Framing the Penal Colony: Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation 3031193954, 9783031193958

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Framing the Penal Colony Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation Edited by Sophie Fuggle Charles Forsdick · Katharina Massing

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of global media networks is now unparalleled. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and criminology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture nexus.

Sophie Fuggle · Charles Forsdick · Katharina Massing Editors

Framing the Penal Colony Representing, Interpreting and Imagining Convict Transportation

Editors Sophie Fuggle Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, UK

Charles Forsdick University of Liverpool Liverpool, UK

Katharina Massing Nottingham Trent University Nottingham, UK

ISSN 2946-3912 ISSN 2946-3920 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-19395-8 ISBN 978-3-031-19396-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Kuto Bay, Ile des Pins, New Caledonia (2018). Photo with permission from Claire Reddleman. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Many of the chapters upon which this collection is based first started out as conference papers at the Framing the Penal Colony conference held at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham, UK, in November 2019. The conference was generously supported by the AHRC as part of the “Postcards from the bagne” project led by Sophie Fuggle (Ref. AH/R002452/1).

v

Contents

1

Introduction Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick, and Katharina Massing

Part I 2

3

4

1

Reporting the Penal Colony

Framing New Caledonia: Policing Escapees from the Bagne in Colonial Australia Briony Neilson “Dancing and Discipline, Frolics and Felonies, Punch and Punishment, Rum and Reform”: Queen Victoria’s Birthday Party, Norfolk Island Penal Station, 25 May 1840 J. M. Moore Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’ as Graphic Novel: From Adventure Narrative to Prison Comics Chantal Cointot and Sophie Fuggle

31

57

79

vii

viii

Contents

Part II

Exploring the Penal Colony

5

6

7

Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River: Between the Prison and the Museum Sophie Fuggle Seeing the Penal Colony Through Heritage Trail Maps: Global Connections and Local Views of the bagne in French Guiana and New Caledonia Claire Reddleman Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony: Starting from the End with Patti Smith and Jean Genet Samuel Tracol and Glória Alhinho

Part III 8

9

10

11

109

133

153

Framing and Reframing the Colonial Prison

Graphic Histories of New Caledonia: Visualizing the Bagne Charles Forsdick

179

Framing Postcolonial Narratives in the Prison Museum: The Qingdao German Prison Museum Katharina Massing

197

Framing the Tiger Cages: Contested Symbols of Postcolonial Conflicts in the USA and Vietnam Maryse Tennant

221

Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps: Sara Gómez’s 1960s Documentary Trilogy and the Racialized Legacy of Cuban Penal Deportation Susan Martin-Márquez

247

Contents

Part IV 12

13

Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal Colony

Listening with Our Feet: Decolonial and Feminist Arts-Based Methodologies in Addressing Australian Incarceration Policies on Nauru and Manus Islands Kate McMillan Abolitionist Ways of Seeing: Artists in the Penal Colony Complex Ros Liebeskind and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

Index

ix

275

301

319

Notes on Contributors

Glória Alhinho, Ph.D. in Iberian, Latin American, Mediterranean Studies, University of Bordeaux, France. Her work is influenced by a great interest in the interconnection of artistic and scientific knowledge, mainly through imaging. She successively builds up a dialogue between the academic and diplomatic dimensions at Georgetown University and at the Embassy of Portugal in Washington, DC, through a multiplicity of scientific, cultural, aesthetical, ethic and diplomatic debates, and teaching film and writing and cultural diplomacy. Her latest publication gathers her photographic work at Saint-Joseph (French Guiana) and writing, exploring visible and invisible spheres of this penal colony as a cultural and natural heritage. Chantal Cointot is Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Fragmented lives: representations of the self in Franco-Belgian autobiocomics’, explores to what extent the interplay of text, image and frame in autobiocomics can propose new ways of approaching a self that is fragmented, complex and contradictory. In it, she notably investigates how formal framing processes provide a space for

xi

xii

Notes on Contributors

self-formation and self-transformation, and examines their potential for educating others. Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He has published on a range of subjects, including travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial and world literature, and the memorialisation of slavery. Recent books include The Black Jacobins Reader (2016), Toussaint Louverture: Black Jacobin in an Age of Revolution (2017) and Keywords for Travel Writing Studies (2019). He co-edited, with Laurence Grove and Elizabeth McQuillan, The Francophone Bande Dessinée (2005) and published an article on ‘Haiti and Bande dessinée’ in a special issue of Yale French Studies (2017) devoted to ‘Bande Dessinée: Thinking Outside the Boxes’, guest edited by Laurence Grove and Michael Syrotinski. Sophie Fuggle is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Heritage at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of Foucault/Paul: Subjects of Power (Palgrave, 2013) and co-editor (with Yari Lanci and Martina Tazzioli) of Foucault and the History of Our Present (Palgrave, 2015). Her current research focuses on the cultural and ecological legacies of French colonial prisons and penal colonies. Ros Liebeskind is a multidisciplinary researcher, creative practitioner and community organiser. Her research explores issues of abjection, space, queerness and resistance. She has recently graduated from the University of Birmingham with a first in their History of Art B.A., researching contemporary art and queer methodologies towards prison abolition. She is currently part of the team at Grand Union, a contemporary art gallery based in Birmingham, merging theory and practice to imagine otherwise. Susan Martin-Márquez is Professor at Rutgers University, with joint teaching responsibilities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Cinema Studies, and an affiliation with the Comparative Literature Program. Her scholarship centres on Spanish-language cinema, as well as on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish imperial practices, and Cuban and African anti-colonial movements and their cultural expression. Her books include: Sight Unseen: Feminist Discourse

Notes on Contributors

xiii

and Spanish Cinema (Oxford UP, 1999) and Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (Yale UP, 2008). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Jail-Breaking the Carceral Atlantic: Cuban Rebellion and Political Deportation in the late Spanish Empire, and also has another book in progress on transatlantic networks of revolutionary filmmaking. Her chapter represents the intersection of those two projects. Katharina Massing is a senior lecturer and researcher in Museum and Heritage Development in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University working on holistic approaches to heritage management, community participation and heritage and tourism development in the Asia-Pacific region. Before working at NTU, she completed her Ph.D. in Museum, Gallery and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University. Her doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Finding an ecomuseum ideal for Hainan Province: Encouraging community participation in intangible cultural and natural heritage protection in a rural setting in China’, investigated the current ecomuseum development in Hainan Province, China. She also holds a M.A. in Chinese Studies (major), Chinese Language (minor) and East Asian Art History from Freie Universität in Berlin. Kate McMillan is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Practice at King’s College, London. Her research engages with histories connected to colonial violence and women’s knowledges. She is the annual author of ‘Representation of Female Artists in Britain’ commissioned by the Freelands Foundation, as well as various other academic publications that consider gender inequality in the visual arts. In 2019, Palgrave Macmillan published her monograph called Contemporary Art & Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Islands of Empire which investigates female artists in the Global South and the ways their practices defy colonial amnesia. Her own creative practice incorporates sound, film, textiles and sculpture to create immersive environments which aim to engender empathic responses to difficult histories.

xiv

Notes on Contributors

J. M. Moore is a historian, sociologist and activist who lives in west Wales. His research centres on the theory and history of penal law, colonialism and its relationship to penal law, and the potential of abolition. Briony Neilson is an honorary associate in History at the University of Sydney and specialises in the history of criminal justice in nineteenthcentury France and its empire, particularly New Caledonia. She has published on the history of juvenile delinquency, convict transportation and penal colonialism, and her research has been supported by grants from the French Embassy and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She is currently preparing a monograph for McGill Queen’s University Press which explores the significance of new practices concerning children and adolescents for the French criminal justice system at the end of the nineteenth century. Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester and previously taught digital humanities at King’s College London, working on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art. Prior to this, she carried out postdoctoral research as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Postcards from the bagne’ led by Dr. Sophie Fuggle, using visual research methods to engage with the history of France’s penal colonies. She received a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, and her research monograph based on the thesis is titled Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps. She previously gained a M.A. in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, and a B.A. (Hons.) in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Reading. She is also a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman. com. Maryse Tennant is a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University where she teaches criminology. She is a historical criminologist who has published and presented on historical and cultural aspects of policing and imprisonment, as well as the ethics of remembering and representing crime and punishment. She has researched and exhibited material on the lives of inmates at the former Canterbury prison, using

Notes on Contributors

xv

these with her students to explore the interconnections between private troubles and public issues. She is the Course Director for the criminology undergraduate and postgraduate degrees and Chair of the School Ethics Committee. She supervises research students working on historical and cultural understandings of crime and punishment. Samuel Tracol is a Ph.D. candidate in Contemporary History in Sorbonne-Université (France). His thesis is focused on the French Penal colonies servants, but he is interested more largely in those on social margins such as vagrants and delinquents, and geographical margins such as Amazonia. He holds the Fondation Thiers scholarship for 2022-2023. He co-founded the CoPALC (Penal Colonisation of Latin America and Caribbean) research group, with a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective. He was previously lecturer in the Université de Guyane and in Sciences Po Aix. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is an artist and historian, currently leading the ERC project REPATRIATES: Artistic Research in Museums and Communities in the process of Repatriation from Europe. She is Professor of History at the Central European University and Honorary Professor and Chair of Global Art at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of the books Art in the Time of Colony (2014); The Importance of Being Anachronistic (2016), Botanical Drift (2017); Mit Fremden Federn (2022); and The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Mexico and Europe (2022). She is the co-author of Bordered Lives: Immigration Detention Archive (2020) and co-editor of Third Text journal .

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Photo wall of images taken at Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author) Mannequins making horseshoes. Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author) Agricultural scene forming part of a diorama. Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author) Mannequins representing convict mealtime. Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author) Third sign on the sentier du bagne des Annamites at Montsinéry-Tonnégrande, French Guiana. ‘La chimérique conquête de l’inini’ [The chimerical conquest of the Inini], 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman) ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ sign located at Kuto Bay, Île des Pins, New Caledonia, side panel featuring the trio of satellite maps, 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman) ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ sign located at Kuto Bay, Île des Pins, New Caledonia, showing the main information panel, 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman)

122 123 125 126

139

142

144

xvii

xviii

List of Figures

Fig. 10.1

The French Tiger Cages upper walkway, Con Dao. Photo by the author The American Tiger Cages inner corridor, Con Dao. Photo by the author Looking down on the bamboo Tiger Cages, Phu Quoc. Photo by the author The film clapper frames Manuela’s challenging gaze. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana: ICAIC Cuban stamp featuring the watchful eye imagery of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. “X Aniversario de los CDR.” Original photograph by Karen Horton: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kar enhorton/4463837284. Licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/leg alcode Sara Gómez prompts Rafael to reveal his experience of racism. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana: ICAIC Working side-by-side, young Black and White Cubans eradicate weeds. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana: ICAIC The ‘exemplary’ White internee César encourages Afro-Cuban Miguel to become ‘just like’ him. Sara Gómez, 1968b. An Island for Miguel. Havana: ICAIC Raúl Martínez’s cover illustration for Cuba magazine, ‘The Youngest Island in the World,’ May 1968 McMillan, K (2010) Islands of Incarceration, Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound produced in collaboration with Cat Hope Karina Utomo performing in Cat Hope’s ‘Speechless’. Image by Toni Wilkinson Drawing of a cell by Mohamed from Morocco in Dover, 2015. Immigration Detention Archive Oxford Courtyard in Colnbrook IRC, Heathrow, outside the exercise area, taken by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll during a photography workshop inside, 2015

Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 11.1

Fig. 11.2

Fig. 11.3

Fig. 11.4

Fig. 11.5

Fig. 11.6 Fig. 12.1

Fig. 12.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2

227 229 230

254

255

259

260

263 265

283 286 304

305

List of Figures

Fig. 13.3

Bordered Lives exhibition at VBKOE Vienna (from left to right: exhibition from the book, performance lecture from Darwin College Cambridge on screen, script and censorship, and border intervention by Emma Humphris), August 2021

xix

307

1 Introduction Sophie Fuggle, Charles Forsdick, and Katharina Massing

In April 2022, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel announced that a deal had been made with Rwanda which would now see asylum seekers sent to the African nation (5,500 miles or 8,800 km away) for processing (The Guardian, 2022). The new arrangement was announced after long-term speculation around extraterritorial management of refugees arriving in the UK including those taking the perilous journey from Calais by dinghy. Previous suggestions had included the proposal of sending asylum seekers to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic over 4,400 miles (or 7,000 km) from the UK and S. Fuggle (B) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Massing Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] C. Forsdick University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_1

1

2

S. Fuggle et al.

1,000 miles from the coast of Africa (Walker & Murray, 2020). So far the proposed deportations have attracted widespread criticism against a backdrop of the erosion of human rights in the UK following the withdrawal from the European Union in January 2020. Earlier proposals seemed ludicrous and, if anything, simply an attempt, in the aftermath of Brexit, to remind British society of its claims to sovereignty via reference to remaining overseas territories such as Ascension Island (part of the Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha territory; on the post-imperial contexts of Brexit, see Dorling & Tomlinson, 2019). Such assertions to sovereignty hark back to the use of distant islands as sites of exile for political deportees. Indeed, after his second defeat against the British at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was sent to live out his days on Saint Helena (Unwin, 2010). The choice of location was intended to ensure he did not escape as he had done from his earlier exile to the Island of Elba in the Mediterranean. Evoking Ascension Island as a possible site (despite the high costs and impracticalities of such a location) for those who have recently crossed both the Mediterranean and the English Channel must be understood as a symbolic gesture intended to evoke past Franco-British histories and to affirm both Britain’s independence from Europe and the country’s ability to exile anyone perceived as threatening its borders. However, this flex has now been revealed to have been a distraction tactic whilst other non-UK sites for immigrant detention have been sought. The UK is not unique here. Denmark has also reportedly been in talks with Rwanda over a similar initiative (see Neilson, Chapter 2). The model of establishing such partnerships is frequently referred to as the ‘Pacific Model’ with reference to Australia’s use of Nauru, Manus and Christmas Island to process asylum seekers. The human rights violations—which have seen children also detained and a high number of suicides—have elicited international criticism. Despite successful legal challenges, the centres have remained open alongside a complex network of sites located across Australia itself. As Alison Mountz (2020) has argued, the increased use by countries in the Global North of what she terms the ‘enforcement archipelago’ since the 1970s is bringing about ‘the death of asylum’. Such a ‘death’ is both metaphorical (as society comes to accept that such practices are legitimate and

1 Introduction

3

necessary) and literal (since the result of such practices is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as the ‘premature death’ of those being held, whether this be during detention or subsequently as a result of physical and mental hardships experienced). Indeed, as Wilson Gilmore points out, ‘premature death’ is the endpoint of racism: “Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of groupdifferentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Wilson Gilmore, 2007, p. 28). Alongside the wider practice of offshore detention as part of broader border control measures, it is also important to note the extraordinary rendition used, notably, by the United States during the ‘War on Terror’ declared by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The extralegal practices of torture used as part of such practices also bring into relief the deployment of extraterritorial spaces such as Guantánamo, together with ‘black sites’ or temporary sites, not marked on any map or flight manifesto. This capacity to block, erase and ‘disappear’ different ‘bodies’ deemed dangerously ‘other’ occurs as a result of the ability to impose and suspend laws and borders that operate as perpetually shifting lines and frames. Such lines are made visible in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s memoir Guantánamo Diary published in 2015 and based on his experience of being held without trial for fourteen years. The original version of the memoir features pages and pages of text redacted by the U.S. government, including extensive passages recounting the use of torture and other forms of abuse.1 The thick black lines, which are frustrating for readers, embody the way information is controlled and denied to certain parties even when it directly concerns or affects them. It also emphasises how the narrative of what happens in places like Guantánamo continues to exclude or limit the voices of those transported there. The current use of overseas territories for asylum processing, immigrant detention and extraordinary rendition should thus be situated within longer, global practices of deportation and transportation as central strategies within colonial expansion from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Ann Laura Stoler (2012) has pointed out, “There are no straight historical lines that lead from les colonies agricoles to Guantanamo”. However, it is our contention in this volume that the complex

4

S. Fuggle et al.

historical phenomenon of the penal colony, as an archaic and seemingly defunct symbol of empire, continues to be reimagined and reactivated within contemporary, postcolonial manifestations of border control and other forms of securitisation aimed at excluding and marginalising different groups and individuals according to racist logics underpinning earlier forms of colonialism. Where, for example, the British ceased convict transportation from the United Kingdom to Australia in 1867, it continued to maintain offshore prisons for colonial subjects until the mid-twentieth century. The Andaman Islands were used as a prison for Indian political prisoners from 1857 with construction of the notorious cellular jail completed in 1906 (see Sherman, 2009). During the 1950s, French colonial officials in Indochina cited the Andamans as justification for their own proposal of maintaining the island of Poulo Condor (now known as Con Dao) as a penal colony for colonial subjects from the region following the closure of their main penal colony in French Guiana (Fuggle, 2021). At the same time as historians (Anderson, 2018, 2022; Forster, 1996) have begun to take stock of the global reach of convict transportation and related sites of forced labour and incarceration, placing them into new transnational and often transcolonial perspectives (Patterson, 2016, 2018), the penal colony and, within it, the prison island have maintained key roles within popular imaginaries of empire, crime and punishment. For instance, collective memory around the use of convict transportation and forced labour is frequently co-opted to nationalist ideologies that seek to rehabilitate the anonymous convict as pioneer, celebrating their sacrifice and labour in the building of empire and nation. Such a move involves both a re-imagining and forgetting of the longer histories of the territories given over to penal settlement. It works to erase the lives and cultures of indigenous populations, notably in locations such as Tasmania, whilst rehabilitating settler colonialism via narratives of convict suffering and the more recent need to redress intergenerational shame and silence that followed. Elsewhere, tales of the celebrity convict (of which Ned Kelly and Papillon are perhaps the best-known examples), including their daring escapes from and confrontations with both hostile, unknown territory and the colonial authorities, emphasise heroic

1 Introduction

5

exceptionalism and sensationalist events over the banal, slow violence of everyday life endured by most convict populations. Within media reporting, cinema, literature, games and other forms of visual culture, the regular reactivation of themes of exile, forced labour and hostile, unknown territories should draw our attention to the continuing efficacy of the penal colony as ideological construction aimed at evoking awe, wonder, horror and fantasy. The figure of the individual anti-hero—allowed escape and redemption via acts of courage and ingenuity—exists against a backdrop of monstruous, forsaken others who have been purged from society with their lives suspended indefinitely. The aim of this collection is to explore the multiple ways in which the penal colony has been and still is defined, described, represented, interpreted, imagined and reimagined both during and after its operation. The wider intention here is to draw attention to the richness and complexities of cultural constructions, identifying their different ideological functions at different points in time and in different places. Many of the chapters emphasise the penal colony as a widely misunderstood, paradoxical space, replete with tensions between lived experience and discourses (both utopian and repressive) imposed from elsewhere. Where, on the one hand, the collection calls for a close and careful analysis of existing historical and contemporary material in order to better grasp key ideological stakes, on the other hand, different, creative methodologies are brought to bear on these sites and their representations, emphasising alternative encounters and narratives to those which have, thus far, provided dominant cultural imaginaries of the penal colony. A further stake here is to affirm the importance of the penal colony and convict transportation within the ongoing work of abolition and related decolonial praxis. Penal colonies are a key part of global geographies of empire. The use of forced labour as punishment at different points in history (and, indeed, its ongoing use within certain carceral regimes today) must be read alongside the parallel histories of the transatlantic slave trade and in conjunction with other forms of punishment including the death penalty. If the discontinuation of transportation to different sites represents a form of decarceration, this must be read carefully in relation to what comes next.

