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PS20 No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance

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PS20 No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance PS20 No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance 12:30 - 2:40pm Thursday, 15th April, 2021 Category Paper Session - Track 5 Session Chair(s) Sophie Hochhäusl, Ana María León 12:35 - 12:55pm Prison Writing and the Production of Colonial Indian Prison Space Mira Waits Appalachian State University, USA Abstract From Boethius to Angela Davis, a global literary tradition exists wherein prisoners challenge their confinement, reclaiming the terms of their persecution through prose and verse. In India prison writing is a celebrated tradition. Letters and memoirs written by political prisoners, including those from Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Bhagat Singh, functioned as a form of protest legible to the British colonial state. While these prison writings have been extensively studied as artifacts of anti-colonial resistance, their importance to the production of prison space is far less discussed. In this paper I examine prison writing in relation to space. When it came to housing such high profile political prisoners, the colonial state, fearful of prisoners’ power to inspire both violent and non-violent resistance, placed them in cells away from the general prison population. Within those cells—spatial units built to exercise disciplinary power only when filled by bodies to impress upon—prisoners were paradoxically provided with implements for writing. Through writing they transformed cellular space by supplanting its disciplinary potential with the construction of texts. These prison writings touch on what Rivkah Zim has described as the “paradox of freedom in confinement,” or the notion that the mind is autonomous from the body and its ties to physical space, so that writing is an escape from spatial reality. While prison writing in India did represent a form of escapism, I argue that freedom came from writing as a spatial practice that reimagined the very nature of confinement, rather than the mental exercise of imagining an alternative reality. This paper will detail the reimagining of colonial confinement by considering prisoners’ lived experiences with writing, the colonial state’s responses to prisoners’ writings, and lastly through a discussion of the texts themselves as spatial forms. Categories No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance 12:55 - 1:15pm Hybrid Governance in Japanese American Internment Camps Lynne Horiuchi Independent Scholar, USA Abstract An internment camp is an instrument designed by dominant state powers to contain, isolate and punish subjects. Internment camps, euphemistically named Relocation Centers, established through Presidential Executive Order 9066 were built to contain Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II in remote rural locations, most in the western United States and Louisiana. The military controlled most of their planning, design and construction and then controlled the perimeters during the war with barbed wire fences, military guard units, guard towers and searchlights. The monotonous grids and rigid repetition of U.S. Army Corps of Engineer standard plans and basic buildings within the prison cities exhibit state spatial control in extremis. The barracks, blocks and guard towers are often used as memes for the camps, belying the complexity of the prison cities and the prisoners’ agency. The prisoners participated in controlling space through city planning and other means within these medium sized cities of 7,500 to 18,000 people, significantly large cities in the states where they were sited. The prison cities required urban infrastructure of roads, utilities, water and power coordinated with multiple jurisdictions as well as prison administrative features, built on occasion with prison labor. In the civic and commercial infrastructure sectors, however, the prisoners were able to maintain significant spatial control throughout the duration of the camps, particularly through the formation of cooperative enterprises, a New Deal legacy. The coops provided much needed services such as shoe repair in the pedestrian cities, but also basic commodities, such as tofu or fish, and recreational facilities. This paper will briefly examine the prisoners’ agency in city planning and hybrid governance with a focus on their cooperative enterprises. Categories No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance 1:15 - 1:35pm Tracing Objects of Resistance in Argentina’s Clandestine Prisons Valentina Rozas-Krause University of Michigan, USA Abstract When Andrea Krichmar looked outside the window of her schoolmate’s living room, she saw two gunmen pointing at a hooded and chained woman. Today, Krichmar’s 1985-testimony is at the center of the exhibition of the “Admiral’s House,” a luxurious residence located within Argentina’s largest clandestine detention, torture and killing center, which is now a museum. Located in northern Buenos Aires inside the Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy (ESMA for its Spanish initials), the detention center that Krichmar unintentionally visited that day became the symbol of the Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983). A closer look at the everyday life of the site reveals not only the terror unleashed by the military against its own citizens, but also the complicated nature of a detention center co-inhabited by victims and perpetrators. In addition to the admiral and his family, many officers and trainees shared the 58,000 sqft building known as the “Navy Officer’s Casino” with more than 5,000 detainees, most of them now disappeared. However, many prisoners used this proximity to their advantage. Forced to perform everyday tasks for their repressors, detainees managed to get an understanding of the operation of the center, register names, and smuggle out photographs, messages, and drawings. Some even survived to give testimony. This paper examines the human agency behind three “objects”: a set of photographs, a comic strip, and a name, which resisted the enclosure of the center and shaped its transformation into a site of memory. While the photographs provide material evidence to identify victims and perpetrators, the comic strip illustrates the power of humor in defiance of death. Finally, the name, that of a child born in ESMA’s maternity ward, reveals how a network of female prisoners managed to write their comrades and their usurped newborns into existence. Categories No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance 1:35 - 1:55pm Angola Plantation. Angola Prison. Angola Three. The U.S. Slavery and Colonial Past and Present Samia Henni Cornell University, USA Abstract Commonly called Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary (L.S.P.) is the largest maximum-security prison in the United States of America (U.S.) and the most infamous one. Located in a former site of a slave plantation named the Angola Plantation,—after Angola, the African country that was the homeland of many African slaves who were enslaved and forced to work in the colonized land—it was the most brutal and cruel prison “farm” in the last two centuries. First used as prison in 1880, L.S.P. is a space and place of incarceration based on the Southern plantation model of colonization and slavery. Still operating as a “farm”/plantation today, “Angola” occupies 18,000 acres and imprisons approximately 6,300 inmates, the majority of which are black people. Among these convicts were Robert King, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, three black men and Black Panthers known as The Angola Three. They have endured solitary confinement for decades—longer than any known living prisoner in the U.S.—while confined in “Angola.” The three men organized a variety of activities in prison to empower the black community. King was released in 2001 and continued to fight for the freedom of Wallace and Woodfox, advocating for justice and prison reform. Wallace passed away in 2013, three days after his release, and Woodfox was released in 2016. Based on published sources and oral history, this paper questions and traces the legacies between the norms and forms of “Angola” slave plantation and those of “Angola” plantation prison. It reveals the slavery and colonial ramifications of these spaces and policies and exposes the institutionalized racial violence that begun in 1492 and continues to this day. The paper also honors the persistent resistance of the three black political prisoners, members of The Angola Three, during and after their protracted incarceration in “Angola.” Categories No Small Acts: Spatial Histories of Imprisonment and Resistance 1:55 - 2:15pm Radio Free Refugee Camp: Spaces of Hygiene and Political Speech in Dadaab Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi Barnard College, Columbia University, USA Abstract Criticism of carceral humanitarian environments has grown, summarized in a New Left Review article that argued that refugee camps have transformed into “‘total institutions’ like prisons,” designed to immobilize asylum seekers under threat of repatriation to the countries they fled. Foregrounding detention as the spatial analytic at the root of the camp, this condemnation elided the ambiguous purposes for which these “prisons of the stateless” (the article title) were often constructed: hygiene and public health. At the large refugee settlement complex at Dadaab, Kenya, people have arrived from Somalia to receive nutritional and medical care from 1991 to the present. In order to preserve public hygiene, they have been enclosed and confined by the UNHCR, the agency designated to protect refugees, as well
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