Search Results

The Natural Prison

Peter Redfield

in Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana

This chapter marks the crucial slide of the penal colony from a space of improvement to a space of punishment. Although the penal colony retained the rhetorical trappings of moralization and ... More

This chapter marks the crucial slide of the penal colony from a space of improvement to a space of punishment. Although the penal colony retained the rhetorical trappings of moralization and development, its acknowledged purpose became more clearly punitive. The continued existence of the penal colony called Devils's Island, attracted an extraordinary measure of attention and sensationalization in France and beyond, particularly the English-speaking world. The chapter examines various sensational portrayals in terms of what they reveal about the topography of colonial anxieties. While Dreyfus's deportation was far from typical of the experience of convicts in French Guiana, and the outrage it provoked was not the first incidence of a public outcry against the bagne (penal colony), it captured the essential mood pervading accounts of the later penal colonies: despair amid the floating terror of distant tropics. For the last half century of its existence, the penal colony constituted a relatively stable social order. To balance its representation, this chapter quickly surveys some of the social facts involved.Less

New Caledonia: Prisoners of Love

MATT K. MATSUDA

in Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific

This chapter studies the French penal colony on the Melanesian island of New Caledonia and the ways that policy makers both imagine and instigate settlements and marriages for convicts with the hope ... More

This chapter studies the French penal colony on the Melanesian island of New Caledonia and the ways that policy makers both imagine and instigate settlements and marriages for convicts with the hope of creating communities of affection and devotion to France from prisoners. This model of idealized French country farmer households transposed to the South Seas is challenged not only by the stories of the convicts themselves, but by the indigenous Kanak peoples who resist the encroachment upon their lands. The final section follows both a violent 1878 rebellion led by the chief Atai against the French colonizers, yet one set within a series of stories that demonstrate how some Kanak and European men and women tried to create domestic lives together in settings hostile to both.Less

Tropics of Nature

Peter Redfield

in Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana

As a first step in bringing the penal colony and space center together, this chapter examines what “place” means in each context, tracing nineteenth-century climatic theories and obsessions with ... More

As a first step in bringing the penal colony and space center together, this chapter examines what “place” means in each context, tracing nineteenth-century climatic theories and obsessions with race, disease, death rates, and reproduction in the penal colony against the twentieth-century rise of ecological discourse and immigration concerns in French Guiana. It also addresses the aestheticization of nature surrounding the contemporary space center, focusing on ways of marking time in the tropics, from prison sentences to jungle tours, and comparing a search for authenticity to one for survival. From the perspective of the economic history of French Guiana, the comparison of the penal colony and the space center appears inevitable. Unlikely a pair as they may be, the two play similar roles as central state projects, uneasily married to the rest of Guyanais society. Each created a settlement to suit its needs, while contributing to the hollow nature of French Guiana's economy. At the same time, there are significant differences in the practical administration of the penal colony and space center, and the rationale behind each project remains strikingly different.Less

“A Peculiar Apparatus”: Kafka’s Thanatopoetics

Martin Blumenthal-Barby

in Inconceivable Effects: Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film

This chapter studies Franz Kafka’s 1914 story, “In the Penal Colony,” and how the word “apparatus” attains significance in it. The apparatus is an execution machine that not only tortures and ... More

This chapter studies Franz Kafka’s 1914 story, “In the Penal Colony,” and how the word “apparatus” attains significance in it. The apparatus is an execution machine that not only tortures and executes, but also informs the prisoner of his sentence. In a general sense, the word “apparatus” denotes something that operates according to an established set of rules—similar to the juridical institution of a penal colony. Kafka also presents another construct, an “anatomical apparatus”—the condemned man’s body. This condemned man has largely been deprived of a sense of justice, thus is unaware of the injustice brought against him. The chapter illustrates how the two different apparatuses appear suspicious regarding their seeming absence of justice. Both constructs, that of law and of life, are not only bound closely to one another, but are in fact interlocked.Less

The Road Not Taken: Germany’s Penal Colony Debate

Matthew P. Fitzpatrick

in Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914

While other European states such as Britain, France, and Russia had found it convenient to expel burdensome citizens to penal colonies such as New South Wales, New Caledonia, and Sakhalin, in Germany ... More