6

S. Fuggle et al.

Writing of the Port Arthur historic site in Tasmania, John Frow (2000) points out the problem of framing the penal colony in terms of the abolition of convict transportation. This creates the notion of the penal colony as an endpoint, a moment that has passed and is sealed off from subsequent history and present: To singularise the past and to isolate it in its pastness is to reduce this complexity to a single story, to sever a monumental time of national origins from the generational times which continuously modify it. (p. 13)

This ignores the multiple, complex functions of Port Arthur and the wider region. In turn, this allows both the ‘sanitisation’ of that history and its re-imagining according to contemporary fantasies. Today, the Historic Port Arthur website claims the status of one of Australia’s ‘most visited’ sites and is one of 11 sites forming the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Convict Sites. Visitor activities include the ‘Escape from Port Arthur Tour’, a walking tour subtitled ‘The daring and the desperate’ and the ‘Isle of the Dead cemetery tour’. But the focus on a sealed-off past also avoids acknowledgement of how Australia’s convict histories not only underpin colonial development and nation-state building, but, equally, the development of policing and punishment. In 1996, 35 visitors to the site were shot with another 23 wounded by a single gunman, Martin Bryant. There is now a Memorial Garden based around the shell of the Broad Arrow Café in which 20 of Bryant’s victims died, but as Frow points out, the site’s refusal to mark more actively the subsequent histories up to and including the 1996 massacre risks: “forgetting the line that runs from the model prison to the coldly violent maximum-security institutions of today. It means failing to understand how the violence of the past is both repeated in and is radically discontinuous with Martin Bryant’s shooting spree in April 1996, which cannot be told as part of the ‘same’ story” (p. 13). Moreover, it is only recently that work is being done to redress the forgetting of genocide and violent displacement of Australia’s aboriginal population as part of the occupation of Van Dieman’s land. As is often the case, this excavation of these silenced histories and their interconnections has occurred in the creative arts, with Jennifer Kent’s 2019 film The Nightingale, set in 1825,

1 Introduction

7

recounting the ways in which the search for revenge by a young Irish convict Clare (raped by a British lieutenant, and witness to the murder of her husband Aidan and their baby) intersects with the story of an Aboriginal tracker called Billy.

What is a Penal Colony? In this collection, the parameters of what constitutes a ‘penal colony’ have been left deliberately broad and it is the task of individual contributors to set out their own definitions and limits. The role and representation of colonial prisons will also be considered alongside multi-sited penal settlements and prison islands. Nevertheless, it is perhaps useful to make a few assertions in relation to how the ‘penal colony’ exists and operates as historical phenomenon, geographical location and ideological and cultural construct. Of particular use here is Ann Laura Stoler’s description of the ‘colony’ as a deliberately ambiguous (shadowy) configuration of space and time: “Already knowing what a colony is precludes asking whether ambiguous nomenclatures, competing visions, repeated failures, and reversals of course (and the violence, alleged permanence, and the fortressed settledness they engender) prefigure the colony not as a site of settlement but as always unstable and precarious, plagued by the expectant promise and fear of its becoming another sort of entity” (Stoler, 2012). One of the most enduring and globally recognisable of all representations of the penal colony is Franz Kafka’s short story In der Strafkolonie (translated into English either as ‘In the Penal Colony’ or ‘In the Penal Settlement’), first published in 1919 in the wake of the First World War. Scholars of various penal colonies (Hecht, 2013, p. 126; Redfield, 2000, p. 51) frequently draw on the story to frame their own historiographies. It has been suggested (Nicholls, 2007, pp. 17–18) that Kafka might have been inspired by the high-profile Dreyfus Affair which saw Alfred Dreyfus sent first to New Caledonia and then to Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana where he spent five years.

8

S. Fuggle et al.

Literary and philosophical readings of the story have focused on theological (Fowler, 1979; Steinberg, 1976) or psychoanalytic interpretations (Barth, 2013; Webster, 1956) which assume the text as largely allegorical. The abstract tropical location which we are subsequently told is an ‘island’ is largely ignored as backdrop in favour of a focus on the law as bodily inscription (Lyotard & Fynsk, 1991) that falls short in its promise of transfiguration. However, a more interesting reading for our purposes is offered by Peters (2001) who proposes greater attention is paid to the notion of colony as punishment, arguing that Kafka should be read alongside anti-colonial writers such as Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Albert Memmi as well as in terms of colonial discourses from the period.2 What, asks Peters, if we read Kafka’s text more literally? In other words, the ‘remarkable apparatus’ described at length is not only ‘metaphor made material’ but, in fact, constitutes an account of the real, complex violent apparatus of colonial administration condensed into the form of a single, imaginary machine. Indeed, the complicated machine captures the paradox of colonial violence as both technologically advanced and ‘archaically’ violent, evoking a spectacle of punishment whilst remaining largely invisible or overlooked by those in charge. The execution is attended by no one else beyond the small group, yet the Officer refers to the sending off of the condemned man by the Commandant’s ‘ladies’ who offer their handkerchiefs and ply the condemned with sweets he later throws up. Another key element of Kafka’s tale is the reference to the shifting regimes and the displacement, albeit slow, of the earlier Commandant’s ‘utopian vision’ embodied in the complex plans accompanying the ‘apparatus’ and in the long-winded speeches of the Officer. Here, Kafka captures the bizarre bureaucracy of penal administration which was often managed by different branches of colonial government such as the Navy. The frequently short-term appointments of governors meant that regimes could shift with each newly arrived governor seeking to define himself in relation or contrast to his predecessor. Consequently, penal colonies often became sites of short-lived, failed experiments thought up from outside the territory (as shall be explored in Chapter 3). Several aspects remain enigmatic in Kafka’s text: to what extent is the colony’s status as ‘penal colony’ determined by the excessive use of the

1 Introduction

9

‘remarkable apparatus’? Is its regular use, as mentioned by the Officer, and its centrality within the former Commandant’s regime, the defining feature of this island? Or does it represent a surplus, an exceptional form of punishment in a place, the exile to which is a punishment in itself? Where are the convicts in this penal colony? The figure of the Condemned Man offers few clues here. He is described as a former soldier who is being punished for insubordination. His original presence on the island does not appear to be as a punishment yet his role appears to be one of servitude to colonial masters. He does not speak the same language as the Officer who talks in French thus further implying he is a colonised rather than colonising subject. As Frow (2000) suggests: [I]f we think of some of Kafka’s other closed, pointless, and selfperpetuating hierarchies, it is perhaps no accident that it is a guard rather than a prisoner who undergoes punishment. There is no outside of such systems, and in this the penal colony resembles rather closely the hierarchy of surveillance envisaged in Bentham’s panopticon, in which it is not only the prisoners in their cells but the warders at every level of the apparatus of inspection who are held under constant scrutiny. (p. 3)

Finally, we might consider the figure of the Traveller whom the reader is most closely invited to identify with. What was his interest in visiting the penal colony if not to witness an execution? What are we to make of his apparently ‘impartial’ observation of the machine as it destroys both itself and the Officer who has staked his career and life on its functioning? Despite his claims to humanitarianism, his departing act of threatening the soldier and formerly condemned man so as to prevent them from boarding his boat should leave readers with a final, unsettling image of one whose opposition to the barbarity of the penal colony and its ‘remarkable machine’ fell short of physical action. Peters describes the Traveller as a ‘scholar-explorer’ and this appellation might equally be applied to the contemporary researcher of the penal colony including the contributors in this book. The Traveller in his observation of the ‘remarkable machine’, his initial lack of interest followed by growing fascination and disgust coupled with his lack of sustained empathy for

10

S. Fuggle et al.

those confined to the island embodies what Michelle Brown has termed ‘penal spectatorship’. In The Culture of Punishment (2009), Brown identifies the widespread consumption of images and narratives of incarceration in contemporary society particularly in the United States as fostering a vicarious experience of punishment which ultimately underpins public attitudes about decision making around criminal justice: The cultural imaginary is not subject to simple cause and effect models and is a nebulous, playful arena where vicarious identities and moralities are picked up and later discarded, but with consistent patterns and attractions to particular disguises. These tendencies then gradually become ideology and convention, habit and value, proper narratives of punishment. With regard to punishment, these processes render representations of imprisonment a particularly seductive site for the production of cultural scripts and classifications on the part of the spectator. (p. 57)

The chapters in this book take up Brown’s concerns via the specific example of the penal colony and its representation in popular culture together with the interpretation of its built heritage as ruin or museum. The penal colony not only constitutes a space and set of practices but also a grouping of people often constructed in public discourse as monstruous, dangerous, abject and undesirable. Yet, as such, they are also a source of the deep fascination that manifests itself as part of a broader carceral exoticism. The lives when framed via sensationalist reporting and fictionalised memoirs offer a vicarious experience of adventure and transgression whilst maintaining the real convict population at a safe distance. In analysing the ongoing, shifting depiction of what Eamonn Carrabine (2011) has termed “iconographies of punishment”, including instruments of torture, constraint and death found in such spaces, the aim is not to reaffirm or rehabilitate the penal colony as object of analysis. As Carrabine has also argued, there is a need when considering images of punishment and, therefore suffering, “to develop an approach to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships between the two” (Carrabine, 2018, p. 559). The task at hand is to

1 Introduction

11

demonstrate the multiple sometimes conflicting ways in which the penal colony as image and text has been instrumentalised by different political agendas via, on the one hand, the fantasies and imaginaries associated with the dual operation of exile and confinement and, on the other, the common tropes and markers that emphasise both carceral continuities and ruptures with other times and places. Yet, in our study of different forms of cultural production that draw on the penal colony, we also seek to identify alternative possibilities, ways of reading, looking and listening that open up space in which to hear other, forgotten or silenced voices (dubbed by Chamoiseau, in the context of French Guiana, as “memory-traces” [2020]) and craft new critical perspectives.

Carceral Geographies The geographical features of Kafka’s story are deliberately sparse—a barren landscape, tropical climate and small dilapidated port town (with the only well-maintained building being the Commandant’s residence)— evoking any number of places under European colonial occupation in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century. The abstract image of the penal colony here identifies dominant colonial discourses which sought to present overseas territories as blank spaces or tabula rasa (Duschinsky, 2012) awaiting resource extraction, agricultural development and colonial infrastructure. As Miranda Spieler (2012) has pointed out, the 1795 French constitution marked out its colonies as such ‘blank spaces’ on the map, representing “institutionless, vacant units of the metropolitan state” (p. 54). In the case of penal colonies, the hostility of the environment was also evoked as offering both effective punishment and new opportunity for those sentenced to forced labour. Furthermore, the specific topography of the prison island (which frequently provides a ‘prison within the prison’ of the wider colony) evokes a specific form of what Kothari and Wilkinson (2010) have termed “colonial island imaginaries”. Drawing on Edward Said’s broader notion of “colonial imaginaries” (Said, 1978), Kothari and Wilkinson describe how such imaginaries are bound up in the projection and construction of multiple aspects of island existence, landscape and resources as befit

12

S. Fuggle et al.

various colonial projects. Whilst frequently dependent on various myths and binaries, these are nevertheless subject to reconfiguration over time. What is particularly interesting for this collection is the persistence of the prison island within colonial and postcolonial imaginaries, a theme we will return to at the end of this introductory chapter. Within this collection, various chapters take up the question of the specific and often underexamined geographies of the penal colony and their representation in text, image and maps as well as their posthumous exploration via walking, photographing, viewing and listening. A central tenet of this book is to work towards a more nuanced understanding of the (evolving) space of the penal colony as perceived from multiple places and positionalities. This echoes Roscoe’s call (2018, p. 63) to attend to the “view from the colonies” in her analysis of the use of carceral islands off the coast of Australia both during and after the end of convict transportation from Britain. By extension, it is also necessary to perpetually deconstruct the language and discourse which maintains the penal colony as a ‘green hell’ situated at ‘the end of the world’. Here, the notion of ‘ecology’ has been drawn upon by scholars to offer a more complex account of penal geography. Edwards (2021) adopts the term ‘carceral ecology’ to explore the history of the port town Ushuaia in Argentina, which between 1902 and 1947 housed an experimental prison that combined the radial architecture of the panopticon with convict labour for the region’s timber industry. Edwards contests the persistent reference to Ushuaia as situated ‘at the end of the world’ and the implication that this makes it an isolated space disconnected from the rest of society. Fuggle (2022) has drawn on the notion of “prismatic ecology” (Cohen, 2013) to challenge the dominant, restrictive image of French Guiana as a ‘green hell’. Working to better understand the complex spaces and mobilities defining convict transportation and the lived experience of the penal colony constitutes a significant aspect of the subdiscipline of ‘carceral geography’ which has emerged over the past two decades (see Moran et al., 2018). One of the first scholars to adopt the term ‘carceral geographies’ was Ruth Wilson Gilmore who describes using it in her teaching back in 1999 as a way of broadening the scope of what was being termed

1 Introduction

13

(in the United States and elsewhere) the “prison industrial complex” (Wilson Gilmore, 2022, p. 480).3 Wilson Gilmore counters the idea of ‘carceral geographies’ with what she terms the ‘abolition geographies’ embodied in her work with activist groups such as Mothers Reclaiming our Children and Critical Resistance and, more specifically, via the connection of different societal concerns around environmental justice, community dispossession and the multiple, diffuse forms of ‘premature death’ occurring to marginalised poor and non-white populations. The role here of geography is as a tool for understanding the connections between different forms of spatial planning, management and land use. It reveals the globalising effects of certain practices whilst at the same time enabling people to understand the different components and how they contribute to the wider carceral landscape. In doing so, it becomes possible to identify how to challenge specific, local practices whilst connecting these to other, wider struggles across space and time. In considering the ways in which analysis of the penal colony as political concept and cultural imaginary might contribute towards the multifaceted work of abolition and decolonial praxis, it is worth keeping in mind the origins of geography as a discipline bound up with colonial occupation, dispossession and extraction. As J. M. Moore (2020) has explored via the specific biography of geographer and prison reformer Alexander Maconochie (also the subject of this volume’s Chapter 3), the carceral and the colonial come together via the work of geography which, at base, is taken up with the use of space to control and coerce different populations. Moore raises the ethical implications of forms of carceral geography that reproduce such work often in the form of reformist agendas (see, for example, Moran et al., 2021) including those taken up with ‘greenwashing’ the prison. Although largely beyond the scope of this volume, one of the pressing tasks for research on penal colonies past and present is to take stock of the ecological impact and legacy of transportation and convict labour across the globe. As Edwards (2021) argues as part of his ‘carceral ecology’, it is necessary to move beyond reductive notions of the ‘natural’ prison,

14

S. Fuggle et al.

instead recognising how the land upon which penitentiaries and penal colonies were sited was shaped and continues to be shaped by these. Developing a wider understanding of global carceral ecologies can be situated in relation to contemporary activist work on prisons and other sites of confinement as toxic ecologies with enormous carbon footprints and water consumption that frequently impact on local communities (Stohr & Wozniak, 2014). Implicated in such work is a reversal of traditional discourse of pollution and contamination applied to convict populations, a discourse epitomised in the 1890s by the New Caledonian Governor Paul Feillet who described the flow of convicts into the penal colony as a “robinet d’eau sale” [dirty water tap] that needed turning off. Moreover, in wrestling historiographies of the penal colony from tales of heroic white convicts and their conquest of hostile territories, other stories emerge attesting to the role of transportation in terraforming the world. Just as the image of the ‘natural prison’ suggests nature as a universal, divine force imposing judgement on a criminal population, contemporary discourses on climate change frequently universalise the era that has come to be known as the Anthropocene. As Kathryn Yusoff (2018, p. 2) argues: [T]his planetary analytic has failed to do the work to properly identify its own histories of colonial earth-writing, to name the masters of broken earths, and to redress the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves in its wake. It has failed to grabble with the inheritance of violent dispossession of indigenous land under the auspices of a colonial geo-logics or to address the extractive grammars of geology that labor in the instrumentation and instrumentalization of dominant colonial narratives and their subjective, often subjugating registers that are an ongoing praxis of displacement.

Miranda Spieler (2012) has pointed out that the early camps associated with French Guiana’s 100-year penal colony disappeared from sight as building materials were recuperated and secondary forest enacted a form of ‘rewilding’. Spieler warns that we should avoid thinking of this disappearance as a ‘return of nature’ or that this suggests the penal colony left no lasting legacy: “(French) Guiana was not a place where human history had yet to begin, but one where human traces on the land tended to vanish” (Spieler, 2012, p. 2).

