Following on my Guantánamo Diary essay at the Virginia Quarterly Review, this week the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog ran an essay from me that finds a damning generic touchstone for Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s book in the American slave narrative. 

Here’s one moment from the piece:

While the scope and duration of American slavery dwarf those of the C.I.A. detainment program, and some, I'm sure, would rather not see the two compared at all, reading Slahi's book in light of the slave narrative brought to mind a phrase from J.M. Coetzee's “Elizabeth Costello”: “Degrees of obsentiy.”