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The United States prides itself on exemplifying the rule of law. Those who point out patterns of state-sponsored rightlessness engender cognitive dissonance, often provoking retreat into denial. In Rightlessness A. Naomi Paik, an assistant professor of Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, engages in an astute assault on the exceptionalist narrative that cloaks such denial. Rightlessness analyzes the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Haitian refugees detained at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, and the incarceration since 2002, also at Guantánamo, of hundreds of men and boys deemed “enemy combatants.” Paik begins from the premise that these detainees have been deprived not only of specific rights but also, more significantly, of the right to have any rights at all. Unlike many critiques of American internments, Paik's narrative moves beyond law, politics, and history to incorporate and contextualize direct testimonies of detainees. She emphasizes that rightlessness goes beyond physical deprivation to the epistemological violence of being unheard and thereby rendered “unthinkable” (p. 3). This significant theoretical move effectively counters denial because it invokes the rationality of fact and law while simultaneously piercing the reader's emotional defenses with stories of human vulnerability and pain. Paik's careful and innovative construction balances her intellectual framing with the voices of those who—in the process of being incarcerated, tortured, or simply studied by those possessed of rights—refuse to be silenced.
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