A. Naomi Paik's Rightlessness: Testimony and Legal Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II charts the evolution of rightlessness in the United States from the 1940s to the present. Rather than defining rightlessness as part of a dichotomy, with those who have rights on one side and those without on the other, this book offers a more fluid and capacious definition: rightlessness is a condition of having few rights, not of having no rights at all, and the condition can vary in degree and intensity. Through examination of three prison camp settings—Japanese internment during World War II, the Haitian refugee carceral quarantine of the 1990s, and the detention of enemy combatants since the events of September 11, 2001—Paik argues that over the past 70 years, United States federal officials have continually renewed the nation state's capacity to create rightless subjects. With the operation of each new prison camp, they have made the condition of rightlessness increasingly severe.

The book operates on two levels: it combines analysis of the legal foundation of the camps with a study of the subjective experience of rightless people. Paik details the process through which the United States government dispossessed Japanese-American internees during World War II of rights such as habeas corpus and due process. To imprison Haitian refugees with HIV during the 1990s, Paik tracks the “reservoir of strategies from which the United States could draw in creating the Guantánamo camp, including detention, interdiction, and the circumvention of U.S. juridical authority and of international human rights agencies” (95). For the most recent camp constructed at Guantánamo for “enemy combatants,” the detainees in the so-called War on Terror, Paik illustrates that federal officials built a quasilegal system running parallel to United States national and international law. The legal foundation for the most recent camp provided the appearance of rights, but actually produced rightless subjects.

Paik does very smart work documenting the trauma that living in a prison camp produces. Where the detainees themselves are silent, she makes innovative choices in sources. To support the cases of Japanese Americans who mentally blocked out the memory of internment, for example, Paik includes the voices of their children—sansei witnesses. These sources are important for two reasons. First, she argues that rightlessness reverberates in the people who know camp survivors, and hence, leaves a kind of testimony important for understanding rightlessness. Family members perceive the consequences of the rightlessness in those dispossessed of their rights. Near relatives actually also experience some of those consequences themselves. Second, as Paik sees rightlessness as a status that continues to haunt people long after their release from a prison camp, she expands her definition of rightlessness to one that “exceeds” legal definitions and suggests a “complex subjectivity” (58). This part of her argument is most compellingly made through the examination of the poetry of Janice Mirikitani and the films of Rea Tajiri: Mirikitani was a baby interned at the Rohwer War Relocation Center and Tajiri, born in 1958, was the daughter of interned parents.

As Paik skillfully documents, United States officials have made living a life without rights now even more devastating than it was at the end of World War II. In the two camps run at Guantánamo, United States authorities and United States courts expanded rightlessness into a condition that makes people vulnerable to torture and the violence of a life lived in indeterminate detention. Paik turns to Michel Foucault's concept of biopower and Achille Mbembe's concept of necropower as a framework for identifying this changing relationship between rightlessness and vulnerability. These theorists grapple with the power of authorities to control life and death. Building on their work, Paik argues that “the state built at Guantánamo is a space between living and dying—a liminal space that did not kill but did not encourage life” (113). Paik's use of the concepts of biopower and necropower also enable her to read acts of self-harm by detainees as acts of resistance to their imprisonment.

In this thoughtful, important book, Paik also makes an argument that she hopes will be of use for advocacy against the future production of rightlessness: she maintains that testimony represents an empowering exercise, whereas redress can actually be used to expand rightlessness. According to Paik, rightless people recover their own subjectivity through testimony, an act through which detainees challenge their rightlessness. Paik contests a commonly held assumption that redress is liberatory, writing that, historically, United States officials have used redress—including legal remedies in court, political apologies, and reparations—to protect their capacity to produce rightlessness in the future. In her coverage of the redress of internment in the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, for example, Paik charges that redress enabled the government to situate Japanese internment as an aberration, as an exception to the rule of law, yet at the same time preserve the legal capacity to run future prison camps. Paik's assertion of the value of testimony and the limits of legal redress may be overstated. Largely unexplored in the book are the ways, for example, that redress may contribute to the rise of rights and psychological healing, but this critique does not take away from the book's many contributions.

Paik's study will be valuable to a broad range of scholars. It makes a significant contribution to the study of human rights. A current strength of this field is its coverage of the rise of individual rights and rights talk in the post-World War II era. Paik expands insight into the far less known, but related growth of rightlessness. This book will be interesting to scholars of race, especially for Paik's analysis of the way that prison camps now produce racial hierarchy, “without actually referring to race” (23). The book will also be important for the growing body of work on immigrant detention because, as Paik documents, noncitizens have become the most vulnerable population for detention in prison camps. With its interdisciplinary methodology and incisive critical analysis, Paik's powerful book documents an important chapter in the history of rights and stands as a challenge to further expansions in rightlessness.