1 Introduction

15

Empire and Capital If, as Clare Anderson has suggested, “all the world’s a prison” (2016), there are nevertheless limits to the territories and cultural representations we have been able to incorporate into this book. Significant space has been given to both British and French penal colonies. This is partly due to the longevity and geographical scope of both transportation regimes and partly due to the place both histories have come to assume within popular culture particularly in the Global North. Readers will note that several chapters reference representations of France’s largest penal colony located in the South American territory of French Guiana. Operating for a hundred-year period between 1852 and 1953, the penal colony (known as the bagne) was widely documented in both French and English language newspapers, not least because of its persistence into the twentieth century. The penal colony was (not without irony) taken up as a human rights obsession by the U.S. media with various celebrity convicts such as René Belbenoit escaping to the United States and obtaining citizenship there. Following the publication of Henri Charrière’s bestselling memoir Papillon in 1969, the 1973 Hollywood adaptation of the book starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman consolidated the status of French Guiana and, moreover, Devil’s Island as the most notorious of all penal colonies. Alongside these two sets of colonial geographies, attention is also given to other examples of European colonisation (German and Spanish) as well as Japan whose internal expansion into Hokkaido [1869–1882] drew on convict labour to build roads across the island. Various chapters take up the question of continuity (and rupture) between different political regimes and, notably, the role of the prison (and prison island) in representations of anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam and Cuba. The ongoing operation of penal colonies and related forced labour into the mid-twentieth century suggest possibilities for comparison with the representation of other forms of internment such as the concentration camps, gulags and re-education camps that define and, in some places, continue to define fascist, communist and other authoritarian regimes. As Stoler has argued: “Colony and camp make up a conjoined conceptual matrix, twin formations and formulations of how imperial rather than

16

S. Fuggle et al.

national logics of security operate. They borrow and blend features of their protective architecture and anticipatory fear. They are in a deadly embrace from the start” (Stoler, 2012, pp. 77–78). A key part of the twentieth-century carceral archipelago is the Soviet Gulag, an abbreviated form of Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerie (or Main Camp Administration). Tsarist Russia had deployed various types of penal transportation, often involving banishment and exile, but the Gulag itself was developed under Lenin as a means of controlling political dissidence and was subsequently expanded by Stalin (Applebaum, 2004). The Gulag was a tentacular system spread across the breadth of the Soviet Union. It began locally with investigative cells in police stations but relied on the rail network to transport people often long distances to multiple penal sites, of which the largest contained over 25,000 prisoners. These camps were often in more remote locations, separated geographically from their surroundings as was often the case also with penal colonies (Pallot et al., 2012). Their dual purpose was to discipline prisoners whilst exploiting their forced labour. By the end of 1940, the Gulag population amounted to 1.5 million people kept in the 53 Gulag camps and 423 labour colonies which stretched across the Soviet Union (Ellman, 2002; Getty et al., 1993). It is estimated that between 1929 and 1953, between fourteen and twenty-five million people passed through the Gulag (Gheith & Jolluck, 2011). Another seven million people had been deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union and approximately seven or eight million had been sent to other forms of labour colonies or settlements. Although all of these figures are approximate and much disputed, it is clear that tens of millions of people were victims of the Gulag system (Bacon, 1994; Getty et al., 1993). The death of Stalin in 1953 marked the end of the Gulag, but it was not officially abolished by Khrushchev until 1960. Although prominent authors such as Albert Camus had alluded to the Gulag throughout his post-war writings, it was The Gulag archipelago: An experiment in literary investigation by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in 1973 and translated into English and French the following year, that brought the institution to broad international attention, leading to the increase in comparisons discussed above with the use of concentration camps by the Nazis. Many Gulag camps are now sites of memory forming

1 Introduction

17

parts of a broader carceral network in evidence around the globe, with ALZhIR (the Akmolinsk Camp of Wives of Traitors to the Motherland) and Karlag in Kazakhstan for instance playing an increasingly important role in the country’s post-Soviet national story. Another way in which we might think about these connections between sites is via examples of creative engagement emerging from within such spaces. Of particular interest are those activities whereby detainees tried not so much to represent poetically and aesthetically their lived experience but, conversely, sought out artistic and intellectual practices that allowed mental escape from confinement. As part of her work on “concentrationary memory”, Griselda Pollock (2015) takes up the life and work of artist Charlotte Salomon, interned at Gurs in France before deportation to Auschwitz in 1942. Pollock’s interest in Salomon lies in her refusal to represent Gurs in the artworks she produced during her internment: “She could paint bloodied suicides, abusive sexual assault, attempted rape, escape, solitude, and even pose the question of killing herself. But she would not bear witness to what she had seen in Gurs” (p. 189). Imprisoned in a Soviet Camp during the Second World War, the Polish artist Józef Czapski (2018) gave a series of lectures based on his memories of reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time several years beforehand. Delivered without the original texts to hand, Czapski nevertheless successfully manages to evoke, with a high degree of accuracy, the rich detail of Proust’s world, creating a reminder for his fellow prisoners of life beyond the prison.

Outline of Chapters The chapters in this collection eschew a straightforward chronological approach and are not organised into geographical territories or empires. The intention instead is to emphasise the complex, multifaceted ways in which penal colonies are represented in reporting, maps, literature from memoir to science fiction, comics and graphic novels, documentary footage, cinema, museum and heritage interpretation, photography and other forms of visual culture. Reflecting the richness of the media studied, methodologies are drawn from history, geography, criminology,

18

S. Fuggle et al.

literary criticism, comic and film studies, museology and critical theory. As such, they incorporate archival research, ethnography, mapping, walking, photography and listening. Where some chapters focus on a single site or set of sites and their representation or interpretation within a specific timeframe, others take up a more comparative and/or transnational perspective. To celebrate the wealth of approaches and objects of analysis whilst also offering a conceptual roadmap for the reader, the collection is organised into four broad sections: 1. Reporting (from) the Penal Colony; 2. Exploring the Penal Colony; 3. Framing and Reframing the Colonial Prison; and 4. Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal Colony. 1. Reporting (from) the Penal Colony News from the penal colonies played an important role within wider forms of crime and punishment reporting. Official and unofficial reports of life in the penal colonies together with the perceived successes or failures of penal settlements both fed and fed off public appetites for stories from these distant sites of exile and the infamous convicts sent there. Yet, reporting could also reveal tensions between public perceptions and official discourses back home and the day-to-day running of the penal colonies. Moreover, journalists and other authorised visitors were not only sent to report back to the mainland but often came from neighbouring states with their own interests and concerns about the impact of the penal colony on their own populations and territories. In Chapter 2, Briony Neilson provides a detailed reading of late nineteenth-century Australian reporting taken up with accounts of escaped convicts from the neighbouring French penal colony in New Caledonia. As Neilson’s extensive reading of newspaper archives reveals, much of the discourse around New Caledonia reflected Australian anxieties around its own recent history as penal colony. Chapter 3 focuses on an earlier period in Australia’s penal history. J. M. Moore examines the application of Alexander Maconachie’s controversial ‘mark system’ on Norfolk Island. The chapter emphasises both the framing of the island itself within public discourse and reporting on Maconachie’s attempt

1 Introduction

19

to impose radical reform conceived from elsewhere. Chapter 4 maintains focus on reporting but shifts attention to French Guiana and the investigative journalism of Albert Londres during the early 1920s. The subsequent republication of Londres’ reports for Le Petit Parisien as memoirs ensured his critique of the penal colony reached a wider readership. Recently, his accounts of the penal colony and, notably, the escape and subsequent pardon of Eugène Dieudonné have been adapted as graphic novels. Cointot and Fuggle consider the role of these adaptations as they draw on earlier visual iconography whilst opening up new readings and readerships. 2. Exploring the penal colony As indicated above, penal colonies are complex, multi-sited geographical spaces which incorporate specific environmental and topographical features together with multiple forms of architecture and infrastructure, often constructed by initial convoys of convicts. The second part of the book focuses on how such geographies are presented for exploration in the present whether this be as ruin, restored heritage site, trail or disappearing/disappeared traces. In Chapter 5, Sophie Fuggle considers the strange doubling which occurs between Abashiri Prison Museum and the prison itself and the wider narratives of colonial development of Hokkaido (Japan) via convict labour presented here. A key element of her ethnography, which examines how the space is offered up to visitors from elsewhere, involves exploring different photographic methods for both documenting the extensive museum grounds and exhibitions and reflecting on motivations and assumptions shaping her own perspective as tourist-researcher. In Chapter 6, Claire Reddleman provides a comparative analysis of maps used to illustrate signage in heritage trails at sites belonging to France’s former penal colonies in both French Guiana and New Caledonia. The comparison allows for critical reflection on transportation as both specific local history and heritage and a means of asserting the global connectedness of a site. Taking up the penal colony as form of literary inspiration in Chapter 7, Samuel Tracol and Gloria Alhinho use Patti Smith’s account of her trip to Saint Laurent du Maroni in the early 1980s to rethink the penal colony not as an endpoint but,

20

S. Fuggle et al.

rather, as a starting point for literature. In Smith’s writing, the bagne as a space once imagined (but never visited) by Jean Genet is explored as material ruin via practices of walking and collecting. 3. Framing and Reframing the Colonial Prison Penal colonies are frequently defined as sites where forced labour has been co-opted to colonial expansion and development. They also function as spaces used to exile and contain different forms of political dissent. Moreover, the colonial prison and its technologies of constraint are frequently repurposed by subsequent political regimes. The complex legacies of such spaces and the forms of punishment, restraint and torture which mark both the continuities and ruptures between regimes pose challenges in terms of how such histories are narrated and interpreted according to later nationalist and international memorial agendas. Chapter 8 takes up once more the literal framing of the penal colony on the page of the graphic novel. Forsdick considers how representations of New Caledonia’s penal colony have often been eclipsed by more prominent material on French Guiana. He explores the existence of a corpus of visual material that presents not only the history of the bagne but also the place of the institution in broader Melanesian history. Reading graphic accounts of the Paris commune of 1871 (and of its protagonists such as Louise Michel and Nathalie Lemel), he identifies stories of solidarity with Kanak rebels. Finally, analysing narratives of settler colonialism and Vietnamese indentured labour, he detects a spectral presence of the penal colony across accounts of post-carceral New Caledonia in the twentieth century. In Chapter 9, Massing explores the lesser-known history of German colonial occupation in Qingdao, China and the interpretation of this history in the city’s colonial prison museum. Alongside its consideration of competing narratives and interpretive strategies, the chapter develops a methodology based on the concept of ‘vicarious looking’, drawing on visitor testimony and photography shared on social media platforms. As such, the chapter offers important food for thought in a time of reduced global mobility, calling into question existing conceptions of the ‘scholar-explorer’. Chapter 10 explores two types of cellular imprisonment both known as ‘tiger cages’ used as

1 Introduction

21

part of French colonial and U.S. military occupation in Vietnam during the early and mid-twentieth century. Tennant analyses the way in which architecture and technologies of punishment frame the penal colony as well as the symbolic role these have assumed post-independence. The theme of regime change and carceral continuity is also taken up in Chapter 11 which focuses on documentary representations of the Isle of Pines in Cuba. The island had been used as a site of deportation since the nineteenth century and remained in use under Castro until 1967. Martin-Márquez discusses the aesthetic strategies adopted by AfroCuban filmmaker Sara Goméz as a means of highlighting the experiences of young camp internees and the ongoing criminalisation of race in post-revolution Cuba. 4. Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal Colony As suggested previously, there are forms of creativity that take place within spaces of confinement that resist or refuse its reproduction as cultural commodity. This final section of the collection explores different forms of creativity which both affirm and challenge dominant imaginaries of the penal colony. Art and performance produced in and of the penal colony can always be co-opted by those wishing to affirm and maintain colonial and postcolonial forms of constraint and restraint. Yet to acknowledge the threat of appropriation is not to refuse or deny the impetus to tell different stories or create new worlds. Kate McMillan takes up questions of silence and forgetting in Chapter 12 to consider the colonial-carceral continuities of the contemporary use of carceral islands as extraterritorial immigrant detention. She proposes different forms of listening as creative practice aimed at redressing the silencing of different dispossessed populations. The role of the artist-activist together with the academy in developing abolitionist praxis is developed in Chapter 13 where Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Rosamund Liebeskind expand our understanding of the penal colony in terms of the carceral state in Australia and Britain today encompassing different forms of secure units alongside prisons and detention centres.

22

S. Fuggle et al.

The Persistence of the Prison Island “The concept of the colony is not foretelling a future colony held in place by design, but rather the unstable morphology of its provisional making and remaking again and again” (Stoler, 2012). According to Michael Taussig (2004), every treasure island, that is every island targeted by European colonisers as a site of magical, untold wealth and resources, has, at some point or other, also operated as a prison island. If numerous colonial prison islands have shed their role as spaces of exile and confinement, today they have been repurposed as neo-colonial sites of escape and sanctuary, and their coastlines peppered with exclusive tourist resorts. Back in mainland Europe, islands along the French Atlantic coast have maintained their role as prisons well into this century. Following his arrest and trial, Philippe Pétain lived out the end of his days on Ile d’Yeu. Between 1956 and 1962, Algerian indépendantiste and future president Ben Bella was imprisoned in Fort Liédot on the Ile d’Aix along with other members of the FLN. Today, the prison on Saint Martin de Ré, once the point of departure for the penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia, continues to operate as a Maison Centrale, housing one of France’s oldest prison populations. In Italy, the island of Gorgona houses a prison farm (known as the Gorgona Agricultural Penal Colony) which includes a vineyard. Bastøy prison located 75 km off the coast of Norway, once a penal colony for boys,4 is regularly cited for its progressive methods and described as an ‘ecological prison’. However, even in the context of Norway’s small prison population, the site which houses 100 inmates is perhaps given undue attention as a key example of the ‘Nordic exception’, held up in contrast to mass incarceration and super maxes elsewhere. Scholars working within Scandinavia have suggested that the region is not immune to the ‘punitive turn’ (Reiter et al., 2018; Shammas, 2016; Todd-Kvam, 2019), which has defined criminal justice throughout the Global North since the 1970s and 1980s. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, islands such as Lampedusa have become refugee camps for those fleeing the long-term after-effects of European imperialism. The shifting role of islands as spaces used to ‘hold’ and ‘process’ those defined as ‘illegal’ or ‘undocumented’ should remind

1 Introduction

23

us of the fluidity with which certain people are defined as ‘criminal’ and certain acts as ‘crime’ at different points in time. Prisons and policing were established in response to the need to protect colonial interests at home and abroad. Similarly, the status of detainees and deportees as political prisoners or common criminals was open to interpretation and revision subject to their specific value as either labour force or political bargaining chip. As technologies evolve, different mobilities and counter-mobilities emerge. In developing a concept of ‘viapolitics’, William Walters (2015) has argued that not enough attention has been given to the forms of transport and routes used in both voluntary and forced migration. Deportations now take place by air not sea or train. Artist Meriem Bennani’s video installations ‘Party on the CAPS’ and ‘Life on the CAPS’ screened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and Nottingham Contemporary in 2022 explore a not-so-distant future in which teleportation has replaced air travel. Borders have become virtual and new forms of illegal migration emerge in response to this new form of transportation. Illegal teleporters are intercepted by U.S. troopers who dump the reassembled bodies onto the CAPS, a large rock located in the middle of the Atlantic. Not all bodies are reassembled successfully or without issues such as a bizarre condition known as ‘plastic face’. Some of the island’s population have not only teleported themselves across the ocean but, at some point, exchanged their original bodies for new ones. Sometimes this results in extreme age reversals with octogenarians now inhabiting the bodies of children. Over the years, the camp becomes a huge urban sprawl with distinct neighbourhoods and infrastructure including a sports stadium. The origins of the CAPS are briefly explained at the start of ‘Party on the CAPS’. However, what is particularly powerful about the installations is that one can enter the screening rooms at any point and experience the feeling of being dropped into this strange, alienating yet often somewhat familiar world. It is almost as if one has teleported oneself and trying to get one’s bearings after reconstruction. The films focus on the Moroccan neighbourhood on the CAPS and much of the action follows two protagonists Kamal and his son and their different life views. Yet these are

24

S. Fuggle et al.

not films about the individual heroism or suffering that we might associate with films set on other prison islands. Instead, it is the banality of life within one’s community that is key together with the slow acceptance that, ultimately, this is all there is. CAPS as a future, mythical prison island offers a different take to Kafka’s ‘metaphor made material’. No longer is the body simply a surface upon which the law can be violently written. Henceforth, the body becomes the message, the writing or code which travels through space and time, seeking to transgress laws of physics along with national and international borders.

Notes 1. An unredacted version was later published in 2017. 2. See also Pierce (2020) which offers a similar reading using Achille Mbembe and Saidiya Hartman as interlocuteurs. 3. Mike Davis (1995) is generally credited with coining the term. See also Schlosser (1998) and Davis (2003). 4. As a reformatory, the island was the site of a riot in 1915 which saw the military called in when staff failed to handle the situation. The events were the subject of the 2010 film King of Devil’s Island directed by Marius Holst.

References Anderson, C. (2016). All the world’s a prison. History Today, 66 (3). https:// www.historytoday.com/archive/all-worlds-prison. Anderson, C. (Ed.). (2018). A global history of convicts and penal colonies. Bloomsbury. Anderson, C. (2022). Convicts: A global history. Cambridge University Press. Applebaum, A. (2004). GULAG: A history. Penguin. Bacon, E. (1994). The Gulag at war: Stalin’s forced labour system in the light of the archives. Macmillan.

1 Introduction

25

Barth, L. F. B. (2013). Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” as a psychoanalytic figuration of the experience [Erfahrung] of acceptance [Annahme]. Revista de Letras, 53(2), 87–103. Brown, M. (2009). The culture of punishment: Prison, society and spectacle. NYU Press. Carrabine, E. (2011). The iconography of punishment: Execution prints and the death penalty. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 50, 452–464. Carrabine, E. (2018). Punishment in the frame: Rethinking the history and sociology of art. The Sociological Review, 66 (3), 559–576. Chamoiseau, P., & Hammadi, R. (2020). French Guiana: Memory traces of the penal colony (M. Reeck, Trans.). Wesleyan University Press. Charrière, H. (1969). Papillon. Gallimard. Cohen, J. J. (Ed.). (2013). Prismatic ecology: Ecotheory beyond green. University of Minnesota Press. Czapski, J. (2018). Lost time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet prison camp (E. Karpeles, Trans.). NYRB. Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press. Davis, M. (1995). Hell factories in the field: A prison industrial complex. The Nation, 260 (7), 229. Dorling, D., & Tomlinson, S. (2019). Rule Britannia: Brexit and the end of empire. Biteback. Duschinsky, R. (2012). Tabula rasa and human nature. Philosophy, 87 (4), 509– 529. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0031819112000393 Edwards, R. (2021). A Carceral ecology: Ushuaia and the history of landscape and punishment in Argentina. University of California Press. Ellman, M. (2002). Soviet repression statistics: Some comments. Europe-Asia Studies, 54 (7), 1151–1172. Forster, C. (1996). France and Botany Bay: The lure of a penal colony. Melbourne University Press. Fowler, D. F. (1979). “In the penal colony”: Kafka’s unorthodox theology. College Literature, 6 (2), 113–120. Frow, J. (2000). In the penal colony. Journal of Australian Studies, 24 (64), 1–13. Fuggle, S. (2021). Geopolitics of the colonial prison island: The case of Poulo Condor (Con Dao). Island Studies Journal, 16 (2), 215–234. Fuggle, S. (2022). From green hell to grey heritage: Ecologies of colour in the penal colony. Interventions, 24 (6), 897–916. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1369801X.2021.1892507

26

S. Fuggle et al.

Getty, A., Rittersporn, G., & Zemskov, V. (1993). Victims of the Soviet penal system in the pre-war years: A first approach on the basis of archival evidence. American Historical Review, 98(4), 1017–1049. Gheith, J., & Jolluck, K. (2011). Gulag voices: Oral histories of Soviet incarceration and exile. Palgrave Macmillan. Hecht, S. (2013). The scramble for the Amazon and the “lost paradise” of Euclides da Cunha. University of Chicago Press. Kafka, F. (2011). In the penal colony. Penguin. Kothari, U., & Wilkinson, R. (2010). Colonial imaginaries and postcolonial transformations: Exiles, bases, beaches. Third World Quarterly, 31(8), 1395– 1412. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2010.538239 Lyotard, J., & Fynsk, C. (1991). Prescription. L’Esprit créateur, 31(1), 15– 32. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.1991.0060. Moore, J. M. (2020). Not without irony: Carceral geography in Birmingham. https://jmmoore.org/2020/05/03/not-without-irony/ Moran, D., Jones, P. I., Jordaan, J. A., & Porter, A. E. (2021). Does nature contact in prison improve well-being? Mapping land cover to identify the effect of greenspace on self-harm and violence in prisons in England and Wales. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(6), 1779–1795. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1850232 Moran, D., Turner, J., & Schliehe, A. K. (2018). Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 666–686. Mountz, A. (2020). The death of asylum: Hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago. University of Minnesota Press. Nicholls, G. (2007). Deported: A history of forced departures from Australia. UNSW Press. Pallot, J., Piacentini, L., & D. Moran. (2012). Gender, geography and punishment: The experience of women in carceral Russia. Oxford University Press. Paterson, L. M. (2016). Prisoners from Indochina in the nineteenth-century French colonial world. In R. Ricci (Ed.), Exile in colonial Asia: Kings, convicts, commemoration (pp. 220–247). University of Hawaii Press. https:// doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824853747.003.0010 Paterson, L. M. (2018). Ethnoscapes of exile: Political prisoners from Indochina in a colonial Asian world. International Review of Social History, 63(S26), 89–107. Peters, P. (2001). Witness to the execution: Kafka and colonialism. Monatshefte, 93(4), 401–425.