While other European states such as Britain, France, and Russia had found it convenient to expel burdensome citizens to penal colonies such as New South Wales, New Caledonia, and Sakhalin, in Germany such avenues for ridding the state of unwanted subjects remained unavailable. Despite a highly complex debate on the issue that spanned several decades, the enthusiasm of German jurists never prompted the Reichstag to allow the establishment of a penal colony in either Africa or the Pacific. As a result, the legal options for expelling German citizens were very few.Less

The Nature of Work

Peter Redfield

in Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana

This chapter moves from questions of nature back to ones related to technology and development. It compares ecologies of work in the penal colony and the space center, and the place of improvisation ... More

This chapter moves from questions of nature back to ones related to technology and development. It compares ecologies of work in the penal colony and the space center, and the place of improvisation within each design, as well as their status as separate states within states relative to the rest of French Guiana. Construction of a large dam at Petit Saut and debates over two roads in the summer of 1994 brought oppositions within Guyanais society to the surface. The shift from the rural settlements envisioned in the penal colony to the urban professional norms of the space center reflects wider trends of material culture and a new scale of mobility and connection that affect thought and practice. Returning from nature to culture and the ever-expanding island of civilization amid the forest, the quality of human action involved in transforming these landscapes is considerable.Less

Embodied Violence and the Leap from the Law: “In the Penal Colony” and The Trial

Jeff Fort

in The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett

This chapter continues to develop the analysis of Kafka’s work from previous chapters through a discussion of the final “judgment stories,” “In the Penal Colony” and The Trial. It is shown that these ... More

This chapter continues to develop the analysis of Kafka’s work from previous chapters through a discussion of the final “judgment stories,” “In the Penal Colony” and The Trial. It is shown that these narratives take the logic of sublime power and judgment to its furthest extreme in a juridical violence that merges bodily execution, language, and the law. The disciplinary nature of the law and of writing are foregrounded and intensified to the point of murder. At the same time, Kafka’s most violent and extreme judgment narratives decouple the body from the law in more subtle ways that allow for a possible escape or exit from the space of the law. It is shown that this exit is staged in every one of the judgment stories as a leap from a confined space, but only in The Trial does this leap from the law lead to something other than death or foreclosure. In formal and linguistic terms, this exit from the law in The Trial corresponds to an emphasis not on the drama of defense speech and judgment but rather on the dispersal and disaggregation of rumor, gossip, and slander.Less

Metaleptic Machines: Kafka, Kabbalah, Shoah

Russell Samolsky

in Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee

This chapter begins with an analysis of the critical tradition that ascribes a prophetic status to Kafka's texts. Skeptical of the contention that Kafka's writings were realized after his death, it ... More

This chapter begins with an analysis of the critical tradition that ascribes a prophetic status to Kafka's texts. Skeptical of the contention that Kafka's writings were realized after his death, it tries to instead theorize Kafka's claim for their apocalyptic destiny. The chapter does so by drawing a correlation between the inscriptional machine in “In the Penal Colony” and Derrida's hypothesis of a textual programming machine that programs in advance Nietzsche's appropriation by Nazi politics. It further demonstrates how Kafka's story functions as a programming machine capturing the inscriptional apparatus of the concentration camps (tattooed numbers), thereby manifesting itself as an apocalyptic text. The chapter concludes by examining Kafka's text in relation to Derrida's thought on autoimmunity. What is at stake is the way in which a dangerous piece of private writing might be said to struggle for its public existence against an author who would consign it to oblivion.Less

Prisoners from Indochina in the Nineteenth-Century French Colonial World

Lorraine M. Paterson

in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration

From Equatorial French Africa to the penal colony of New Caledonia, the French administration of Indochina used various territories within the expanse of the French colonial world as sites of exile ... More

From Equatorial French Africa to the penal colony of New Caledonia, the French administration of Indochina used various territories within the expanse of the French colonial world as sites of exile and labour for convicts from Indochina. Between the first transport in 1863 (to Réunion) and the last in 1941 (to Madagascar), nearly 7000 prisoners of different penal categories were sent to eleven different geographic sites spanning the French colonial globe. While these deportations were an attempt to defuse political and intellectual movements, they also inadvertently created some fascinating trans-colonial societal contexts. This chapter first explores the sites, systems, and social categories of exile from Indochina before examining three case studies from Réunion and the penal colony of New Caledonia.Less

