The Great Wall of Confinement

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520938557
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (385 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great Wall of Confinement by : Philip F. Williams

Download or read book The Great Wall of Confinement written by Philip F. Williams and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-08-17 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is the only major world power to have entered the twenty-first century with a thriving prison camp network—a frightening, mostly hidden realm known since 1951 as the laogai system. This book, the most comprehensive study of China's prison camps to date, draws from a wide range of primary sources, including many compelling literary documents, to illuminate life inside China's prison camps. Focusing mainly on the second half of the twentieth century, Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu outline the evolution of the laogai system, construct a vivid picture of prisoners' lives from arrest and interrogation to release, and provide a troubling new perspective on the human rights issues plaguing China.

Long Road Home

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Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231519281
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Long Road Home by : Yong Kim

Download or read book Long Road Home written by Yong Kim and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-19 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime. As a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, Kim Yong enjoyed unprecedented privilege in a society that closely monitored its citizens. He owned an imported car and drove it freely throughout the country. He also encountered corruption at all levels, whether among party officials or Japanese trade partners, and took note of the illicit benefits that were awarded to some and cruelly denied to others. When accusations of treason stripped Kim Yong of his position, the loose distinction between those who prosper and those who suffer under Kim Jong-il became painfully clear. Kim Yong was thrown into a world of violence and terror, condemned to camp No. 14 in Hamkyeong province, North Korea's most notorious labor camp. As he worked a constant shift 2,400 feet underground, daylight became Kim's new luxury; as the months wore on, he became intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions. After years of meticulous planning, and with the help of old friends, Kim escaped and came to the United States via China, Mongolia, and South Korea. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, his story not only testifies to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence but also illuminates the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable hardship. Like the work of Solzhenitsyn, this rare portrait tells a story of resilience as it reveals the dark forms of oppression, torture, and ideological terror at work in our world today.

Remolding and Resistance Among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135987866
Total Pages : 201 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (359 download)

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Book Synopsis Remolding and Resistance Among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp by : Philip Williams

Download or read book Remolding and Resistance Among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp written by Philip Williams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting extensive analysis of literary and biographical accounts, this illuminating book provides a window to the affective side and emotional tenor of day-to-day life in modern day labour camps in China.

Cultures of Confinement

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501721267
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultures of Confinement by : Frank Dikötter

Download or read book Cultures of Confinement written by Frank Dikötter and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.

Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 311063113X
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival by : Anja Tippner

Download or read book Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival written by Anja Tippner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of “camp narratives” rather than “Holocaust narratives” or “Gulag narratives” is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de mémoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative.

Readings in Syrian Prison Literature

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Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815655207
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis Readings in Syrian Prison Literature by : R. Shareah Taleghani

Download or read book Readings in Syrian Prison Literature written by R. Shareah Taleghani and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s—a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Asad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the “experimental shift” in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani’s groundbreaking work explores prison writing’s critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

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Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501714023
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness by : Ning Wang

Download or read book Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness written by Ning Wang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58, Chinese intellectuals were subjected to "re-education" by the state. In Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness, Ning Wang draws on labor farm archives, interviews, and memoirs to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of these banished Beijing intellectuals. Wang’s use of newly uncovered Chinese-language sources challenges the concept of the intellectual as renegade martyr, showing how exiles often declared allegiance to the state for self-preservation. While Mao’s campaign victimized the banished, many of those same people also turned against their comrades. Wang describes the ways in which the state sought to remold the intellectuals, and he illuminates the strategies the exiles used to deal with camp officials and improve their chances of survival.

Incarceration Around the World

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1681461021
Total Pages : 123 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (814 download)

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Book Synopsis Incarceration Around the World by : Craig Russell

Download or read book Incarceration Around the World written by Craig Russell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one wing of Sweden's top-security prison, red drapes hang from the ceiling while small candles burn on an altar and men kneel in prayer; prisoners can apply to spend some of their sentence in religious meditation. Meanwhile, the guards at Jyderup State Prison in Denmark don't wear uniforms, and they don't carry guns. Prisons in the Congo, on the other hand, are so bad that, according to the New York Times, "If there is a worse place on earth than a Congolese prison, stay well away." Incarceration Around the World describes prison conditions on every continent, from Malawi and Kenya in Africa to China and India in Asia, from Brazil and Venezuela in South America to European nations like Sweden and Denmark.

Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature

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Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 0739167421
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (391 download)

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Book Synopsis Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature by : Yenna Wu

Download or read book Human Rights, Suffering, and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature written by Yenna Wu and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature, while probing the intersections of suffering, politics, and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context. As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives, it demonstrates how literary insight enhances the study of human rights. Covering varied geographical and geopolitical regions, this collection encourages comparative analyses and cross-cultural understanding. Seeking to interrogate linguistic, structural, and cultural constructions of the political prison experience, it highlights the literary aspects without losing sight of the political and the theoretical. The contributors cross various disciplinary boundaries and adopt different interpretive perspectives in analyzing prison narratives, especially memoirs, from such diverse countries as China, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Romania, Russia, Uruguay, and the U.S. The volume emphasizes the literary works produced since the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since the political seismic shift in 1989. The authors treated range from the canonical to the less well-known: Nawal El Saadawi, Varlam Shalamov, Zhang Xianliang, Cong Weixi, Wumingshi, Carlos Liscano, Fatna El Bouih, Nabil Sulayman, Faraj Bayraqdar, Hasiba 'Abdalrahman, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nicolae Steinhardt, Irina Ratushinskaya, etc. Critical issues investigated include how the writers represent their sufferings, experiences, and emotions during incarceration; their strategies of survival; and how political prison literature can reveal hidden violations of human rights, while resisting official discourse and serving other functions in society. Examining the commonalities and differences in global experiences of imprisonment, the eight chapters engage with the aesthetics of self-making and resistance, individual and collective memory, denial and conversion, catharsis and redemption, and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma. Topics also include the politics of remembering and the politics of representation, such as the problematic relationship between narrative, language, and representations of torture. Similarly under discussion are prison aesthetics of happiness, the role of spectacle in the criminal justice system, and the intersection of prison, gender, and silences. At a juncture when more and more people all over the world actively defy repressive regimes and demand political reform, this book makes a timely contribution to the advocacy and discourse of universal human rights.

Imprisoned, but Not Forgotten

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Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
ISBN 13 : 1462839290
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (628 download)

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Book Synopsis Imprisoned, but Not Forgotten by : Cyriacus Akas

Download or read book Imprisoned, but Not Forgotten written by Cyriacus Akas and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once in everyones life, you are forced to deal with lifes unexpectancy. Whether that lifes unexpectancy happens to be an illness that had you bedridden for any period of your life, or it is a simple thought that managed to captivate your mind, they are no surprise to God who desires that you walk in freedom. This book allows you to see Gods escape route for any confinement. Wouldnt it be nice if you could have Gods plan? Hence, you are not oblivious of your enemys plan to erect a wall within you. But Jesus in his Word has declared, In the World you have tribulation and trials and distress and frustration; but be of good cheer [take courage; be confi dent, certain, undaunted! For I have overcome the World [I have deprived it of power to harm you and have conquered it for you]. (John 16:33 [Amplifi ed]) If you are tired of living in the wall of prison (spiritual, mental, and physical) that was not meant for you to start with and you want your freedom, this book is for you. Do you know that God is so much interested with your freedom? As such, he is willing to trade places with you. But how bad do you treasure your liberty? Only you can answer that.

