Letter from the Department of Defense

Editorial note: This August 6, 2018, letter from the Department of Defense appears in Jacket2 as part of “FOIA Request #SC 15–102-S: The Detainee Library,” Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce’s feature devoted to obtaining a list of contents held at the library at the US Guantánamo Bay detention camp on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The 2018 letter accompanies the two archives that appear in this feature. — Julia Bloch

Click here to view the letter.

May 31, 2019

About this feature

“FOIA request #SC 15–102-S: The Detainee Library,” a collection of materials curated by Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce, emerges from their engagements with the Freedom of Information Act, which since 1967 has given the public a method of requesting access to records from any US federal agency, including records held by the US Department of Defense relating to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Scott and Voyce used FOIA to petition for access to two archives: the catalog of materials held in the detainees’ library at Guantánamo Bay, and the records related to artworks produced by Guantánamo Bay prisoners. This Jacket2 feature includes the six hundred unclassified pages that lists books and films in English, Arabic, Bahasa, French, and Urdu, as well as approximately 228 paintings and drawings by inmates included in the Detainee Art Gallery, in addition to correspondence relating to the FOIA request and a preface collaboratively written by Scott and Voyce.

Preface

Jordan Scott

Stephen Voyce

Letter from the Department of Defense

Guantánamo Bay library catalog

Archive of detainee artwork

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Reading and hearing ‘Drafts’

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

This brief essay, introducing Drafts, was published in its unrevised version in 2017 in a single issue of Thresholds, a prototype journal put out in 2017, that now several years later will publish regularly. I have altered this essay for Jacket2, making some cuts and updates. Here I included a brief consideration of the DuPlessis PennSound Archive in order to celebrate both the 2024 completion of my recording of all the Drafts and the imminent publication of Drafts in 2025 by Coffee House Press.

July 11, 2024