Producing the Periphery

Jonna M. Yarrington

in Locating Guyane

This chapter discusses the impact that changes in the French national sugar market—caused by the introduction of French-grown beet sugar—made on the conceptualisation of Guyane between 1800 and 1860. ... More

This chapter discusses the impact that changes in the French national sugar market—caused by the introduction of French-grown beet sugar—made on the conceptualisation of Guyane between 1800 and 1860. It addresses a specific historical lacuna: the conjunction between the penal colony and other colonial activity such as the cane complex. The penal colony has too often been studied as a thing in isolation. More broadly, the chapter seeks to explain how Guyane can be used as a means to question the reification of ‘national’ territory. The chapter first outlines how, after being claimed as a colony by France in the early seventeenth century, Guyane came to differ from other locations in the French Antilles, although all Caribbean cane colonies were still perceived as external to the nation that built them. Secondly, the chapter focuses on the period between 1812 and 1860, which it defines as the sugar ‘conjunction’ and which is part of the reason why Guyane provides a prime illustrative case of colonial change.Less

Penal Colonialism and National Sovereignty: Porras and the Liberal Reforms, 1912–1924

Ezer Vierba

in The Singer's Needle: An Undisciplined History of Panamá

The chapter deals with the period of state-building under the Liberal Belisario Porras through a discussion of the construction of the penal colony in the Island of Coiba. While modern criminology ... More

The chapter deals with the period of state-building under the Liberal Belisario Porras through a discussion of the construction of the penal colony in the Island of Coiba. While modern criminology prescribed the construction of urban penitentiaries, the penal colony can be understood within the larger liberal state-building project. It was supposed to boost modern agricultural production, to rehabilitate the prisoner while teaching him to work, to colonize the “savage” interior of the country, and to connect its resources with the urban center. It is argued that Coiba was appealing to the liberals because it encapsulated the notion that in order for Panama to gain sovereignty, it had to be strong enough to “stand on its own”; in order to do so the government had to colonize the interior and civilize its lower classes.Less

Kafka and the Cold War: Fantasies of the Invisible Master

Sorin Radu Cucu

in The Underside of Politics: Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War

This chapter analyzes the political dimensions of Franz Kafka's works. It focuses on Orson Welles' 1962 adaptation of Kafka's The Trial and the short story “In the Penal Colony.” It also explains how ... More

This chapter analyzes the political dimensions of Franz Kafka's works. It focuses on Orson Welles' 1962 adaptation of Kafka's The Trial and the short story “In the Penal Colony.” It also explains how the Kafkaesque dimension of the Cold War provides a useful interpretative direction for this book focused on the political significance of the literary encounter with the Cold War discourse.Less

Patrick Chamoiseau and Rodolphe Hammadi in the Penal Colony: Photo-text and Memory-traces

in Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image

In 1993, the Martiniquan novelist Rodolphe Hammadi and Algerian photographer Patrick Chamoiseau visited France's notorious former penal colony, the Iles du Salut (Salvation Islands) in French Guiana. ... More

In 1993, the Martiniquan novelist Rodolphe Hammadi and Algerian photographer Patrick Chamoiseau visited France's notorious former penal colony, the Iles du Salut (Salvation Islands) in French Guiana. Their experience culminated in a collaborative photo-text, Guyane. Traces-mémoires du bagne. The design, especially the layout of the images in relation to the essay, produce an impressive, if uneasy, work that reflects the medial tensions, historiographical conflations, and political dynamics of the photo-text. Although Chamoiseau has written and collaborated on a number of photo-texts, his photo-essay with Hammadi displays the most extraordinary simplicity or power.Less

Grand Reporters in Guyane Bringing the Exotic Back Home

Kari Evanson

in Locating Guyane

The 1923 publication of Albert Londres’ Au bagne signalled a watershed moment in the history of grand reportage in Third-Republic France. Following this investigation, each newspaper editor wanted ... More