1 Introduction

27

Pierce, M. (2020). Colonial articulations: Race, violence, and coloniality in Kafka’s “Penal colony”. PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal, 14 (1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.15760/mcnair.2020.14.1.1 Pollock, G. (2015). Nameless before the concentrationary void: Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? Oder Theater? 1941–2 “After Gurs”. In G. Pollock & M. Silverman (Eds.), Concentrationary imaginaries: Tracing totalitarian violence in popular culture (pp. 159–189). I.B. Tauris. Redfield, P. (2000). Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. University of California Press. Reiter, K., Sexton, L., & Sumner, J. (2018). Theoretical and empirical limits of Scandinavian exceptionalism: Isolation and normalization in Danish prisons. Punishment & Society, 20 (1), 92–112. Roscoe, K. (2018). A natural hulk: Australia’s carceral islands in the colonial period, 1788–1901. International Review of Social History, 63(S26), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859018000214 Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books. Schlosser, E. (1998). The Prison-Industrial Complex. The Atlantic. https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-com plex/304669/ Shammas, V. L. (2016). The rise of a more punitive state: On the attenuation of Norwegian penal exceptionalism in an era of welfare state transformation. Critical Criminology, 24, 57–74. Sherman, T. C. (2009). From hell to paradise? voluntary transfer of convicts to the Andaman Islands, 1921–1940. Modern Asian Studies, 43(2), 367–388. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x08003594 Slahi, M. O. (2015). Guantánamo Diary. Canongate Books. Spieler, M. (2012). Empire and underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Harvard University Press. Steinberg, E. R. (1976). The judgment in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” Journal of Modern Literature, 5 (3), 492–514. Stohr, M., & Wozniak, J. (2014). The green prison. In F. Cullen, C. Lero Johnson, & M. Stohr (Eds.), The American prison: Imagining a different future (pp. 193–212). Sage. Stoler, A. L. (2012). Colony. In Political concepts: A critical lexicon. http://www. politicalconcepts.org/colony-stoler/ Taussig, M. (2004). My cocaine museum. Chicago University Press.

28

S. Fuggle et al.

The Guardian. (2022, April 14). UK plans to send thousands of asylum seekers to Rwanda, says Boris Johnson—As it happened. https://www.the guardian.com/politics/live/2022/apr/14/uk-politics-live-boris-johnson-asy lum-seekers-rwanda-plan-provokes-fury-priti-patel-latest-updates Todd-Kvam, J. (2019). Bordered penal populism: When populism and Scandinavian exceptionalism meet. Punishment & Society, 21(3), 295–314. Unwin, B. (2010). Terrible exile: The last days of Napoleon on St Helena. I.B. Tauris. Walker, P., & Murray, J. (2020, September 30). Priti Patel looked at idea of sending asylum seekers to South Atlantic. The Guardian. https://www.the guardian.com/politics/2020/sep/30/priti-patel-looked-at-idea-of-sendingasylum-seekers-to-south-atlantic Walters, W. (2015). Migration, vehicles and politics: Three theses on viapolitics. European Journal of Social Theory, 18(4), 469–488. Webster, P. D. (1956). Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”: A psychoanalytic interpretation. American Imago, 13(4), 399–407. Wilson Gilmore, R. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press. Wilson Gilmore, R. (2022). Abolition geography: Essays towards liberation. Verso. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

Part I Reporting the Penal Colony

2 Framing New Caledonia: Policing Escapees from the Bagne in Colonial Australia Briony Neilson

Introduction On Wednesday 10 March 1886—alongside brief records of cases of infanticide, arson, abduction, burglaries; lists of stolen watches and horses; and names and descriptions of missing friends, deserters and recently released prisoners—the New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime printed a short notice: “French Escapees from New Caledonia” (p. 75). The piece announced the arrest of four individuals for “being illegally at large in the Colony of New South Wales (being escapees from New Caledonia)”. Appearing before an extradition court, the men were held at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Gaol, pending a warrant from the New South Wales Governor enabling their extradition to the French penal colony in neighbouring New Caledonia. All four men originally hailed from metropolitan France and were apprehended B. Neilson (B) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_2

31

32

B. Neilson

by Jules Rochaix. A detective from the investigative branch of the New South Wales police, Rochaix was, as his name suggests, also of French origin. Facilitating Rochaix’s task was that at the time of the men’s arrest, all but one were already in custody, serving time in prison for offences committed within the Colony of New South Wales. One had just served time for breaking, entering and stealing, following a previous stint for indecent language (‘Wilshire Joseph’, 1884). Another, a barber by trade, had been imprisoned for malicious wounding (‘Hypolite Arfemllieres’, 1884). And a third, an illiterate painter, had been gaoled after being “found by night with housebreaking implements” (‘Dubois Paul’, 1881). In the second half of the nineteenth century, as settlers in the Australian colonies sought to cast off any residual taint of their own as depots for Britain’s convicts, the presence of individuals such as these from New Caledonia provoked considerable indignation, particularly in the press. Indeed, readers of colonial newspapers at this time were highly attuned to the risk of convicts from France’s bagne (penal colony) in New Caledonian surfacing in Australia. Colonial newspapers in Australia regularly disparaged France’s penal settlement, adopting language of pollution and pestilence to describe the characters of the transported convicts and the risks of contamination they posed. While the 1886 extradition case was heard in closed court, various newspapers ran short accounts of the men’s appearance. The Protestant Standard (‘Essence of Ephemerides’, 1886), a weekly Sydney newspaper, presented the four men as living proof of the dangers posed to the Australian colonies by the nearby French penal colony: “The natural way in which these New Caledonian escapees take to crime again in Australia is reason enough for the protest against the French criminal deputation system to the South Seas”. For the Brisbane Courier, New Caledonia had become an “island…overcrowded with the scum of France”, a “sink into which France flings her criminal refuse” (24 March 1886, p. 4). Under the headline “More French Rubbish”, Sydney’s Evening News reported that with the recent dispatch of recidivists from France, “another ship-load of her double-distilled scoundrelism [was] to be discharged upon the shores of New Caledonia” (24 November 1886, p. 4). The Sydney Morning Herald observed that

2 Framing New Caledonia

33

New Caledonia had been “turned … into a plague spot worse than the lowest quarters in the cities of centuries in growth”, becoming home to “the dregs of France” (8 July 1884, p. 4). That prisoners could apparently readily escape the bagne and make their way to Australia heightened the indignation. According to the Evening News, deficiencies on the part of authorities in both New Caledonia and Australia were responsible for these getaways which endangered public security: “the escaped prisoner who has managed to elude the vigilance of the authorities on either side, being generally a social outlaw of the worst type, almost invariably continues his criminal career in this country” (24 March 1896, p. 3). For the Sydney Morning Herald , however, the fault lay primarily with the French gaolers who “have shown themselves totally inadequate to the duty of confining the prisoners within the limits of the island. Year after year they break bounds and seek shelter in Australia, to hide in dark nooks and breed there the crime for which their own people have rejected them” (8 July 1884, p. 4). Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, south of Vanuatu, New Caledonia is geographically one of Australia’s closest neighbours—Nouméa and Brisbane are less than 1500 kilometres apart. In the nineteenth century, depending on the type of vessel, the length of a boat journey between the British and French possessions might range from a few days to a couple of weeks. Certainly, in comparison with the three months it would take to return to metropolitan France, Australia was a far more feasible destination for prisoners in New Caledonia with few resources and limited prospects. In ways that scholars have not fully explored, New Caledonia and Australia are bound by more than geographical proximity: as European penal/settler colonies, New Caledonia and Australia share remarkably similar histories. From 1863 until 1897, France sent tens of thousands of convicts to New Caledonia—a fraction of the more than 162,000 convicts Britain dispatched to nearby Australia between 1788 and 1868. France’s introduction of convict transportation in 1854 (with prisoners sent first to French Guiana and then, a decade later, to New Caledonia) coincided with the gradual demise of the practice for the

34

B. Neilson

British, under the weight of fervent opposition by anti-transportationists in the colonies. Convict transportation to Britain’s first colony in Australia (New South Wales) was ultimately brought to an end in 1843. In December 1853—just three months after New Caledonia was declared French— transportation of convicts to Van Diemen’s Land was abolished and the colony renamed Tasmania in an effort to distance the free settler colony from its weighty past (Shaw, 1966). The final shipments of convicts departed from Britain to Western Australia in 1867. Where once it had been promoted or perceived as a land of dread or, at best, expiation, from the 1850s Australia (especially the eastern colonies) was increasingly seen as a land of enrichment. Migrants flocked in their droves, lured by the possibilities offered by a new land (especially through gold prospecting). Although Britain continued to transport convicts from all over the British Empire to Gibraltar until 1874 (Carey, 2019), and sent colonial subjects to the Andaman Islands (Anderson, 2018; Sen, 2000), in the second half of the nineteenth century, Australia’s colonies moved away from being primarily a continent of transported felons (and their descendants) to a land of free settlers whose migration was not coerced. In terms of its efficacy, convict transportation was seen by most criminological experts, who began to exchange their expertise internationally in earnest from the mid-nineteenth century, as patently inferior to the modern penitentiary (Neilson, 2016). Many colonists in Australia similarly held a dim view of convict transportation, primarily because of the deleterious effect the system was seen to have on general morality and wages. In the 1860s, having only recently managed to eradicate the flow of prisoners from Britain, colonists in Australia found France’s introduction of more convicts in their vicinity galling. Indeed, the existence of the New Caledonian bagne and its proximity to Australia were seen to compromise not only the Australian colonies’ security, but also their ability to transcend the tainted history of their early settlement. As a journalist for the Melbourne newspaper Argus wrote (27 September 1877, pp. 4–5) “Australasia has been branded already sufficiently with the convict stamp… One of the plain duties before us is to efface the

2 Framing New Caledonia

35

stigma, and, so long as a single convict is sent to New Caledonia, and the bad traditions of the unhappy past are thus maintained, so long Australia is justified in manifesting a repugnance to the extension of the French settlement”. The period of particular focus here spans the decades from the prise de possession of New Caledonia in 1853 through to the first years of the twentieth century, by which time French convict transportation to New Caledonia had been suspended following the decision by its governor, Paul Feillet, to encourage free settler migration from France—an experiment which would end in failure (Merle, 1995). By this time, too, the Australian colonies had transformed themselves from colonies into states within a federated nation; their own penal histories effectively buried. Until 1901, colonial Australia consisted of six distinct British colonies (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania), each with their own governor and parliament. On 1 January 1901, after decades of campaigning, the colonies federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. Despite the concern aroused by the proximity of France’s penal colony and by the presence of convicts (bagnards) in Australia, this chapter argues that ultimately the issue served a useful nation-building purpose for the Australian colonies. Australia’s reconfiguration from settlements of transported convicts to free settler colony was arguably facilitated by the problem of penal colonialism in New Caledonia, as opposition to the proximity of the bagne and to its escaped convicts legitimised the superiority of BritishAustralian colonialism to the French variety (Neilson, 2018, 2019) and enabled the disparate Australian colonies to form a greater sense of shared identity (Bergantz, 2018; Donohoo, 2013; Rechniewski, 2015). Furthermore, well before any national policing authority had been formed, the policing of bagnards in Australia, by figures like Rochaix, encouraged greater inter-colonial cooperation through the organised circulation of information about individual convicts and led to colonial Australian police adopting French techniques such as Bertillon’s anthropometric system of criminal identification.

36

B. Neilson

Convict Escapes The concern about bagnards in the Australian colonies sits within a longer history of narratives about escaped convicts. In colonial Australia, over the lifetime of British convict transportation, escape and the penal colony went hand in hand. In the first decades of British occupation in Australia, as the first settlement—in extreme isolation—struggled to maintain itself, a sentence of transportation risked becoming a death sentence by default. Within this context, according to Robert Hughes, “it was easy to escape. The hard thing was to survive” (1988, p. 203). In the early years, most runaways escaped inland, but some intrepid souls took to the sea. In 1791, just three years into settlement, a group of convicts (Mary Bryant among them) carried out an epic escape from Sydney, stealing a boat and making their way to Timor. Eventually arraigned, Bryant would be brought back to England and the case caused a sensation in the British press (Currey, 1983). Bryant’s escape and that of her conspirators “became legendary precisely because it was unique” (Hughes, 1988, p. 212). After this infamous escape, regulations in Sydney became more stringent. Over the ensuing decades, inland escapes proliferated. With time, as settlers pushed further inland, dispossessing the Aboriginal inhabitants, the prospects of escapees surviving in the bush improved. Absconded convicts became bushrangers and after the abolition of convict transportation to Australia’s eastern colonies, they became seen as a sign of the incorrigibility and violence of criminals. In an 1864 article, the Sydney Morning Herald declared that “The old Grecian cities contended for the honour of giving birth to Homer, or other noble sons who made their countrymen renowned; but we, it seems, boast that this colony has bred a Gardiner or a Morgan” (11 July 1864). Only in 1880, with the quashing of the notorious Ned Kelly, would Australia’s bushrangers be brought to heel. By that time, the focus of concern had already begun to shift to French transported convicts escaping from New Caledonia and arriving on Australia’s east coast. The most famous escape from New Caledonia’s bagne occurred in 1874 when a group of six Communards, including Henri Rochefort, availed themselves of a boat and took to the Coral Sea, heading for

2 Framing New Caledonia

37

Australia. After arriving in the working-class town of Newcastle, where they were feted as heroes, the men travelled south to Sydney, from where they would make their way back to Europe (Dutton, 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald reported that “The arrival of these fugitives will…justify the apprehension which has been already expressed, that the Australian colonies have something to fear from the establishment of a large penal settlement in such close neighbourhood. Some time since, representations were made to the French Government on the subject, and assurances were given that the surveillance would be so complete as to prevent the possibility of escape. New Caledonia is being made the receptacle for the worst class of French prisoners” (‘Escape of French Communists’, 1874). The presence—actual and suspected—of escaped or freed bagnards from New Caledonia in Australia and the risks this allegedly posed to sovereignty, safety and general morality would be persistent themes for decades. Handwringing stories on the problem of New Caledonian convicts crossing the Coral Sea were a regular feature in the pages of Australian colonial newspapers. In the early 1890s, Sydney’s Evening News ran a series of articles on the bagne and the dangers it posed to Australia. The journalist asked in desperation: “What can be done to keep away from these shores this vast crowd of cosmopolitan scoundrelism?” (‘Modern Galley Slaves’, 1891, p. 2). While brazen escapes by serving convicts were alarming, it was the released bagnards who were said to be more dangerous because they had no threat of recapture hanging over their heads and therefore acted with impunity on foreign shores (‘Modern Galley Slaves: New Caledonia and its convicts, Part III’, 1891, p. 3). Even before France began shipping convicts across the Indian Ocean, anxiety was high in the Australian colonies about French convicts entering and infiltrating the neighbouring settlements. According to historian Clem Lack, from the arrival of the first prisoners in 1864 through to the suspension of convict transportation to New Caledonia in 1897 “almost every year, a few escapees succeeded in reaching the Queensland, and sometimes, the New South Wales coast, emaciated, their almost naked bodies horribly blackened and blistered by the torrid sun” (1954, p. 1048). Arriving on a stolen boat or a self-fashioned raft, simple geography for the most part accounted for the arrival of

38

B. Neilson

these escapees in Queensland—the closest point to the Australian eastern coast. Bagnards also took advantage of the regular stream of trading vessels plying the waters between Nouméa and Sydney to stow themselves away. Precisely how many escaped bagnards made it to Australian shores is difficult to ascertain. In 1884, forty-seven male convicts from New Caledonia (of whom five were escapees) were identified living in Sydney (Parliament of Victoria, 1884), while seventy-seven had gone to Queensland and forty-two had been returned to the bagne. Some also had found their way further south to the Colony of Victoria (Hayter, 1885). For colonial Victorian society, coasting on the wealth generated by gold and preoccupied with status, the presence of New Caledonian former convicts was particularly disturbing.

Permanent Isolation: The Impossible Logic of Penal Colonialism Preventing escapes is a core mission of the penal colony, as it is for all sites of involuntary incarceration. While the metropolitan penitentiary isolated the prisoner within a fortress-like edifice, thereby neutralising the harm caused and producing general compliance, the penal colony operated according to a different logic. The transported convict was held at a far greater remove from metropolitan civil society. In addition, while, in theory at least, metropolitan prisoners would, at the satisfactory completion of their sentence, re-emerge into civil society, transported convicts—even if they were not expelled à perpétuité —faced practical impediments and sometimes legal barriers which increased the likelihood that their exile would effectively be for life. This included the policy of doublage, which required convicts sentenced to hard labour for terms of less than 8 years to remain in the colony for a period equal to that of their sentence (Sanchez, 2018). In contrast to France’s port-city bagnes, which preceded its overseas penal colonies (Pierre, 2017), where there was a certain porousness between the life of the forçat and the surrounding community, transportation to the bagnes d’Outre mer cut the prisoner off more definitively from the metropole (Toth, 2006).