The Cinema of Wang Bing

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Publisher : Hong Kong University Press
ISBN 13 : 9888805770
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (888 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cinema of Wang Bing by : Bruno Lessard

Download or read book The Cinema of Wang Bing written by Bruno Lessard and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having made documentary films screened at the most prestigious film festivals in the West, Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing presents a unique case of independent filmmaking. In The Cinema of Wang Bing, Bruno Lessard examines the documentarian’s most important films, focusing on the two obsessions at the heart of his oeuvre—the legacy of Maoist China in the present and the transformation of labor since China’s entry into the market economy—and how the crucial figures of survivor and worker are represented on screen. Bruno Lessard argues that Wang Bing is a minjian (grassroots) intellectual whose films document the impact of Mao’s Great Leap Forward on Chinese collective memory and register the repercussions of China’s turn to neoliberalism on workers in the post-Reform era. Bringing together Chinese documentary studies and China studies, the author shows how Wang Bing’s practice reflects the minjian ethos when documenting the survivors of the Great Famine and those who have not benefitted from China’s neoliberal policies—from laid-off workers to migrant workers. The films discussed include some of Wang Bing’s most celebrated works such as West of the Tracks and Dead Souls, as well as neglected documentaries such as Coal Money and Bitter Money. “Bruno Lessard analyzes Wang Bing’s documentary masterpieces through the twin lens of history and labor. Incisively framing them as a sustained critical intervention in how China understands itself through the legacy of Maoism and Deng Xiaoping’s neoliberal reform project, The Cinema of Wang Bing makes me want to watch the films again.” —Chris Berry, King’s College London “Professor Lessard offers an original and comprehensive study of Wang Bing’s contribution to Chinese documentary as a mode of observation and reflection on some of the most crucial periods of China’s recent and present history . . . I certainly felt that reading the films through a sociohistorical approach produced a more vibrant understanding of Wang Bing’s oeuvre.” —Cecília Mello, University of São Paulo

The Great Wall of Confinement

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520227794
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great Wall of Confinement by : Philip F. Williams

Download or read book The Great Wall of Confinement written by Philip F. Williams and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-08-17 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "China is so big and so diverse that, as in the proverbial blind man touching an elephant, contemporary descriptions that vary dramatically can all be true. Few visitors to glittering Shanghai of Shenzhen, for example, will get any impression of the gaping gray maw of the government's prison camp system that Philip Williams and Yenna Wu, basing themselves on a vast range of Chinese sources, illuminate in erudite detail. The authors look at every facet of the camps, place them within China's historical tradition, and compare them with modern analogues. Throughout, literary and autobiographical sources give the 'feel' for the deadening world of the camps."—Perry Link, author of The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System "The Great Wall of Confinement deals with issues ranging from the legal grounding—or the lack of any—of the Chinese concentration camp system, to its technical implementation, its discursive manifestation, and its physical as well as psychological impact. A book like this is long overdue. With this work, Williams and Wu have made an important contribution to the fields of Chinese legal and literary studies."—David Der-wei Wang, author of The Monster That Is History "The Great Wall of Confinement is an excellent book. It synthesizes an already significant corpus of writings on Chinese prisons and labor camps, marshals an array of literary sources as essential historical source materials, and compares the literature of Chinese incarceration with its Soviet and European counterparts. The value of this important study stems equally from its tone—a rare combination of a level-headed quality with a very fine sensitivity to the human tragedy recounted in this literature."—Jean-Luc Domenach, author of Où va la Chine? (Where does China Go?) "The Great Wall of Confinement has attempted to lift part of the veil on China's long lasting tragedy: the use of imprisonment, torture, forced labor against its citizens, whether criminals, feeble minded or simply political opponents. The angle is new; the question is to find out how Chinese have written on this subject, whether in fiction or reportage, the way they went about telling their stories, how much they said, or withheld. Through Philip Willams and Yenna Wu's thought-provoking analysis of such writings, of the cultural origins of forced labor and imprisonment in imperial and Communist China, one comes closer to this sinister reality, which remains to this day one of the best kept secrets of our planet."—Marie Holzman, President of the Association Solidarité Chine

A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350000698
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies by : Clare Anderson

Download or read book A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies written by Clare Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the University of Leicester. Between 1415, when the Portuguese first used convicts for colonization purposes in the North African enclave of Ceuta, to the 1960s and the dissolution of Stalin's gulags, global powers including the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, British, Russians, Chinese and Japanese transported millions of convicts to forts, penal settlements and penal colonies all over the world. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies builds on specific regional archives and literatures to write the first global history of penal transportation. The essays explore the idea of penal transportation as an engine of global change, in which political repression and forced labour combined to produce long-term impacts on economy, society and identity. They investigate the varied and interconnected routes convicts took to penal sites across the world, and the relationship of these convict flows to other forms of punishment, unfree labour, military service and indigenous incarceration. They also explore the lived worlds of convicts, including work, culture, religion and intimacy, and convict experience and agency.

