ABSTRACT
Stemming from Gilroy's and Agamben's exploration and extension of the concept of the camp, this chapter examines three examples that inflect the periodic need to enclose the alien Other in bordered and policed geographies away from the alleged healthy national imaginary. The chapter explores the intimate link between place, experience, and subjectivity within the inhospitable premises of different detention camps. As an anti-nation, the camp, in Agamben's words, is 'the fourth inescapable element that has now added itself to-and so broken-the old trinity composed of the state, the nation, and land'. Different camp-machines coexist, overlap, and collide, 'containing within themselves elements of one another'. Camp nations exhibit the workings of 'camp mentalities', that is, forms of nationalism that splinter society into distinct and easily drawn categories based on belonging or not belonging to a particular sacred litany, be it race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and so on.