2 Framing New Caledonia

39

For the British and French, Australia and New Caledonia satisfied what Peter Redfield (2000, p. 59) calls the “algorithm of distance” on which the efficacy of a site of punishment and a profitable colony rested. In the early nineteenth century, a French official outlined the necessary conditions for an effective penal colony: “a proximity great enough so that the expense of transporting convicts and things useful to their establishment is not excessive, and yet a removal considerable enough to create an obstacle, not only to their return, but also to communications with them, of which facility and frequency would not be without danger” (Forestier, 1816). These conditions would later eliminate Algeria as a site of exile for France. Interestingly, however, in 1848, Algeria was selected as the destination for French revolutionaries because of its temperate climate, fertile soil, relative proximity to France and the established presence of French troops (Barbançon, 2003). Meanwhile, New Caledonia—not yet claimed by any European power—was ruled out as too distant and therefore too costly. Only a few years later, however, opinion shifted. What prompted the French Government to put aside its qualms when the metropolitan penitentiary was generally accepted as the best response to criminality? In this, France’s navy played a significant role, lobbying aggressively for the closure of uneconomical and unpopular metropolitan bagnes (dockyard prisons) and their replacement by overseas penal settlements. In championing the cause, the navy was also defending its own interests, providing a justification for greater state investment in the French fleet after decades of relative neglect (Merle, 1995). In terms of isolation from France, New Caledonia was an appealing choice for exile. Its climate—more temperate than the deadly French Guiana—would be another favourable factor. Shortly after New Caledonia was declared a French possession, its suitability for a prospective penal colony was noted (Barbançon, 2003), arousing the consternation of settlers in the Australian colonies. Prior to British settlement in Australia in 1788, Europeans’ relationship to the Pacific had been essentially restricted to the occasional visit by explorers. By 1863, when France dispatched its first convicts to New Caledonia, the distance from the European metropole had been considerably lessened. New seafaring design and technology, including the American “clipper” ship and later

40

B. Neilson

the steamship (McCreery & McKenzie, 2013; Steel, 2018), narrowed the time–space ratio on which the efficacy of penal colonialism rested (Neilson, 2016). By mid-century, the Pacific Ocean was being imagined as “a realm of transit–of routine, regular, and repeated travel” (Steel, 2018, p. 107). The greater connectedness of the Pacific to Europe had a significant impact on France’s penal colonial system and the legislation underpinning it. In addition to purging the metropole and extracting productive labour, both the British and French penal colonial systems in Australia and New Caledonia, at least in theory, aimed to settle the coerced migrant in the new, distant land. Transported convicts were enticed to settle permanently by promises of land ownership. In early British settlement in New South Wales, convicts were enticed to behave well through the promise of owning land. Controversially, land grants allowed convicts greater possibilities for advancement than their law-abiding metropolitan compatriots (Atkinson, 1994; Hirst, 1983). Convicts’ ready acquisition of land was also said to undermine transportation’s power as a deterrent in the metropole and was unpopular among British taxpayers (MaxwellStewart, 2018, p. 198). In response, from 1822 Britain instead offered crown land only to free migrants who possessed sufficient capital. As we shall see, this marked the beginning of a gradual shift in Australian settlement away from a system centred on penal colonisation to free settler colonialism. Convict land grants would similarly feature in New Caledonia’s system of penal colonialism. Encouraging migrants to permanently settle in a distant land was especially challenging for the French, and that bagnards might try to escape could never have been far from legislators’ minds. In contrast to other Europeans, French people were said to be particularly firmly rooted (Poiré, 1897). This partly explains the appeal transportation held for French legislators—it offered a means for forcing people to move where others would not voluntarily go. Land grants acted as a carrot, encouraging convicts’ good behaviour and inducing them to settle permanently on completion of their sentence. However, only a minority of convicts transported to New Caledonia received a plot of land (Merle, 1995). More pervasive was the stick of doublage. Convicts sentenced to eight years and more, along with récidivistes, were bound to remain in the

2 Framing New Caledonia

41

colony for life. Britain had similarly sought to ensure transportees’ isolation and encourage their permanent exile to the antipodes by obliging ex-convicts to cover the cost of their own passage home. In the 1780s, New South Wales’s utter isolation from Britain had been a significant mark in its favour as penal colony. In 1786, the distant territory was lauded for its “fertility and salubrity of the climate, connected with the remoteness of its situation (from whence it is hardly possible for persons to return without permission)” (Sydney, 1892, p. 17). Yet despite the barriers impeding their return, some convicts succeeded. London’s Hue and Cry Police Gazette regularly carried names and descriptions of convicts who might have contrived to return to the metropole or, as sometimes happened, to escape before their transport vessel had even departed British shores. Once in the colony, especially in the early decades, escape was relatively easy. Indeed, Grace Karskens writes that early settlement in New South Wales was “a place where it was almost impossible to constrain people, to fix and count them” (2005, p. 9). Escapes were taken very seriously by the British authorities. That convicts could successfully return to the metropole undermined the very idea of the remoteness of the penal colony (Atkinson, 1991). More generally, as Clare Anderson puts it (2001, p. 3), escapes “exposed the potential fragility of the convict system, creating enclaves of social space, and inscribing them with freedom at the expense of colonial power”. Decades later, the arrival in Australia of escaped convicts from the New Caledonian bagne exposed a different form of fragility—the porousness of Australia’s maritime borders.

Reorienting the Governing Gaze in Australia: From Escape to Invasion Concern about the bagne emerged at a pivotal moment in the settlement of the Australian colonies. By the time New Caledonia was claimed by France in 1853, colonists in several parts of Australia had succeeded in pressuring the British government to abandon transporting further convicts to their settlements and had secured greater autonomous governance. These were important steps in the colonies’

42

B. Neilson

evolution towards political maturity. While some colonists, primarily squatters (large landowners), continued to advance the benefits of transportation to Australia as a source of cheap, replenishable labour, an ever-growing number was condemning it. At the same time, politicians in the Australian colonies mounted the rostrum to argue for greater defence and tighter border control against undesirable migrants. Journalists and popular writers penned accounts of the goings-on—real and imagined—of shady characters from the bagne who, they claimed, were entering the Australian colonies in droves. Although their presence was not as troubling as that of immigrants from Asia, especially China (Walker, 1999; Walker & Sobocinska, 2012), bagnards were said to threaten social stability and could potentially launch a military attack on France’s behalf (Thomas, 1886). In analysing this alarmist discourse, it is important to consider what ideological work it performed. Rather than reflecting any actual vulnerability, asserting the dangers posed by New Caledonian convicts served as a mechanism for colonists in Australia’s fledgling free settler colonies to distinguish themselves as morally upstanding and thereby emphasise their legitimacy as settlers (Neilson, 2019). It also helped build a nascent nationalism (distinct from a British identity) at a time when no Australian nation yet existed. The French penal colony in New Caledonia, and the floating subjects who emanated from it, played an important part in helping to construct the infrastructure and governing logic of the modern Australian nation. This encompassed the implementation in 1901 of a racist policy of immigration restriction (the White Australia policy) and efforts to extend Australian (distinct from British) power over the Pacific, including over British New Guinea (Lake, 2015) and, later, Nauru. Australian settlers’ response to the bagne needs to be interpreted within the context of their colonies’ own history as penal sites, their aspiration for greater self-government and their geo-political positioning. Until the 1830s, settlement in Australia was overwhelmingly convict or ex-convict (emancipist or expiree). By 1830, just 15,700 people had come to Australia as free migrants (Vamplew, 1987). Between 1831 and 1850, 127,000 people were brought to Australia freely at the expense of the state, along with 65,000 others who financed their own passage. As

2 Framing New Caledonia

43

time went on, settlers steadily expanded demographically and geographically, pushing further into the interior of the country and dispossessing the Indigenous inhabitants of their lands. From a total non-Indigenous population of around 70,000 in 1830, the numbers swelled to over 400,000 by 1850 and, buoyed by the gold rush, exploded to over 1.1 million by 1860. By 1901, the non-Indigenous population of the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia had reached more than 3.8 million (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2014). Accompanying the developing prosperity of the Australian colonies and the growing number of free settlers drawn to partake in the island continent’s wealth came a general reorientation of the governing gaze. While fear of attack or reprisals by Indigenous inhabitants remained a constant in the Australian colonies, the solidification of settlement and the mid-century transition from penal to settler colonies produced an inversion of the governing gaze. While authorities overseeing the penal colony worried about convicts escaping from the penal colony (either by disappearing inland into the bush or by heading out to sea), once British convict transportation to Australia’s eastern colonies was wound back from mid-century and eventually completely abolished in the 1860s, the focus of public security in Australia underwent an inversion, becoming centred more on preventing people from entering rather than on inhibiting their departure. Along with the risk of imminent attack by foreign powers, including Russia whose activities prompted the erection of defences and inner forts around Sydney Harbour in the 1850s (Hirst, 1988, p. 61), racist anxieties about invasion in more insidious forms also manifested. Anxieties developed about Chinese migrants whose highly disciplined work ethic was seen to endanger British settlement (Lake & Reynolds, 2008). Such anxieties produced exclusionist and racist discourses and policies which aimed to restrict Asian immigration (Walker, 1999), intersecting with public health measures and legislation (Bashford, 2004). The decades in which France first claimed New Caledonia as a possession and transported convicts there are seen as a pivotal moment in Australian history, witnessing the first stirrings of a nascent sense of nationalism. Australia at this time, divided into various colonies, lacked a central political structure of government. Exemplifying the lack of inter-colonial cooperation

44

B. Neilson

in Australia in the nineteenth century was railroad construction: when first laid throughout Australia, the gauges of train tracks—as a result of what one geographer would later refer to as “a series of expensive blunders” (Siddall, 1969, p. 43)—were set differently in the various colonies, thus preventing trains from travelling continuously across the continent. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the gold rush decade of the 1850s, some colonists began to think of the continent as their home and a sense of proto-nationalism grew (Blackton, 1955). This budding nationalism and exclusionary political stance would ultimately culminate in the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia and the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (commonly known as the White Australia policy). Opposition to the proximity of the bagne and the presence of bagnards in Australia developed out of a longer history of tensions and anxieties about the mixing of free and convict (or ex-convict) populations in the colony. Over the life course of British convict transportation, colonial society was riven with divisions and suspicions deriving from a person’s status as convict, former convict or free settler. In early New South Wales, because of the small number of free settlers, colonial society offered convicts relatively greater privileges than free people enjoyed in Britain (Hirst, 1983; McKenzie, 2016). This contributed to acute status anxiety among free colonists and a desperate urge among former convicts (especially emancipists—that is, convicts who through their good behaviour had been issued an official pardon) to bury their background. The abolition of convict transportation to New South Wales went a long way to settling this conflict (Neal, 1991). But status anxieties and an atmosphere of suspicion attached to convicts (and former convicts) nevertheless persisted in the Australian colonies. Several colonies implemented surveillance measures and migration procedures to monitor and restrict movement between colonies by individuals with convict backgrounds. Significantly, in December 1853—the same month that transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ended, the newly-established Colony of Victoria (having split from New South Wales two years earlier) established Australia’s first police gazette, the Victorian Police Gazette. Similar in format and function to London’s Hue and Cry, the police gazette was distributed every week to city and

2 Framing New Caledonia

45

rural police stations and to government offices and newspaper publishers. Along with information on internal police affairs, the gazette provided detailed lists of recent criminal activities; lost, found or stolen property; and the names of escaped prisoners and ticket-of-leave holders. Notable among the latter were former convicts from what had been Van Diemen’s Land and had become Tasmania. Indeed, as Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (2019) has shown, between 1853 and 1893 thousands of former convicts and people of Tasmanian origin were named in its pages. In the Colony of South Australia, officially (and proudly) established as a free settler colony in 1836, a police force was established expressly to seize escaped convicts or prevent entry to former ones (Finnane, 1994). This domestic climate of suspicion about convicts and former convicts in Australia would later be extended to French bagnards, but with different results. Whereas British penal colonialism was an internally divisive force within the Australian colonies, pitting free against convict (or ex-convict), and free settler colony against penal colony, the French bagne was an issue which the Australian colonies could oppose collectively, thereby finding common ground.

Policing the Bagne in the Australian Colonies In 1853, one month after the inaugural issue of the Victorian Police Gazette, the Colony of New South Wales produced its own police gazette, the New South Wales Reports of Crime, distributed to all police stations from January 1854. In 1862, it acquired a new title—the New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime. That same year a centralised, unified police force was established, “replac[ing] the piecemeal jumble of Metropolitan, Water, Native, Rural, Gold Escort, and Mounted Patrol” (Walker, 1984, p. 25) that had been created in ad hoc fashion since first settlement. New South Wales’ first detective branch was also created, becoming the Criminal Investigation Branch in 1879. It was to this branch that Jules Rochaix would be assigned in 1883. Rochaix had no background in policing, and his appointment appears to have come about following a chance meeting with the French consul in Sydney. In 1919, eight years after his retirement, Rochaix was invited

46

B. Neilson

by the Evening News to recount his life and career (‘Detective’s Deeds’, 1919). Rochaix related the story of his birth in France and how he had served in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War before migrating to England. Suffering poor health, he elected to seek the warmer climes of Australia, arriving in Queensland in 1874. It was while working as a manual labourer on Sydney’s sewage works that Rochaix had the fateful random encounter with the French consul that provided him with his unexpected entrée into the New South Wales police. Falling into conversation, the consul asked him whether he would have any interest in a job as a detective, to which Rochaix pointed out his lack of experience. The consul retorted that he would soon pick it up, and pledged to put in a good word for Rochaix with the head of the force, Edmund Fosbery. And so began Rochaix’s policing career. Pursuing escaped bagnards in Australia was not Rochaix’s task alone. Extradition required suspected escaped bagnards to be personally identified by French officials, who would arrive from New Caledonia armed with the necessary paperwork. After testifying to the accuracy of the prisoner’s identification, the French representative would then escort the bagnard back across the Coral Sea. The most efficient method of recapture entailed the French authorities informing police in Australia of the likely arrival of a convict whose absence had been noted in New Caledonia. Such was the case, for instance, of Jean Henri Charles Rousselot, a transported convict serving a life sentence for murder. Receiving word in early 1891 from French authorities that Rousselot had disappeared, Queensland police printed a full description of the man in the Queensland Police Gazette (‘Escaped French Convict’, 1891), all the way down to the “coffee-coloured birth-mark on right side of body”. Rousselot was “said to be a dangerous criminal, and has escaped on six previous occasions from New Caledonia. It is believed he is making for Australia, and the police in coast districts are to keep a sharp look out for him”. Belgianborn Rousselot’s transportation file indeed reveals him to have been a serial escapee (‘Rousselot’, 1884). After recapture in Australia, he was returned to New Caledonia and incarcerated on the Île Nou, where he would die two years later at the age of thirty-six. At a time of limited communications within and across colonial lines, police gazettes in colonial Australia assisted in the identification and

2 Framing New Caledonia

47

localisation of bagnards suspected of escape. Notices in one colony’s gazette would be reprinted on the pages of another. This was the case, for instance, in 1871, when descriptions of George O’Brien, Eugene Ducas and George Bluett, escapees from the New Caledonian penal colony, were printed first in the New South Wales and then in the Queensland police gazettes (‘Extracts from “New South Wales Police Gazette”’, 1871). Together, the accretion and accumulation of these notices formed a familiar yet distinct genre of surveillance in an increasingly networked system of information exchange. Moreover, evidence indicates that dealings with French authorities influenced the development of policing in Australia. For instance, France’s dispatch of recidivists to New Caledonia from the mid-1880s prompted Queensland police to develop photographic identification of offenders who had been convicted but released on probation (Finnane & Myrtle, 2011). Through their liaising with French authorities, Queensland police were familiarised with the Bertillon system of criminal identification (Giuliani, 2012). This all serves as a reminder that information flowed not only between the metropole and colonies within a particular empire, but also across competing empires and their colonies. In 1901, during a visit to Sydney, Queensland’s Commissioner of Police William Edward Parry-Okeden met with New South Wales’ Inspector General of Police Edmund Fosbery, the man who almost twenty years earlier had appointed Rochaix to the force, and discussed the best method of identifying criminals. Parry-Okeden advocated adopting a modified version of Bertillon’s system—Queensland police were well versed in its workings thanks to their interactions with French military warders pursuing escaped prisoners from New Caledonia. According to Parry-Okeden, French authorities would readily train police in Australia in anthropometry. With cooperation between the various Australian states, such techniques would be indispensable (Finnane & Myrtle, 2011). The proximity of the bagne to Australia’s eastern coast and the apparent ease with which convicts escaped their island prison affected policing methods in the Australian colonies in the decades after the abolition of British convict transportation through until after Federation. Pursuing escaped bagnards laid important foundations for the emergence of a national policing body in Australia and contributed to methods

48

B. Neilson

of policing at a formative point in Australia’s nation-building process. Until 1917, when the Commonwealth Police was formed, there was no national police authority in Australia. The sharing and transmitting of information and alerts on escapees between the Australian colonies (and, later, states) shaped approaches to co-operative policing across jurisdictional lines. The effectiveness of the cooperation in dealing with escaped bagnards arguably provided material justification for the adoption of a more cohesive, nationwide system of police at a time when the distinct interests of colonies (later states) were still being defended. In November 1889, a regional Victorian newspaper printed an editorial asserting the need for Australia’s colonies to defend themselves against the moral pollution emanating from the nearby French penal colony. “To protect the young people of these rising colonies [of Australia] from a contamination as black as Erebus”, the piece read, “which if allowed to continue and grow will do much to blast their happiness and life, and to destroy the moral grandeur, the glowing righteousness which all true lovers of their country earnestly desire to see firmly laid in the foundations of Australian communities is of the very utmost importance”. What was needed was “Australian unity”, with “Australians [drawn] shoulder to shoulder in the closest bonds of mutual helpfulness and protection” (Bendigo Advertiser, 25 November 1889). A little over a decade later, the journalist’s desire had been achieved.