Freedom and Confinement in Modernity

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 023011895X
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (31 download)

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Book Synopsis Freedom and Confinement in Modernity by : A. Kordela

Download or read book Freedom and Confinement in Modernity written by A. Kordela and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.

Metaphors of Confinement

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 019884090X
Total Pages : 841 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Metaphors of Confinement by : Monika Fludernik

Download or read book Metaphors of Confinement written by Monika Fludernik and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 841 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy offers a historical survey of imaginings of the prison as expressed in carceral metaphors in a range of texts about imprisonment from Antiquity to the present as well as non-penal situations described as confining or restrictive. These imaginings coalesce into a 'carceral imaginary' that determines the way we think about prisons, just as social debates about punishment and criminals feed into the way carceral imaginary develops over time. Examining not only English-language prose fiction but also poetry and drama from the Middle Ages to postcolonial, particularly African, literature, the book juxtaposes literary and non-literary contexts and contrasts fictional and nonfictional representations of (im)prison(ment) and discussions about the prison as institution and experiential reality. It comments on present-day trends of punitivity and foregrounds the ethical dimensions of penal punishment. The main argument concerns the continuity of carceral metaphors through the centuries despite historical developments that included major shifts in policy (such as the invention of the penitentiary). The study looks at selected carceral metaphors, often from two complementary perspectives, such as the home as prison or the prison as home, or the factory as prison and the prison as factory. The case studies present particularly relevant genres and texts that employ these metaphors, often from a historical perspective that analyses development through different periods.

Conviviality and Survival

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319922106
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (199 download)

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Book Synopsis Conviviality and Survival by : Sacha Darke

Download or read book Conviviality and Survival written by Sacha Darke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-16 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brazilian authorities continuously fail to comply with international norms on minimal conditions of incarceration. Brazil's prison population has risen ten-fold since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s. Its prisons typically operate at double official capacity and with 100 prisoners for each guard on duty. At the same time, however, the average Brazilian prison is not as disorderly or its staff-inmate relations so conflictual as our established theories on prison life might predict. This monograph explores the means by which Brazilian prisons function in the absence of guards. More specifically, the means by which prison security and inmate discipline is negotiated between prison managers, gangs and the wider inmate body. While fragile and varied, this historical tradition of co-produced governance has for decades kept most prisons in better order and enabled most prisoners to better survive.

Afterlives of Confinement

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Author :
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822978067
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Afterlives of Confinement by : Susana Draper

Download or read book Afterlives of Confinement written by Susana Draper and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the age of dictatorships, Latin American prisons became a symbol for the vanquishing of political opponents, many of whom were never seen again. In the postdictatorship era of the 1990s, a number of these prisons were repurposed into shopping malls, museums, and memorials. Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the "opening" of prisons and detention centers to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in post-dictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, Draper examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures. The afterlife of prisons became an important tool in the "forgetting" of past politics, while also serving as a reminder to citizens of the liberties they now enjoyed. In Draper's analysis, these symbols led the populace to believe they had attained freedom, although they had only witnessed the veneer of democracy—in the ability to vote and consume. In selected literary works by Roberto Bola–o, Eleuterio Fernandez Huidoboro, and Diamela Eltit and films by Alejandro Agresti and Marco Bechis, Draper finds further evidence of the emptiness and melancholy of underachieved goals in the afterlife of dictatorships. The social changes that did not occur, the inability to effectively mourn the losses of a now-hidden past, the homogenizing effects of market economies, and a yearning for the promises of true freedom are thematic currents underlying much of these texts. Draper's study of the manipulation of culture and consumerism under the guise of democracy will have powerful implications not only for Latin Americanists but also for those studying neoliberal transformations globally.