April 14, 2005

Culture Critic Asks ‘Where Is Guantanamo?' At UCSD April 28

By Inga Kiderra

American studies scholar Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, delivers the annual Robert C. Elliott Memorial Lecture at the University of California, San Diego on April 28.

“Where Is Guantanamo?” asks Kaplan, who has recently published essays on 9/11 and on the prison camp at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “How did Guantanamo become a ‘legal back hole,’ a space for a brutal prison in a perpetual war against terror? Is Guantanamo in Cuba or the U.S.? Who is sovereign there? Where in the world is Guantanamo?” Kaplan argues that Guantanamo lies at the heart of what she calls the U.S. Empire.

Free and open to the public, the talk begins at 7:30 p.m. in Pepper Canyon Hall, Rm. 109, on the UCSD campus. Pepper Canyon is on Russell Lane, next to the Gilman Parking Structure, off Gilman Drive.

The Elliott Memorial Lecture is presented by the UCSD Department of Literature. Previous guest speakers have included Ursula K. LeGuin, Iris Murdoch, Fredric Jameson, Edward W. Said, Stephen J. Gould, Isabel Allende, Alexander Cockburn and Mike Davis.

More information: (858) 534-4618 or http://literature.ucsd.edu/news/currentevents/.
Campus map at http://maps.ucsd.edu/Viewer.htm?Map=Visitor.

Media Contact: Inga Kiderra, (858) 822-0661