Conclusion As a settler colony emerging out of a society founded by transported criminals and military men, established on land stolen from its Indigenous owners, modern Australia has always had to grapple with issues of legitimacy. Concerns about controlling mobility—whether as escape from or “invasion” into—have been woven into the very fabric of Australia’s history since colonisation. From the perspective of Indigenous Australians, the arrival of the First Fleet of British settlers, including over 700 convicts, in January 1788 and the ensuing violent dispossession of land was itself an invasion (Reynolds, 2006). According to the convenient fiction of terra nullius, whereby “title to ownership…rested on

2 Framing New Caledonia

49

occupation; by which was meant cultivation (clearing, tilling, manuring the soil, erecting fences and permanent settlements, etc.), and it followed that where no cultivation in this European-style could be observed, then the land was held to be waste-land, unowned, and therefore open to the first person who could use it to sustain life” (Buchan, 2007, p. 389). According to European thinking, then, Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants were themselves viewed as an illegitimate presence. In fact, as Bruce Pascoe (2014) shows, the land that the British viewed as “uncultivated” had in reality been carefully tended, supporting human life for tens of thousands of years. Rather than engaging in significant soul-searching over the legitimacy of their own claims to ownership, a major priority for the British administrators of the fledgling penal colony from its earliest years was the prevention of convict escapes—not only because all available manpower was needed to develop the settlement but also because escapes undermine the severity of convict transportation as a punishment and thus its deterrent function. With the demise of convict transportation from the 1840s and the cementation of free settlement, anxiety about escapes was overtaken by a preoccupation with invasion, directed most often against Asian subjects. But, as we have seen, this anxiety was also directed against the French—in particular, bagnards from New Caledonia. In ways not fully appreciated by existing scholarship, the preoccupation in the Australian colonies with France’s transported convicts represents an important stepping stone in facilitating their evolution from disreputable penal settlements (from which one would seek to escape) to a desirable, unified nation of free settlers (to which one would choose to migrate). In the nineteenth century, France’s penal settlement of New Caledonia was directly inspired by the British experiment in adjacent Australia (Forster, 1996). Through to the present day, Australia’s use of offshore territories to control the mobility and migration of asylum seekers inspires other countries, including Denmark, which in 2021 signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding with Rwanda to establish a refugee reception centre outside the country’s borders (Magnay, 2021). Australia’s policy on extraterritorial detention of asylum seekers—known as the “Pacific Solution”—was announced by the conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2001. Under this policy, Australia would send

50

B. Neilson

asylum seekers to the Pacific nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea for detention and processing. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”, he declared (Howard, 2001). The Howard Government immigration policy would subsequently be upheld and indeed extended by the Rudd Labor Government (‘Kevin Rudd Announces’, ABC News, 2013). The response in the Australian colonies to the arrival of bagnards— whether escapees or expirees—from the 1860s onwards needs to be understood within the context of the Australian colonies’ own origins and transition from penal to free settlements. Not only was the New Caledonian bagne entangled in long-standing practices in Australia of control and exclusion, it also helped shape methods of policing in the Australian colonies at a pivotal moment in their development. While the abolition of convict transportation from Britain to Australia—complete by 1868—meant that the British source of disorder and immorality was effectively stopped, France’s introduction of the practice to nearby New Caledonia re-aroused or extended similar anxieties. Although lesser in scale to the paranoia about Asian invasion, concern about the New Caledonian bagne and the alleged threat its populations posed to the security and stability of the Australian colonies was persistent. The pursuit of escaped bagnards effectively provided authorities in the Australian colonies with a mechanism for asserting their relative superiority as settlements of morally upstanding people and to collect around a common enemy, helping pave the way for a greater sense of common ground in the years before their federation.

References ‘Detective’s Deeds.’ (1919, July 15). Evening News [Sydney], p. 5. ‘Dubois Paul.’ (1881, March 31). Photographic Description Books [Darlinghurst Gaol], NRS-2138. State Archives & Records New South Wales. ‘Escape of French communists from New Caledonia.’ (1874, April 10). The Sydney Morning Herald , p. 7. ‘Escaped French Convict.’ (1891, February 7). Queensland Police Gazette, 28(6), 114.

2 Framing New Caledonia

51

‘Essence of Ephemerides.’ (1886, February 20). Protestant Standard , p. 5. ‘Extracts from “New South Wales Police Gazette”—Miscellaneous Information.’ (1871, June 7). Queensland Police Gazette, 8(6), 55. ‘Extradition Court.’ (1886, February 20). The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser. ‘French Escapees from New Caledonia.’ (1886, March 10). New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime, 75. ‘Hypolite Arfemllieres.’ (1884, February 9). Photographic Description Books [Darlinghurst Gaol], NRS-2138. State Archives & Records New South Wales. ‘Kevin Rudd Announces New Asylum Seeker Processing and Refugee Settlement Deal With Nauru.’ (2013, August 3). ABC News. www.abc.net.au/ news/2013-08-03/rudd-announces-asylum-policy/4863226 ‘Modern Galley Slaves: New Caledonia and its convicts, Part II’. (1891, December 19). Evening News [Sydney], p. 2. ‘Modern Galley Slaves: New Caledonia and its convicts, Part III’. (1891, December 31). Evening News [Sydney], p. 3. ‘News of the Day.’ (1886, February 12). Sydney Morning Herald , p. 7. ‘[No Title].’ (1877, September 27). Argus, pp. 4–5. ‘Wilshire Joseph.’ (1884, June 6). Photographic Description Books [Darlinghurst Gaol], NRS-2138. State Archives & Records New South Wales. Anderson, C. (2001). Multiple border crossings: “Convicts and other persons escaped from Botany Bay and residing in Calcutta.” Journal of Australian Colonial History, 3(2), 1–22. Anderson, C. (2018). The Andaman Islands Penal Colony: Race, class, criminality, and the British Empire. International Review of Social History, 63(26), 25–43. Atkinson, A. (1991). The pioneers who left early. The Push, 29, 110–116. Atkinson, A. (1994). The free-born Englishman transported: Convict rights as a measure of eighteenth-century empire. Past and Present, 144 (1), 88–115. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2014). Australian Historical Population Statistics. http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/3105.0.65. 001Main+Features12014?OpenDocument Barbançon, L. -J. (2003). L’archipel des forçats: histoire du bagne de NouvelleCalédonie, 1863–1931. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Bashford, A. (2004). Imperial hygiene: A critical history of colonialism, nationalism and public health. Nationalism and Public Health.

52

B. Neilson

Bergantz, A. (2018). “The scum of France”: Australian anxieties towards French convicts in the nineteenth century. Australian Historical Studies, 49 (2), 150– 166. Blackton, C. S. (1955). The dawn of Australian national feeling, 1850–1856. Pacific Historical Review, 24 (2), 121–138. Buchan, B. (2007). Traffick of empire: Trade, treaty and terra nullius in Australia and North America, 1750–1800. History Compass, 5 (2), 386–405. Carey, H. M. (2019). Empire of hell: Religion and the campaign to end convict transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875. Cambridge University Press. Currey, C. H. (1983). The transportation, escape and pardoning of Mary Bryant. Halstead Press. Donohoo, J. (2013). Australian reactions to the French penal colony in New Caledonia. Explorations, 54, 25–45. Dutton, K. R. (2002). Henri Rochefort and his companions in Australia. Explorations, 32, 3–39. Finnane, M. (1994). Police and government: Histories of policing in Australia. Oxford University Press. Finnane, M., & Myrtle, J. (2011). An exercise in police co-operation? Australian Journal of Politics and History, 57 (1), 1–16. Forestier. (1816, October 14). Mémoire sur le choix d’un lieu de déportation. Série Colonies H, Carton H1. Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-enProvence, France. Forster, C. (1996). France and Botany Bay: The lure of a penal colony. Melbourne University Press. Giuiliani, E. (2012). Surveillance policière et technologies d’identification dans les colonies de Nouvelle Galles du Sud et du Queensland, 1880–1903. In C. Denys & V. Denis (Eds.), Polices d’Empires: XVIIIe-XIXe siècles (pp. 135– 156). Presses universitaires de Rennes. Hayter, H. H. (1885). Victorian year book containing a digest of the statistics of the colony for 1884–85. John Ferres Government Printer. Hirst, J. B. (1983). Convict society and its enemies: A history of early New South Wales. Allen & Unwin. Hirst, J. (1988). The strange birth of colonial democracy: New South Wales, 1848– 1884. Allen & Unwin. Howard, J. (2001, October 28). 2001 election speech, campaign launch, Sydney Town Hall . Australian Federal Election Speeches. https://electionspeeches. moadoph.gov.au/speeches/2001-john-howard

2 Framing New Caledonia

53

Hughes, R. (1988). The Fatal shore: A history of the transportation of convicts to Australia, 1787–1868. Karskens, G. (2005). “This spirit of emigration”: The nature and meanings of escape in early New South Wales. Journal of Australian Colonial History, 7 , 1–34. Lack, C. L. (1954). The problem of the French escapees from New Caledonia. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 5 (3), 1046–1065. Lake, M. (2015). The Australian dream of an island empire: Race, reputation and resistance. Australian Historical Studies, 46 (3), 410–424. Lake, M., & Reynolds, H. (2008). Drawing the global colour line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality. Cambridge University Press. Magnay, J. (2021, May 6). Denmark looks to follow Australia’s offshore detention policy, may send asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. The Australian. www.theaustralian.com.au/world/denmark-looks-to-follow-aus tralias-offshore-detention-policy-may-send-asylum-seekers-to-rwanda-forprocessing/news-story/59d5e42debf13199eb42b3dccdf8ea8f Maxwell-Stewart, H. (2018). Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615– 1875. In C. Anderson (Ed.), A global history of convicts and penal colonies (pp. 183–210). Bloomsbury. Maxwell-Stewart, H. (2019). Convict bloodlines: Crime, intergenerational legacies and convict heritage. In A. Marchant (Ed.), Historicising heritage and emotions: The affective histories of blood, stone and land (pp. 198–213). Routledge. McCreery, C., & McKenzie, K. (2013). The Australian colonies in a maritime world. In A. Bashford & S. Macintyre (Eds.), The Cambridge history of Australia (Vol. 1, pp. 560–584). Cambridge University Press. McKenzie, K. (2016). Defining and defending honour in law. In P. Russell & N. Worden (Eds.), Honourable intentions? Violence and virtue in Australian and cape colonies, c. 1750 to 1850 (pp. 17–30). Routledge. Merle, I. (1995). Expériences coloniales: La Nouvelle-Calédonie (1853–1920). Belin. Neal, D. (1991). The rule of law in a penal colony: Law and power in early New South Wales. Cambridge University Press. Neilson, B. (2016). The paradox of penal colonization: Debates on convict transportation at the international prison congresses 1872–1895. French History & Civilization, 6 , 198–211.

54

B. Neilson

Neilson, B. (2018). Settling scores in New Caledonia and Australia: French convictism and settler legitimacy. The Australian Journal of Politics and History, 64 (3), 391–406. Neilson, B. (2019). Moral rubbish in close proximity: Penal colonization and strategies of distance in Australia and New Caledonia, c.1853–1897. International Review of Social History, 64 (3), 445–471. Parliament of Victoria. (1884). Annexation, federation and foreign convicts: Correspondence. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by His Excellency’s Command, 38. John Ferres. Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu. Black seeds: Agriculture or accident? Magabala Books Aboriginal. Pierre, M. (2017). Le Temps des bagnes 1748–1953. Tallandier. Poiré, E. (1897). L’émigration française aux colonies. Plon. Rechniewski, E. (2015). The perils of proximity: The geopolitical underpinnings of Australian views of New Caledonia in the Nineteenth Century. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 12(1). https://epr ess.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/portal/article/view/4095/4590 Redfield, P. (2000). Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. University of California Press. Reynolds, H. (2006). The other side of the frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia (Rev. ed.). UNSW Press. Rousselot, J. H. C. (1884). Série Colonies H 545. Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France. Sanchez, J.-L. (2018). The French empire, 1542–1976. In C. Anderson (Ed.), A global history of convicts and penal colonies (pp. 123–156). Bloomsbury. Sen, S. (2000). Disciplining punishment: Colonialism and convict society in the Andaman Islands. Oxford University Press. Shaw, A. G. L. (1966). Convicts and the colonies. Faber & Faber. Siddall, W. R. (1969). Railroad gauges and spatial interaction. Geographical Review, 59 (1), 29–57. Steel, F. (2018). “Time is on our side”: Shipping and the coming of flight in the Pacific. In W. Anderson, M. C. L. Johnson, & B. L. Brookes (Eds.), Pacific futures, past and present (pp. 107–130). University of Hawai‘i Press. Sydney, L. (1892). Heads of a Plan, 1786. Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, Part 2. Charles Potter. Thomas, J. (1886). Cannibals and convicts: Notes of personal experiences in the Western Pacific. Cassel & Co. Toth, S. A. (2006). Beyond Papillon: The French overseas penal colonies, 1854– 1952. University of Nebraska Press.

2 Framing New Caledonia

55

Vamplew, W. (1987). Australians; historical statistics. Fairfax, Syme & Weldon. Walker, D. (1999). Anxious nation: Australia and the rise of Asia, 1850–1939. University of Queensland Press. Walker, D., & Sobocinska, A. (2012). Australia’s Asia: From yellow peril to Asian century. UWA Publishing. Walker, R. (1984). The New South Wales police force, 1862–1900. Journal of Australian Studies, 8(15), 25–38.

3 “Dancing and Discipline, Frolics and Felonies, Punch and Punishment, Rum and Reform”: Queen Victoria’s Birthday Party, Norfolk Island Penal Station, 25 May 1840 J. M. Moore

The penal colony has a long history as experiment. As Clare Anderson (2022, p. 8) has observed penal settlements were not only “used to occupy territories for economic and commercial reasons” but were also “intertwined with global circulations of ideologies of punishment and rehabilitation”. Their remoteness, from both public scrutiny and immediate supervision, made them ideal locations to experiment. This chapter looks at what Norval Morris (2002, p. 177) has described as a “great penal experiment”: Alexander Maconochie’s trial, between 1840 and 1844, of his “mark system” on Norfolk Island. Morris, like other accounts, portrays Maconochie’s regime as a progressive, humane and enlightened initiative that was brought to an end by reactionary opposition from the authorities in New South Wales and London (Barry, 1958; Clay, 2001). Maconochie’s (1848, p. 13) claim that “I found the Island J. M. Moore (B) Llandysul, Wales, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_3

57

58

J. M. Moore

a turbulent, brutal hell, and I left it a peaceful well ordered community” has largely been accepted at face value. This was not, however, the response it received at the time from the New South Wales press, whose coverage was a mixture of ridicule and hostility. This chapter introduces Maconochie and Norfolk Island, a remote penal settlement just over 1,400 kilometres east of the British colony of New South Wales, before focusing on the early days of Maconochie’s experiment and, in particular, on a party he organised to celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1840. On arrival on Norfolk Island, he had detected animosity among the prisoners to both Britain and her institutions. The celebration was intended to address the convicts lack of patriotism, something Maconochie (1848, p. 8) feared represented a barrier to their successful rehabilitation. My account of the party is largely based on Maconochie’s own account and its coverage in the New South Wales press. Maconochie’s account was framed in the language of a theoretician, seeking to persuade by reason and with reference to the wider interests of the state in both the metropole and the colony. The Sydney press on the other hand framed their accounts in the dramatic, polemic language of outrage. These are followed by a review of the wider literature which shows that neither Maconochie’s nor the press’s accounts accurately reflect the reality of life on the island. To explain their very different accounts, the chapter concludes by arguing that both Maconochie and the Sydney newspapers discourse need to be understood as ideological: Maconochie’s seeking to deploy reformative rhetoric to justify the penal expansion then occurring in England and the Sydney press advocating the terror of deterrence they believed necessary to maintain the emerging colonial social structure. Maconochie originally travelled to the Australian penal colonies in 1836 as the private secretary to Sir John Franklin, the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Barry, 1958). Maconochie’s first career had been as a naval officer after which he was involved in the establishment of the London (subsequently Royal) Geographical Society, serving as its founding Secretary as well as Britain’s first Professor of Geography.1 Before he left England for Van Diemen’s Land, the Prison Disciplinary Society commissioned him to review the colony’s transportation system (Moore, 2011). His swiftly drafted report, alongside

3 Dancing and Discipline

59

the largely unfavourable responses of local officials, was sent by Franklin to the Colonial Office. Maconochie also sent a summary of his findings to Lord John Russell, the Home Secretary. Russell saw the report’s relevance to the ongoing Molesworth Committee’s review of transportation and published Maconochie’s summary as a Parliamentary Paper (Home Office, 1838).2 Subsequently, the Colonial Office ordered the full set of dispatches to be printed for consideration by Molesworth and his committee (Colonial Office, 1838). Maconochie’s reports not only provided a damning indictment of the operation of the transportation system but also set out an innovative alternative penal theory, which was to become known as the mark system (Moore, 2011). The mark system had five key characteristics. Firstly, Maconochie (1839, p. 6) declared that reformation, rather than deterrence, was punishment’s primary aim. Secondly, he advocated task rather than time sentences (Maconochie, 1839, p. i). Thirdly, marks were the currency which measured task achievements, rewarded desirable behaviour, punished misconduct and with which rations and indulgences were purchased (Home Office, 1838, p. 10). Fourthly, Maconochie advocated a staged approach to penal discipline with a clear division between the initial punitive stage and the subsequent reformative stages (pp. 9–10). Lastly, Maconochie did not tie his system to a specific institution; it was a theory of punishment with wider applications than “mere imprisonment” (Maconochie, 1839, p. 19; 1846, p. 27). Accumulating the required balance of marks was the key to the prisoner’s release. However, marks also paid for provisions, so the convicts’ purchase of anything beyond bare necessities prolonged their incarceration. A refusal to cooperate resulted in a bread and water diet and an increasing debt to be paid off (Maconochie, 1853, p. 6). The system was designed so that release could not be obtained through endurance; Maconochie (1857, p. 1) intended to “uniformly subjugate all brought under its influences” (emphasis in original). Convicts’ desire to complete their punishment, he believed, promoted behaviour that would become internalised. Good habits, Maconochie (1839, p. 24) hoped, would become “fetters which would be only the more effectual because they are unseen”. Following the report of the Molesworth Committee significant changes were made to transportation (House of Commons, 1838).

60

J. M. Moore

New South Wales ceased to be a destination for convicts in 1840, and in Van Diemen’s Land the assignment system was subsequently replaced by the probationary system (Reid, 2007). In England, work commenced on the building of Pentonville prison intended to provide a period of penitentiary confinement for convicts before their transportation to the Australian colonies.3 Whilst the Molesworth Committee had not, as Maconochie often implied, endorsed his mark system, it had recommended a trial: not as a substitute for the more perfect system which may be followed in well constructed penitentiaries, but as an experiment … in the hope of mitigating the evils which it is to be feared must unavoidably result from the associating together of offenders, until such buildings can be provided. (House of Commons, 1838, p. xlv)

Therefore, whilst in London the penitentiary option at Pentonville was pursued, Maconochie was given the opportunity to trial his system on Norfolk Island. An uninhabited island, originally claimed by Cook in 1774, Norfolk Island was settled in 1788 (Hoare, 1999, pp. 6–7). Logistical problems caused by the Island’s remote location led to the settlement being abandoned in 1814 (Nobbs, 1988). However, in the 1820s, it was decided to re-establish a penal station on Norfolk Island. The New South Wales Governor Ralph Darling (1922, p. 105) hoped for, “a place of the extremest punishment, short of Death” whilst his predecessor as Governor, Thomas Brisbane (1917, p. 604) had desired felons there would be “for ever excluded from all hope of return”. This extreme rhetoric contributed to the second settlement of Norfolk Island between 1825 and 1855 acquiring a reputation as a brutal, violent penal institution. The convicts on Norfolk Island have routinely been portrayed as predominantly reprieved capital convicts with histories of serious offending in both the British Isles and the Australian colonies (Hazzard, 1984; Hughes, 1987). Through a painstaking analysis of the convict records, Causer (2010, p. 315) has determined that “the foundational myth that Norfolk Islanders were nearly all doubly-convicted capital respites is untrue” and concludes that a majority were transported to Norfolk Island for non-violent thefts.

