East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop presents:
Paper Abstract:
The U.S. military interrogation room came into the purview of the U.S. mainstream public by way of the torture debate, but both critics and supporters of coercive interrogation techniques have surprisingly found common ground in one assumption regarding the interrogation room itself: that the interrogation room can be a rational space for the production of information. This article argues that the U.S. military interrogation room has historically played a critical role in the project of universalizing the vision of a U.S. liberal geopolitical order not through the production of information, but rather through the production of subjects. Through an examination of the histories of the interrogators, the interrogated POWs, and the policies surrounding interrogation during the Korean War, this article demonstrates that the notion that the U.S. military interrogation room can be an objective space for information-gathering is actually a construct molded by mid-twentieth ideas about racial capacities, assimilation, and decolonization.