In other words, these radical thinkers defined the ocean as a neutral territory and contested the dominant notion that the ship itself was the logical extension of the national territory and all shipboard activities thus subject to the law of slavery. The legal conflict about the status of the high seas recalls Burke’s identification of the ocean as a site of sublime terror, born of an impossibility of rational definition. Like the undefined Louisiana Territory, the ocean was a hermeneutic legal monstrosity and, an embattled legal site.

  • 29 Gesa Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature, London, Routle (...)

25But the “natural freedom” appealed to by rebellious slaves and their abolitionist defenders was a double-edged sword. With reference to the same legal notion of the “freedom of the seas,” the American government in 1842 put an end to the British right to search foreign ships suspected of illegal slaving. As a result, the American flag became the preferred protection of illegal slavers. The new “freedom of the seas” (including the freedom to enslave Africans) led to a veritable masquerade on the high seas which that found a wonderful fictional rendering in Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1856).29

  • 30 See Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of United States Cultur (...)
  • 31 Amy Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?”, Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders(...)

26Now as then, the United States legislature tends to articulate international juridical affairs in the language of domesticity. But as the fictions accompanying this discourse of “manifest domesticity”30 (see Amy Kaplan31) reveal (as King’s novel, for example, smartly suggests), the heartland of domesticity, the nuclear family, is forever terrorized by the extraterritorial forces which occasionally make their uncanny returns.

  • 32 Ibid., p. 241.
  • 33 Ibid., p. 249.

27Recent developments, moreover, indicate that the extension of national jurisdiction refers only to the right to use foreign territories for American military purposes but not to the civil rights of foreigners caught inside this machinery. As Amy Kaplan argues in “Where is Guantánamo?”, the ambivalent legal status accorded this American naval base on Cuba is neither new nor an aberration from earlier American legal practice in international affairs. In a close reading of the 2004 Supreme Court decision Rasul v. Bush, Kaplan shows that “the legal space of Guantánamo today has been shaped and remains haunted by its imperial history.”32 The court tried to bring some order into the ambivalent legal status of Guantánamo by ruling that federal courts do have jurisdiction over the US naval base there and that the prisoners held captive there do have access to the American legal system. But the question whether the US Constitution can be applied to Guantánamo remains unresolved.33

  • 34 Ibid., p. 250.

28The argument of the Supreme Court follows the so-called Insular Cases of the early Twentieth Century (1902-1922) in which the legal status of the “unincorporated territories” of the United States—e.g., Puerto Rico—was to be resolved. The court then decided that some parts of the Constitution follow the flag to those territories while other parts do not. Puerto Rico was accordingly regarded as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense”—a phrase which inevitably recalls the definition found for native American tribes as “domestic dependent nations” in 1831. Just as the Louisiana Territory at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Puerto Rico was in the “insular case” Downes v. Bidwell left in a legal “limbo,” as a dissenting judge wrote: “The ‘occult meaning’ of the ‘unincorporated territory,’ he argued, gave Congress the unrestricted power to keep any newly acquired territory like a disembodied shade in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period’.” As Amy Kaplan concludes, this language “uncannily describes Guantánamo today” as an “ambiguous legal space where the extent of constitutional rights remains indeterminate.”34 With both the US courts and the US government unwilling to make explicit the legal status of Guantánamo, the applicability of the rights granted by the US Constitution—like the right to habeas corpus granted to any detainee under national jurisdiction—likewise remains undecided and a matter of spontaneous interpretation. Kaplan, who historicizes the case Rasul v. Bush with earlier imperial legal history, concludes that the US Supreme Court, in reinforcing the logic spelled-out in cases derived from an earlier imperial period, allows the executive to “exert power with impunity: ”

  • 35 Ibid., p. 261.