3 Dancing and Discipline

61

Maconochie arrived on the island on the 6 March 1840 aboard the Nautilus along with the first group of prisoners selected to participate in his experiment (Bateson, 1969, pp. 373, 395).4 He also took charge of the existing population of convicts sent there by Australian colonial courts. Maconochie had previously advised the Governor of New South Wales (and Maconochie’s line manager), Sir George Gipps, that it would be impossible, on such a small island,5 to run two separate regimes, an experimental one for the new prisoners and one based on the existing regulations for the colonial convicts,6 whom he described as “1,200 of the refuse of both colonies” (House of Commons, 1841, p. 10). His negative view of the colonial prisoners was reinforced on his arrival where his first impression of them was that they “were more like Demons than men” (Maconochie, n.d.). Maconochie was already well known in Australian colonial society through his contribution to the Molesworth committee. Responding to his appointment to run Norfolk Island, the Sydney Herald (4 March 1840) highlighted his lack of practical experience of convict management, calling his appointment an example of “weathercock policy” based on “mere theory”. The paper held out little hope for the success of his experiment, advising its readers that “his scheme of reformation is visionary in the extreme and will turn out to be nothing more than a waste of public money”. Condemning the government for appointing Maconochie the paper rejected “his peculiar views on discipline” declaring that “Terror is the chief object of punishment” before concluding: It appears to us, that this plan is a tissue of undigested absurdities … it will inundate the country with speedily released felons, and it will cause the prisoners here to sigh after the pleasures of Norfolk Island … we feel confident the scheme will fail and cause the colonists an infinity of trouble to counteract the evils; and that it will entail an immense expense upon the community. (Sydney Herald , 29 April 1840)

Maconochie was undisturbed by this opposition and on his arrival on the island took swift action to establish his reformative regime. He immediately issued a General Order setting out “the details of the system of

62

J. M. Moore

discipline which he is directed to introduce into the settlement, and to which the prisoners landed from the Nautilus are to be immediately subjected” (House of Commons, 1841, p. 52). The penal settlement was, he declared, to be converted “from a scene of prolonged suffering … into a field of moral reform” (p. 53). Maconochie made clear his view “that lengthened sentences are in every way injurious” and declared that it would be his “pride and pleasure … rapidly to pass good men through the school of training” (pp. 52–53). Despite acknowledging his lack of authority in determining the length of their sentences Maconochie announced that he would “strongly recommend” to the Governor of New South Wales “that seven year sentences be made commutable for 6,000 marks, 10 years for 7,000, and 15 years and upwards for 8,000” (p. 53). He valued each mark at a penny, set the wages at “10 marks a day, or 60 marks a week, for ordinary day labour” whilst allowing payment of “up to 16 marks a day for mechanical or any other superior labour” (p. 53). The order set out how, as well as purchasing freedom, marks could be deducted as fines for misconduct and expended on the purchase of certain indulgences (p. 53).7 The importance of deferred gratification was highlighted by Maconochie emphasising the need for the convicts to show restraint in their expenditure of marks whilst on the Island. Their whole future after release, he warned, “may take its character from the degree in which they avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by it of acquiring self-command” (p. 53). Although the regime he outlined was only to apply immediately to the new convicts, he assured the existing convict community that he intended swiftly to apply this regime to them (p. 54). In daily life, keeping the two sets of convicts separate was problematic and Maconochie rapidly concluded that maintaining the distinction between the two groups “enlisted every old prisoner on the island against me” (House of Commons, 1841, p. 57). Whilst it is possible that the problems of maintaining separate regimes were overstated by Maconochie, there is evidence that he was struggling to impose his authority. In the first week of his regime, he had had to revert to corporal punishment on three occasions, “to keep up the old system with the old hands” (p. 54). His solution was to extend his experimental regime to the old hands. He issued a second General Order declaring that:

3 Dancing and Discipline

63

After a week’s experience the superintendent finds the difficulty of maintaining two systems of discipline at the same time on the island almost insuperable, and the attempt, as he thinks, is even otherwise inexpedient. He has therefore resolved to put the mark system into full operation universally on Monday next, the 16th instant. (p. 54)

Ten days after Maconochie’s arrival, and without any authorisation, he extended his experiment to the old hands, their wages and mark regime established, and any effective distinction between the old establishment of colonially convicted prisoners and the new convicts had been removed (pp. 54–55). Gipps reacted to Maconochie’s coup d’état with “surprise and apprehension” and set out clearly the legal restrictions on releasing prisoners. He informed Maconochie that the extension of his experimental regime to the colonial prisoners was “illegal” and should be immediately abandoned (House of Commons, 1841, p. 56). Maconochie was clearly shocked by the Governor’s response. Despite the reprimand giving him “very great pain”, he felt sure it was the result of a misunderstanding and he set out detailed explanations of his changes “calculated … to modify his Excellency’s opinions” (p. 57). The response from Sydney was curt: his Excellency regrets he feels forced to say that the arguments contained in your letter have produced no alteration whatever in his opinion of the impropriety of the changes introduced by you in the management of the men on the old establishment at the island. (p. 59)

Maconochie had no choice but to concede defeat and for the remainder of his time on Norfolk Island he had to, at least nominally, operate two systems of discipline. Nevertheless, before he informed the convicts of Gipps’ order to withdraw the colonial prisoners from the experimental mark regime, he allowed them to participate in the celebrations he had planned for Queen Victoria’s birthday. These continued despite the clear apprehension felt in Sydney at the impact of Maconochie’s regime on the convict population of New South Wales. This was made explicit in a dispatch Maconochie received on the day he announced the celebrations of the Queen’s birthday, which informed him that Gipps “fears that the report of what is going on at Norfolk Island will destroy the

64

J. M. Moore

salutary dread in which transportation to it has always been held among the convict population of New South Wales” (p. 57). On Monday 25 May 1840, 80 days after Maconochie’s arrival, the penal settlement celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday. The convicts were issued with fresh meat and other ingredients, so they could be kept occupied in the morning preparing their food (Maconochie, 1848, p. 7). At noon, the prisoners sat down to dinner and Maconochie toured the island where at each station he reported that: having previously mixed twenty gallons of rum8 with two thousand halfpints of lemonade … I gave each man in succession, in my own presence, about half a tumbler of the mixture to drink the toast of the day. It scarcely smelt of spirits, and went, as was intended, to the hearts, not the heads, of those who drank it. (p. 7)

During the afternoon “every description of national game was engaged in, prizes being offered in each” (p. 7). In the early evening, the convicts were called together for a concert during which the performances were the Castle of Andalusia, in which the comic powers of the prisoners were exhibited to their companions, a variety of glees and songs, the tent scene of Richard II, the Purse or the Benevolent Tar, and finally the national anthem. (West, 1852, p. 284)

The convicts were allowed to be “at large” for nearly two hours after dark to enable them to enjoy a firework display (House of Commons, 1841, p. 61). Maconochie proudly recorded that during this “not a shadow of disorder occurred” and at “the appointed hour every man quietly returned to his ward” (House of Commons, 1841, p. 60; Maconochie, 1848, p. 8). The events were viewed very differently in Sydney. Gipps’ reaction was scathing: It is scarcely possible for his Excellency to conceive anything more calculated to produce mischievous effects among the large convict population of this colony … than to learn that men of their own class, who have been transported to Norfolk island for crimes of the most atrocious nature, are there entertained with the performance of plays, and regaled with punch,

3 Dancing and Discipline

65

and he considers it his duty not to allow reports of such proceedings to reach them, without causing them at the same time to learn, that they have met with his marked disapprobation. (p. 62)

The following week the Sydney Herald (1 July 1840) declared the celebrations of the Queen’s birthday a “mockery of law, justice and order”. According to the paper, “penal discipline was abandoned” at the point that Maconochie issued his first general order and the “fete” organised for the Queen’s Birthday had “put an end to the distinction between crime and good conduct”. Like Gipps the paper was concerned not to evaluate Maconochie’s innovations in terms of their reformative possibilities but was expressing their apprehension that Norfolk Island’s deterrence potential was being undermined. “The festivities and allurements of Norfolk Island” were, they feared, a “monstrous injustice to every well behaved Convict in this colony” and represented “a Bonus to crime” (Sydney Herald , 1 July 1840, emphasis in original). New South Wales was still a colony heavily reliant on convict labour and maintaining discipline within this workforce, it was believed, relied on the fear of a sentence to Norfolk Island. What incentive would there be to the colony’s convict labour force to maintain its discipline, demanded the Herald (1 July 1840) if “the ruffian who adds Colonial atrocities to his prior British crimes, is sent to the refuge for criminals, and is treated to luxuries and indulgences”? It was, the newspaper declared, time that an end was “put to Captain Maconochie’s system”. In developing the press’s portrayal of the settlement’s regime repeated subsequent references were made to the 1840 Queen’s birthday celebrations. Two years later the Sydney Morning Herald 9 (5 May 1842) described Maconochie’s regime as “instructing them [the convicts] in the accomplishments of fiddling, dancing, drinking, rum-punch, enacting plays, and greeting the name of Her Most Gracious Majesty with loyal and lusty huzzas”. The island was a place of: “Dancing and discipline, frolics and felonies, punch and punishment, rum and reform”. For the Australian Maconochie’s regime was the “mild and soothing system” (21 December 1842) which was “most pernicious and injurious in its results” (6 January 1842). The Sydney Morning Herald (5 May 1842) was blunter. The convict settlement was not, it declared, a

66

J. M. Moore

prison but a “large boarding school”. On another occasion, it was “a penal Utopia – an Elysium of crime – an earthly hell aping the attributes of an earthly heaven!” (Sydney Herald , 13 July 1841). It represented a “new-fangled method of fawning and crouching at the offenders’ feet” which “it would be mockery to call it penal discipline” (emphasis in original). The Sydney Herald suggested it was receiving first-hand accounts throughout Maconochie’s tenure. “The whole island, we understand, was in a disorganised state”, it reported, before advising that “thefts were of everyday occurrence, while an unmentionable crime was prevalent to a degree that it is horrible to contemplate” (Sydney Herald , 26 July 1841). The following week it cited a letter “from a gentleman resident there” who claimed that: The penal character of the place is completely done away with; while I am writing, some hundred convicts are assembled with a flag, amusing themselves at different games. It cannot be wondered at, that prisoners should commit crime for the sole purpose of being sent here (Sydney Herald , 31 July 1841),

further evidence for the paper that “crime no doubt is increasing … The men think of little except crime and amusement”. Underpinning much of this coverage was a fear of the eventual return of convicts to New South Wales. The Morning Chronicle (29 May 1844) warned of the dangers to the community of “the influx of the sort of characters let loose upon us by the crack-brained philosophy of Captain Maconochie”. The Australian (6 January 1842) reminded its readers it was “to this Colony’s … shores Captain Maconochie’s patients are, after the period of their punishment, almost inevitably thrown”. New South Wales residents were warned of “the serious evils” that would inevitably result from “every five or six weeks … forty or fifty Norfolk Island expirees … (being) let loose upon us, at the caprice of a moon struck visionary like Captain Maconochie, who called them reformed ” (Morning Chronicle, 22 May 1844, emphasis in original). It was “the very worst sort of transported felons” that were being released in the colony where “they are ripe for the commission of the heaviest crimes” (Australian, 6 January 1842; Morning Chronicle, 22 May 1844). Much of the press

3 Dancing and Discipline

67

coverage demonised the prisoners with, for example, the Australian (21 December 1842) referring to the “trebly-convicted felons confined on the island”. Although we now know that those incarcerated on the island were predominately relatively minor non-violent lawbreakers, the risk they were portrayed as representing was substantial (Causer, 2010, p. 315). The Australian (6 January 1842) warned its readers that on release “these old offenders … in almost every instance, betake themselves, immediately upon their arrival in Sydney, to the commission of every sort of crime”. The consequence of the “mistaken” trial conducted by Maconochie was, they declared, “to deluge the Colony from time to time, with large numbers of unreformed criminals” (Australian, 6 January 1842). Not only were crimes released by Norfolk Islanders given prominence in the press, but other crimes were wrongly attributed to former Norfolk Island prisoners and unsolved crimes were presumed to have been perpetrated by former Norfolk Island convicts (see, for example, Sydney Morning Herald , 21 December 1842). This crime wave was the direct result of “this madman’s pranks” (Sydney Herald , 31 July 1841). By drawing on Maconochie’s own writings and reports published in the Sydney press, two very distinct pictures have emerged. To Maconochie Norfolk Island was a successful and well-managed penal establishment reforming its convicts, whilst to the press Norfolk Island had “lost its penal character” (Sydney Herald , 29 April 1840). In fact, neither picture is particularly accurate. In reality, Maconochie’s Norfolk Island regime was poorly administered and characterised by conflict, poor productivity, attempts to escape and, over time an increasingly heavy reliance on corporal punishment. Maconochie’s firm conviction in his theories meant that from the outset he focused on promoting their merits rather than getting to grips with the practical tasks involved in running a remote penal settlement. His correspondence with the New South Wales government often reads like a lecture, setting out, in considerable detail, his penal theory and his aspirations with little concern for practicalities. He casually dismissed clear instructions on the basis that they misunderstood what he was actually doing. It was a practice he continued despite the Colonial Secretary bluntly telling him his missives were “both tedious and unsatisfactory” (cited in Causer, 2021, p. 6). This

68

J. M. Moore

inability to accept criticism and advice was replicated in many of his relationships on the island. Tim Causer (2021, p. 7, 30) has highlighted how Maconochie fell out with, among others, the island’s Superintendent of Agriculture Charles Ormsby (whom it was alleged, in an attempt to undermine Maconochie’s regime, had enticed a convict to steal government sheep); his successor William Pery (whom Maconochie alleged had run an illegal still); both Anglican and Catholic clergymen; and James Reid, a medical officer (whom Maconochie promised an increase in salary to act for a period as his assistant, but which was never paid). Maconochie’s high opinion of himself and his theories were not shared by others. Reid referred to Maconochie in a letter to a friend as “His Highmightiness –& his Holiness”, whilst John Smith, the Assistant Commissary General, observed that he “fancies himself supreme”, and Thomas Sharpe, the protestant chaplain, recorded in his journal his concerns about the “pestiferous influence” of the mark system on the convicts (all cited in Causer, 2021, p. 7). Whilst, for many prisoners Maconochie’s innovations would have been welcome and improved their lives, others were more critical. The Norfolk Gazette, an underground convict publication satirised Maconochie and his regime, referring to him as the penal settlement’s “Lord Chamberlain” and its “Commander in Chief (Not at Horse Guards)” (cited in Causer, 2021, p. 8).10 More significantly, the repeated attempts to abscond suggest that some convicts were highly motivated to escape the pains of being confined there. Of the seven successful escape attempts in the history of the second settlement, four occurred in Maconochie’s time (Causer, 2010, pp. 225, 333). There were further attempts, including, most famously, the attempt to seize the brig Governor Philip, which resulted in the death of four convicts in the struggle on the boat and subsequently another four on the gallows (The Australian, Friday 15 July 1842; Naylor, 1872, pp. 3–4, 13–15;). It is clear that for some convicts, the strong likelihood of death was a risk worth taking to escape Norfolk Island, Maconochie’s reformative regime notwithstanding. Although it is likely that Maconochie’s poor record keeping masks the full picture, the settlement’s disciplinary records show that the island was neither Maconochie’s “well ordered community” nor the “mild and

3 Dancing and Discipline

69

soothing system” portrayed in the Sydney press.11 A return Maconochie submitted in April 1842, two years into his experiment, showed the range of behaviours that were being punished (Maconochie, 1843, pp. 20–22). The largest group of offences were those that we might categorise as forms of resistance, such as disobedience, insolence, refusing to bathe, abusive language, failing to co-operate with the regime and offences relating to absence, including from the camp, from work, from muster, from prayers and on occasions for breaking out of the stockade. The only other offences that occurred on any scale related to property, robbery and theft, both from the government and from other prisoners. There were also a few offences of violence, a false confession of a murder and a handful of offences related to homosexuality (pp. 20– 22). Although Maconochie’s theory used mark fines as the method of disciplining convicts, in these returns these were supplemented by both carceral and corporal punishments. Sixteen of the return’s 24 men had been sentenced to terms in gaol and one had been subject to a corporal punishment. Interestingly, although fines were being used extensively, it was clear that imprisonment was the primary disciplinary method, with many convicts being repeatedly imprisoned (pp.20–22). In fact, the use of imprisonment had become so routine that Maconochie admitted that it was not always being recorded, with one prisoner “also imprisoned for several other offences, but which are not recorded” (p. 21). Whereas in theory Maconochie had been confident that his mark system could operate purely through mark rewards and punishments, these records show that in his experimental regime he depended on other, particularly carceral, punishments in order to maintain control. The nature of the transgressions that this group were being punished for, with the preponderance of offences of resistance, is also significant. It suggests that for this group of prisoners Maconochie had failed to achieve his ambition of aligning the interests of prisoners with that of the regime. Despite John Barry (1958, p. 144) claiming that Maconochie did not flog any of the new hands, Causer (2010, p. 248) has shown this to be untrue, with at least 36 beatings being inflicted on the new prisoners. Despite the number of floggings appearing to have decreased under Maconochie, his regime remained underpinned by his deployment of violence to enforce his control. Causer (2010, pp. 246–247) reports that

70

J. M. Moore

Maconochie ordered floggings of up to 200 lashes and that “floggings inflicted under Maconochie were of a greater intensity … than any other commandant”. The central role of work in convict reformation in Maconochie’s mark system would suggest that his experiment would have increased the island’s productivity (Moore, 2018). However, in an analysis of the penal settlement’s economy, Malcolm Treadgold (1991, p. 87) identified “a falling-off in effort or in the intensity of work undertaken by the convicts as a major factor in the declining agricultural production” during Maconochie’s time as Supervisor. Indeed, there is clear evidence that, despite a significant increase in the prisoner population under Maconochie, agricultural production from government-cultivated land declined. This was most evident in the levels of production of maize and wheat. In 1840, 27,078 bushels of maize were grown on the Island; by 1843, this had declined to 8,379 bushels with each acre under production producing 13 bushels, compared with the 33 per acre that had been produced in 1840 (Maconochie, 1845, p. 5). The reduction in wheat grown from 3,442 to 544 bushels during these years was even more dramatic and reflected the reduced acreage cultivated, which declined from 237 to 34 during the period (p. 5). Although the reality of life on Maconochie’s Norfolk Island was very different from both his description and the colonial press’s portrayal, both discourses had purpose. At a superficial level, this conflict can be seen as a dispute, still ongoing, over the purpose of state punishment. Is it justified on the basis it is deserved? Or does it protect society by deterring future criminals, incapacitating the dangerous or reforming the anti-social? Such perspectives presume penal law is merely a response to crime. However, a historical sociological perspective on punishment suggests state punishment performs specific social functions, at particular times and in particular places. For Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939, p. 5), “(e)very system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships”. The history of punishment, they argue, is therefore intrinsically linked to changing social structures, with the specific punishments deployed in any epoch largely determined by the prevailing economic relations. It therefore follows that penal strategies will not only change across time but vary across place.

