'Guantánamo’s French Connection: The Making of a US Prison Island'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “Guantánamo’s French Connection: The Making of a US Prison Island” by Kenyon College’s Visiting Assistant Professor Royce Novak.

Since 2001, the prison facilities at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay have been widely portrayed as exceptional, lacking historical or legal precedent. In this talk, Novak will trace various policies and practices that created prisons at Guantánamo Bay, from the prison established for “war on terror” suspects in 2002 to the camps for undocumented immigrants erected in recent months since Trump’s second term in office, to prison islands operated by the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) with US support during the Vietnam War, namely Côn Đảo and Phú Quốc, first established by colonial French authorities. He will further trace these practices to the French Colonial era in Vietnam by showing how prisons that were first established under French rule and written into South Vietnamese legal codes that included sentences such as deportation and had widely used provisions for indefinite detention by executive decree. In tracing Guantánamo’s French connection, Novak argues that the prison represents a survival of French imperial penal policies. Novak concludes by connecting Guantánamo’s French imperial ancestry with the present US administration’s fixation on expanding prison facilities there, this time to facilitate mass deportations, alongside the reanimation of other prison islands like Alcatraz.

Novak is a visiting assistant professor of history at Kenyon College where he teaches courses on Southeast Asia. His current book project is on the history of prison islands in colonial and Cold War Indonesia and Vietnam, and he has also published research on the history of “comfort women” in Southeast Asia. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022 and began his studies of Southeast Asian history as an undergraduate at Cornell University.