In creating this ambiguous territory, the Court contributes to reclassifying persons as ‘enemy combatants,’ a category that erodes the distinctions among citizens and aliens, immigrants and criminals, prisoners and detainees, terrorists and refugees. Yet this erosion is not moving toward granting more rights to noncitizens. On the contrary, it moves both citizens and noncitizens further toward the lowest possible rung of diminished liberties. Ultimately, these persons are codified as less than human and less deserving of human, international, or constitutional rights. This dehumanization is shaped by racial, national, and religious typologies and shored up by revamped historical imperial taxonomies, which rebound across national borders. The blurring of legal boundaries between domestic and foreign, and aliens and citizens... creates ever-widening spheres to the ‘four corners of the earth,’ where the US administration, abetted by the courts, might manipulate habeas corpus to conceal rather than to ‘show the bodies’ that have been indefinitely detained, sexually humiliated, and medically and psychologically abused and tortured. Haunted by the ghosts of empire, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, remains an imperial location today. From here the borders of the law are redrawn to create a world in which Guantánamo is everywhere.35

29Territorial and juridical ambivalence, the rhetoric of selective domesticity, and the practice of masquerade have remained favorite ingredients of American foreign policy—from camps erected for “illegal enemy combatants” in Guantánamo to unofficial prisons run by private subcontractors in “friendly” states in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, to secret flights in “private” planes across the national territories of other states, to the arbitrary and unprosecuted acts of violence committed by private mercenary gangs. Afraid of the legal standards once developed by its own experts, courts, and governments and now represented by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, the US-American administration prefers to enmesh itself in states of jurisdictional “inchoateness” and ambivalence. Useful implements in the tool box of empire, masquerade and territories kept like “disembodied shades” are but the grotesque mirror image of a new, rhizomorphic form of terrorism whose extraterritoriality is proportionate to that of the power it seeks to fight. The devil’s territory is never short of powerful contenders.

Notes

1 Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693. Reprinted in The Witchcraft Delusion in New England. Samuel Drake (ed.), 3 volumes, New York, Burt Franklin, 1970, volume 1, p. 15.

2 Ibid., p. 17-19.

3 Stephen King, Pet Sematary, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1983.

4 Ibid., p. 259-60; see also p. 4, 29-30, 114.

5 Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, New York, Meridian, 1975, p. 66.

6 Ibid., p. 71.

7 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757. Reprint ed. Adam Phillips, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 66-67.

8 Ibid., p. 54.

9 Ibid., p. 55.

10 Michael Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, p. 182.

11 Peter J. Kastor (ed.), The Louisiana Purchase: Emergence of an American Nation, Washington, CQ Press, 2002, p. 7.

12 Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, New York, Humanity Press, 1966, p. 74, passim.

13 Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indians in Western Legal Thought, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 309.

14 Enrico Milano, Unlawful Territorial Situations in International Law, Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff, 2006, p. 80-84.

15 Ibid.

16 See Georg Jellinek, Die normative Kraft des Faktischen, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2004 [1905].

17 Edward H. Spicer, A Short History of the Indians of the United States, Malabar, Florida, Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1983 [1969], p. 186.

18 See the Indians’ speech to Jefferson and Henry Dearborn, January 4, 1806, in Kastor, op. cit., p. 221-224.

19 Kastor, op. cit., p. 225.

20 Ibid., p. 226-227.

21 Ibid., p. 193-194.

22 Ibid., p. 194.

23 Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Quoted after David Galloway, “Introduction,” Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, London, Penguin, 1986, p. 23.

24 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 1837, ed. Harold Beaver, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983, p. 62-63.

25 Ibid., p. 63-66 and 104.

26 Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1983, p. 21.

27 Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1975, p. 113.

28 Quoted in ibid., p. 114.

29 Gesa Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 102 ff.

30 See Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of United States Culture, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 23-50.

31 Amy Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?”, Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders, ed. Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, p. 239-266.

32 Ibid., p. 241.

33 Ibid., p. 249.

34 Ibid., p. 250.

35 Ibid., p. 261.

Author

Professor of American studies at the University of Rostock, Germany. She has recently published Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1997, and Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature, New York, Routledge, 2004. She has recently edited (with Bernhard Klein) Das Meer als kulturelle Kontakzone: Räume, Reisende, Repräsentationen, Constance, Constance University Press, 2003 and Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, New York, Routledge, 2004.

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be used under OpenEdition Books License, unless otherwise stated.

Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search