The 1923 publication of Albert Londres’ Au bagne signalled a watershed moment in the history of grand reportage in Third-Republic France. Following this investigation, each newspaper editor wanted his own investigation of the overseas penal colonies on his front page. This chapter argues that the investigations of the penal colonies in Guyane were a nodal point both in the history of grand reportage and in the broader history of the territory. The chapter first refers to early appearances of the Cayenne bagne in literature—such as Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris—and to the predecessors of Londres in Guyane. It then explains Londres’ identity as justicier, enacting a moral intervention whilst at the same time purporting to be an intellectual nomad, along with the function of reportage, between literature and journalism. Within this, it discusses the role of the reader, whom the journalist brings along on his travels. From there, by contrast, the chapter considers the role of the Guyanais, who become side characters in a French drama (‘ne faisant rien, n’ont pas d’histoire’). The chapter concludes by positing that the interwar investigations of the colony and its prisons cemented Guyane as a borderland, at once distinctly French and other.Less

Subaltern Migrations and the State

Philipp Zehmisch

in Mini-India: The Politics of Migration and Subalternity in the Andaman Islands

This chapter considers the history of Andaman migration from the institutionalization of a penal colony in 1858 to the present. It unpicks the dynamic relationship between the state and the ... More

This chapter considers the history of Andaman migration from the institutionalization of a penal colony in 1858 to the present. It unpicks the dynamic relationship between the state and the population by investigating genealogies of power and knowledge. Apart from elaborating on subaltern domination, the chapter also reconstructs subaltern agency in historical processes by re-reading scholarly literature, administrative publications, and media reports as well as by interpreting fieldwork data and oral history accounts. The first part of the chapter defines migration and shows how it applies to the Andamans. The second part concentrates on colonial policies of subaltern population transfer to the islands and on the effects of social engineering processes. The third part analyses the institutionalization of the postcolonial regime in the islands and elaborates on the various types of migration since Indian Independence. The final section considers contemporary political negotiations of migration in the islands.Less

. Dispersal: Abakuá Exiled to Florida and Spanish Africa

Ivor L. Miller

in Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba

This chapter describes how Abakué was made illegal in 1875, with its members (as well as other anticolonials) dispersed to Spanish penal colonies in North and West Africa. Those who could escaped ... More

This chapter describes how Abakué was made illegal in 1875, with its members (as well as other anticolonials) dispersed to Spanish penal colonies in North and West Africa. Those who could escaped from Cuba to Florida to join the emerging cigar industry. Responding to scholarship that argues for the recreation of Abakuá lodges in exile, having learned otherwise from Abakuá leaders, the chapter discusses issues basic to the process, which highlight the extraordinary achievements of Abakuá’s foundation in Cuba.Less

The First Fagin

Alan Rosenthal

in The documentary diaries: Working experiences of a non-fiction filmmaker

This chapter illustrates the making of the feature docudrama “The First Fagin.” It is the story of a Jewish receiver of stolen goods who lived in London in 1820 and was thought to have been the ... More

This chapter illustrates the making of the feature docudrama “The First Fagin.” It is the story of a Jewish receiver of stolen goods who lived in London in 1820 and was thought to have been the inspiration for the character of Fagin in “Oliver Twist.” The film follows the adventures of “Ikey” from London’s Newgate jail to his transportation to the worst and most savage prisons in Australia’s southern island, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and his trial at the Old Bailey. It is both the a story of love leading to downfall and an examination of the prison systems in nineteenth century England and Australia. Considerable coverage is given in the chapter to problems of research, co-producing a film in various countries, authenticity, working with minimum budgets, casting and working with actors.Less

Women’s Lives

Raylene Ramsay (ed.)

in Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Caledonia

This chapter presents an excerpt from Les femmes bagnards by Odile Krakovitch, which appears in Regards de Femmes, the exhibition catalogue and anthology of texts on New Caledonian women. The text ... More

This chapter presents an excerpt from Les femmes bagnards by Odile Krakovitch, which appears in Regards de Femmes, the exhibition catalogue and anthology of texts on New Caledonian women. The text describes the life of female “criminals” (numbering around two thousand in total) sent from France to the penal colony of New Caledonia. Many of the deported women were sent to work in the gardens or to be seamstresses in the convent at Bourail, and married off in groups to liberated male convicts, in support of the policy of populating the colony. The second excerpt is an oral narrative about the childhood of fifty-year-old Naomi, now living in Nouméa, as she was growing up in the tribu (now called customary lands) of Goyetta. Naomi's account highlights the extent to which European practices had influenced the lifestyle of the Kanak, even those living on customary lands.Less