Constructing the Enemy

Contents

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pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript exactingly and offered invaluable suggestions that strengthened its theoretical foundations and to the lawyers who agreed to be interviewed about their pro bono defense work for Guantánamo Bay detainees. I cannot...

Introduction: The Landscape of Empathy

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pp. 1-40

This book presents and charts the fraught terrain of empathy—in U.S. literature and law—specifically as it relates to “the enemy” at two historical moments: the Japanese Americans after the December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the Muslim men captured and detained in various locations...

1. Literary Imagination and American Empathy

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pp. 41-72

Empathy is a relationally imaginative approach to living that underscores interdependence—whether of individuals, communities, or nations—and has at its foundation the call to imagine our lives always in the context of similar and dissimilar others. A crucial aspect of this relational imagining is...

2. Deserving Empathy?: Renouncing American Citizenship

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pp. 73-103

In the short period between December 18, 1944, and mid-January 1945, several thousand—5,589—U.S. citizens of Japanese descent renounced their citizenship. Most of them were among the internee population at the Tule Lake internment facility in Newell, California, which had by this time become...

3. Hierarchies of Horror, Levels of Abuse: Empathy for the Internees

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pp. 104-134

Emiko Omori, director of the documentary film Rabbit in the Moon (1999) on the internment experience of her family (her parents, herself, and her older sister), offers in voice-over narration one reason for the reluctance of the Japanese American community to talk about its wartime experience in the...

4. Guantánamo: Where Lawyers Connect with the “Worst of the Worst”

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pp. 135-165

The location is Guantánamo Bay. The detainee, lawyer, paralegal, and translator form a quartet. This meeting, inside an interview/interrogation room, is unusual, because it results in the announcement of happy news. The detainee Adel, a former Saudi Arabian police officer who was traveling...

Conclusion: Prognosis: The Future of Empathy in the United States

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pp. 166-171

On September 22, 2010, Eddie Daniels, antiapartheid activist and fellow prisoner on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, spoke at the University of Massachusetts Boston about his experience under apartheid and the circumstances that led him to join the resistance movement and...

Notes

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pp. 173-183

References

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pp. 185-197

Index

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pp. 199-205