The Black Ecstasy of Guantánamo Bay

Heys, Toby ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3249-8133 (2021) The Black Ecstasy of Guantánamo Bay. In: Darkness. The Dynamics of Darkness in the North. Isberg . Montréal and Reykjavik, Imaginaire du Nord and University of Iceland, pp. 65-86. ISBN 9782923385426

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Abstract

“The Black Ecstasy of Guantánamo Bay” focuses on the state sanctioned sonic torture techniques utilised on persons illegally captured and sequestered within the Guantánamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba, which, since the 11th January, 2002 has been operated by the Joint Task Force of the United States Government. More particularly, it considers the waveformed dynamics of violence that are carried out in the dark, when the ocular field is negated in order to amplify the efficacy of music and noise as instruments of torture. It is in this intensely pitched environment that the body as antenna is considered; a subjectivity that receives and transmits information about the affect of waveforms. When music becomes weaponised, it blurs the distinctions between cultural and military spheres and, as a result, the darkness of the detainees cell, military strategy, and frequencies coalesce into a new cosmology of insidious relations.