3 Dancing and Discipline

71

Michel Foucault (2019, pp. 102, 106) further developed this analysis to argue that penal law’s “main function is anti-seditious”, it is a political strategy aimed not at delinquency, but at repressing “the struggle of the people against power”. To therefore understand the functionalism of the discourses of both Maconochie’s and the New South Wales press, we need to look at the social structures, and penal economies, of both metropolitan England and colonial Australia. Over the previous century, England had undergone dramatic social and economic change. The industrial revolution, commercial expansion and the enclosure movement fundamentally changed English society (Thompson, 1991, p. 66). Economic change re-organised society with inequality and poverty increasing alongside, for a minority, great wealth. In the countryside, “the introduction of liberalism on the land … shattered the social structure”, forcing many to relocate to urban centres (Hobsbawn, 1995, p. 159). The stability and mutual obligations of the old moral economy were replaced by “a society of strangers” (Ignatieff, 1983, p. 87). These changes were not uncontested, and the first half of the nineteenth century saw organised struggle as well as widespread individual acts of resistance (Thompson, 1991). Whilst the revisionist histories of the 1970s suggested that between 1780 and 1850 there was a move from corporal to carceral punishments, recent empirical work has shown that with respect to England all modes of state punishment—imprisonment, transportation, corporal and capital punishments—underwent a dramatic increase (Ignatieff, 1983; Moore, 2021). To justify the increased punishment of those who (willingly or unwillingly) were perceived as resisting the new order, the doctrine of deterrence, which had previously dominated theological and philosophical justifications of state punishment, was increasingly supplemented by reformative aspirations (Wiener, 1990). Whereas deterrence justifications had viewed punishment as a necessary evil, to be kept to the absolute minimum, reformatory rationalisations saw it “as medicine for the individual, as well as protection for the community” (Bentham, 1843, p. 390; Maconochie, 1847, p. 2). For many in England, the nineteenth-century criminal justice system was “an arena of unequal negotiation and despair”, whose focus on

72

J. M. Moore

the protection of property increasingly led to its legitimacy being questioned (Gatrell, 1994, p. vi). Maconochie (1839, p. 15) recognised penal law’s vulnerability to such criticisms, conceding that its administration “undoubtedly contributes to alienate the two classes”. In response, he highlighted his system’s capacity to generate “a general improvement … in the relations and feelings of high and low towards each other in England” (Maconochie, 1839, pp. 14–15). His ideas, he argued, offered the penal system not only legitimacy, but the capacity to reconcile those subjected to it to their place within the desired economic and moral order. The mark system, Maconochie (1839, p. 16) argued, would enable state punishment to “sow the seed, not only of future good conduct, but of warm attachment, both to the agents who have been employed [in administrating the punishment], and the interests which they have served!” Maconochie’s ideas and their reception therefore need to be understood as a political response to England’s expanding penal system’s need for legitimacy. Reformation, and parties that celebrated the Queen’s birthday, in that context made sense. However, New South Wales was still a convict colony, with a social structure characterised by divisions: between convict and free labour; indigenous peoples and colonial settler; emancipists and free immigrants; military and civilian. Its European population was dispersed over a large and (from a colonial settler perspective) rapidly expanding land mass. Although property could be acquired relatively rapidly its owners hold over it was often precarious. In such a society, the law was central to both the protection of property and the maintenance of the social hierarchy. In this setting, Maconochie’s theory, which saw criminals as morally defective individuals who needed treatment, made little sense. Those with property believed they faced a greater threat from a much wider section of the population. At a deep psychological level, they needed the law to provide them with the comfort of knowing that it had the capacity to react with severity towards those who failed to respect property rights or otherwise threatened the status quo. It was not the “defective” nature of individual criminals but the perceived threat of a whole class that needed responding to. That required a terror that reformative rhetoric, and celebrations of the Queen’s birthday, threatened.12 Whilst the colonial government had to balance the competing pressures coming

3 Dancing and Discipline

73

from the government in London—who supported an experiment that offered the potential legitimisation of the metropole’s expanding penal economy—and the emerging local colonial bourgeoisie—whose interests required a penality that terrorised—no such balance was required by the local press. Their opposition to Maconochie’s experiment was relentless and uncompromising. Maconochie’s experiment and the ideas that underpinned it hold a central place in both the history of penal reform and the development of the discipline of criminology. However, his experiment on Norfolk Island proved unsustainable. Although its immediate success has been exaggerated, it should nevertheless be recognised as an important attempt to use reformative ideas to legitimise state punishment. Whilst the idea of reformation has subsequently played a central role in the rhetoric of penal law, it was inappropriate for New South Wales colonial society. As Georg Rusche (1978, p. 4) has highlighted, “all efforts to reform the punishment of criminals are inevitably limited by the situation of the lowest socially significant proletarian class which society wants to deter from criminal acts”. In the colonial context, the significant “proletarian class” were convicts. For the editors of Sydney’s newspapers, they were not a class likely to be deterred by “(d)ancing and discipline, frolics and felonies, punch and punishment, rum and reform” (Sydney Morning Herald , 5 May 1842). The New South Wales press were not interested in giving Maconochie and his experiment a fair trial; they understood that the interests of the colonial bourgeois required a penal policy based on deterrence. By promoting reformation rather than seeking to terrorise, Maconochie’s regime was seen, and responded to, as a direct threat to these interests. For Rusche (1978, p. 4) “reform efforts, however humanitarian and well-meaning, which attempt to go beyond this restriction are condemned to utopianism”. Queen Victoria’s Birthday party confirmed, at least for the Sydney press, that Maconochie’s regime was utopianism and they were unwavering in their commitment to its failure.

74

J. M. Moore

Notes 1. Alongside the other founders of the RGS, Maconochie saw himself as a ‘political geographer’ participating in an applied discipline facilitating the expansion of British colonialism and trade. (See for example his earlier geographical publications: M’Konochie, 1816, 1818). For the relationship between Maconochie, colonialism and carceral geography see: https://jmmoore.org/2020/05/03/not-without-irony/. 2. The Molesworth Committee, which reported in 1838, was a British parliamentary committee set up to review transportation to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Island. 3. Between its opening in 1842 and 1849, Pentonville received only prisoners sentenced to transportation, almost exclusively “those who were convicted of their first offence, and whose ages were generally between 18 and 35” (Graham, 1850, p. 3). 4. Like all the prisoners on Norfolk Island during its second settlement (1825–1855), Maconochie’s convicts were male. 5. Norfolk Island is just under 35 square kilometres in area. 6. The colonial convicts were nearly all originally from the British Isles. Causer’s (2010, pp. 78, 82) detailed examination of the convict records has identified, that, out of a total of 5,941 convicts: “Eight Aboriginal men were detained at Norfolk Island, as were five Chinese, a fair few Americans and continental Europeans, as well as men from Mauritius, India and the West Indies”. 7. For the influence of political economy on Maconochie’s theories, see Moore (2018). 8. Based on a convict population of 1,800, this worked out at just over 50 ml each, or slightly over a modern-day English pub’s double measure. 9. The Sydney Herald was renamed the Sydney Morning Herald in 1842. 10. When Maconochie was subsequently appointed as governor of Birmingham prison in England, his tenure was also characterised by conflict with both local magistrates and other officers within the prison. For a full account see Moore (2016). 11. Causer (2010, p. 233) has highlighted that the available data on punishments during Maconochie’s period is “a definite underestimation due to significant gaps in the conduct records for this period”. 12. This need for a penality of terror may help to explain why official and media discourse consistently promoted the myth of the dangerous

3 Dancing and Discipline

75

double-convicted capital offenders, despite most prisoners being nonviolent minor property offenders (Causer, 2010).

References Anderson, C. (2022). Convicts: A global history. Cambridge University Press. Barry, J. V. (1958). Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island . Oxford University Press. Bateson, C. (1969). The convict ships, 1787–1868. Brown, Son & Ferguson Bentham, J. (1843). The rationale of punishment. In J. Bowring (Ed.) The works of Jeremy Bentham (Vol. 1). W Tait. Brisbane, T. (1917). Letter to Colonial Secretary, Bathurst, 21st May 1825. In: Governors despatches to and from England January, 1823 to November, 1825. Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Vol. 11 (pp. 603–604). Causer, T. J. (2010). “Only a place fit for angels and eagles”: The Norfolk Island penal settlement, 1825–1855 (Unpublished PhD). King’s College London. Causer, T. J. (2021). The Norfolk Island penal station, the panopticon, and Alexander Maconochie’s and Jeremy Bentham’s theories of punishment. Revue d’études enthamiennes, 19, 1–37. Clay, J. (2001). Maconochie’s experiment. John Murray. Colonial Office. (1838). Despatch from Lieutenant Governor Sir J. Franklin, October 1837, relative to present System of Convict Discipline in Van Diemen’s Land. British Parliamentary Papers 1837–1838 [309]. Darling, R. (1922). Letter to Under Secretary, Hay, 10th February 1827. In: Governors despatches to and from England January, 1827 to February, 1828. Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Vol. 13 (pp. 105–106). Foucault, M. (2019). Penal theories and institutions: Lectures at the College de France 1971–1972. Palgrave Macmillan. Gatrell, V. A. C. (1994). The hanging tree: Execution and the English people 1770–1868. Oxford University Press. Graham, J. (1850). Letter to the Commissioners of Pentonville 10th December 1842. In: Coms. for Government of Pentonville prison, eighth report. British Parliamentary Papers 1850 [1192]. Hazzard, M. (1984). Punishment short of death: A history of the penal settlement at Norfolk Island. Hyland House.

76

J. M. Moore

Hoare, M. (1999). Norfolk Island: A revised and enlarged history, 1774–1998. Central Queensland University Press. Hobsbawn, E. (1995). The age of revolution, 1789–1848. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Home Office. (1838). Report on state of prison discipline in Van Diemen’s Land, &c By Captain Maconochie. British Parliamentary Papers 1837–1838 [121]. House of Commons. (1838). Report from the select committee on transportation; together with the minutes of evidence, appendix, and index. British Parliamentary Papers 1837–1838 [669]. House of Commons. (1841). Secondary punishment (New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.). British Parliamentary Papers 1841 [412]. Hughes, R. (1987). The fatal shore. The Harvill Press. Ignatieff, M. (1983). State, civil society and total institutions: A critique of recent social histories of punishment. In S. Cohen & A. Scull (Eds.), Social control and the state: Historical and comparative essays (pp. 75–104). Martin Robertson. Maconochie, A. (1839). General views regarding the social system of convict management. Tegg & Co. Maconochie, A. (1843). Return of ill-conducted prisoners. In: Correspondence between Secretary of State and Governor of Van Diemen’s Land on Convict Discipline. British Parliamentary Papers 1843 [158], 20–22. Maconochie, A. (1845). Criminal statistics and movement of the bond population of Norfolk Island, to December 1843. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society of London, 8, 1–49. Maconochie, A. (1846). Crime and punishment. J Hatchard. Maconochie, A. (1847). Comparison between Mr Bentham’s views on punishment, and those advocated in connexion with the mark system. W H Compton. Maconochie, A. (1848). Norfolk Island. John Ollivier. Maconochie, A. (1853). Penal discipline. Thomas Harrison. Maconochie, A. (1857). The mark system of prison discipline. Mitchell and Son. Maconochie, A. (n.d.). Memorandum of the circumstances which first led to my writing on convict management. The National Archives of the UK [CO/280/240/107]. M’Konochie, A. (1816). Considerations on the propriety of establishing a colony in one of the Sandwich Islands. William Blackwood. M’Konochie, C. (1818). A summary view of the statistics and existing commerce of the principal shores of the Pacific Ocean. With a sketch of the advantages, political and commercial, which would result from the establishment of a central

3 Dancing and Discipline

77

free port within its limits; and also of one in the Southern Atlantic, viz. within the territory of the Cape of Good Hope, conferring on this latter, in particular, the same privilege of direct trade with India and the Northern Atlantic, bestowed lately on Malta and Gibraltar. James Richardson. Moore, J. M. (2011). Alexander Maconochie’s mark system. Prison Service Journal, 198, 38–46. Moore, J. M. (2016). Reformative rhetoric and the exercise of corporal power: Alexander Maconochie’s regime at Birmingham Prison, 1849–1851. Historical Research, 89 (245), 510–530. Moore, J. M. (2018). Labouring out of adversity: Maconochie, political economy and penal labour. Howard Journal of Crime and Justice., 57 (2), 182–203. Moore, J. M. (2021). Expansion, crisis, and transformation: Changing economies of punishment in England, 1780–1850. Social Justice, 46 (4), 5–30. Morris, N. (2002). Maconochie’s gentlemen: The story of Norfolk Island and the roots of modern prison reform. Oxford University Press. Naylor, T. B. (attrib.). (1872). A tale of Norfolk Island. In: Chambers’s miscellany of instructive and entertaining tracts (New and Revised ed., 3(43)). W & R Chambers. Nobbs, R. (1988). Norfolk Island and its first settlement, 1788–1814. Library of Australian History. Reid, K. (2007). Gender, crime and empire: Convicts, settlers and the state in early colonial Australia. Manchester University Press. Rusche, G. (1978). Labor market and penal sanction—Thoughts on the sociology of criminal justice. Crime and Social Justice, 10 (3), 2–8. Rusche, G., & Kirchheimer, O. (1939). Punishment and social structure. Columbia University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1991). The making of the English working class. Penguin. Treadgold, M. (1991). Economic development. In R. Nobbs (Ed.), Norfolk Island and its second settlement 1825–1855 (pp. 73–98). Library of Australian History. West, J. (1852). History of Tasmania (Vol. 2). Henry Dowling. Wiener, M. J. (1990). Reconstructing the criminal: Culture, law and policy in England, 1830–1914. Cambridge University Press.

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’ as Graphic Novel: From Adventure Narrative to Prison Comics Chantal Cointot and Sophie Fuggle

Introduction: A Story of Many Men At the end of the 2017 remake of the 1973 film Papillon, itself an adaptation of the memoir by former convict Henri Charrière first published in 1969, Papillon (played by Charlie Hunnam) visits a publisher in Paris and hands over a large bundle of loose handwritten notes. The conversation proceeds as follows: Charrière:

It’s important that my memoir be published here, in France. My wife convinced me to write it all down, while I’m still young enough to remember.

C. Cointot (B) Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Fuggle Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_4

79

80

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

Jean-Pierre Castelnau: So, is this really your story? Charrière nods: It’s the story of a lot of men. The irony of Papillon’s statement should not be lost to those who are aware of Charrière’s adoption of anecdotes and myths belonging to the wider story of the penal colony as his personal story of survival and escape. Located in sites across the overseas French colony of French Guiana, the bagne operated for a 100-year period between 1852 and 1953. Over 70,000 men and almost 1000 women were sent there making it, after Australia, one of the largest penal transportation operations in history. Its relatively recent functioning, only closing after the end of the Second World War, resulted in visual representations including photography and film not applied to earlier forms of convict transportation. Moreover, the relative proximity of the territory (located in the north of South America between Brazil and Suriname) to the United States meant that the penal colony attracted the attention and imagination of the U.S. press and public alongside those back in France. In addition to the memoirs of escaped convicts such as Charrière and René Belbenoît (1938),1 fictionalised accounts by writers such as Blair Niles (1928) fed into wider U.S.-dominated imaginaries around incarceration and exile which arguably continue to shape ongoing perceptions of the history and geography of the penal colony today. In this chapter, we will explore how specifically visual representations of the penal colony have been over-determined by existing fictional and semi-fictional re-imaginings. In other words, the penal colony is always already ‘framed’ and even ‘re-framed’. While this is not peculiar to French Guiana, the specific history and geographies of the bagne provide a rich example of how such re-framings worked and continue to work today. The term bagne was previously used to refer to the dockyard prisons in France and certain practices, official and unofficial, were transposed from those earlier sites to French Guiana.2 However, the geography of French Guiana, located in the Amazon rainforest, and sparsely populated despite attempts at colonisation via slave plantations, offered colonial administrators a seemingly blank space onto which different colonial fantasies could be projected (Spieler, 2012).

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

81

Arguably, the role of such representations, of which the Papillon narrative is most widely known, is twofold. Firstly, these provide a visual shorthand which precludes any deeper, more nuanced engagement with the specific geographies of the penal colony. These types of representations belong to a particular form of what Michelle Brown calls “penal spectatorship”. The ‘penal spectator’ observes the punishment and suffering of others at a remove whether this be temporal or spatial (Brown, 2009, p. 21). This distance allows for the consumption of images and narratives of punishment without the need to actively question the lived experience for those caught up in the justice system both now and throughout history. The impact in this case is that post-carceral spaces such as French Guiana are little understood and continue to be subject to neo-colonial development fantasies imposed from without.3 The concept of the penal colony subsequently becomes a vague idea evoked within right-wing discourses of punishment as a possibility to be reactivated. Secondly, such narratives tend to be built around myths of heroic exceptionalism which pit the protagonists against the rest of the convict population. As such, these stories endorse rather than contest the wider operation of the penal colony as a space of violence and suffering. Other convicts are dehumanised as either monstrous or pathetic with Corsican, North African and Vietnamese convicts subject to additional racial stereotyping.4 The chapter offers a close reading of two recent comics, the 2-volume (2016–2017) Forçats by Fabien Bedouel, Pat Perna and Florence Fantini and L’Homme qui s’évada (2006) by Laurent Maffre which retell journalist Albert Londres’ account of Eugène Dieudonné’s escape from the penal colony and subsequent campaign for pardon.5 The intention is to analyse contemporary re-imaginings and the visual lexicon upon which they draw. How do these recent comics fit into a longer visual tradition? To what extent do they also offer an alternative set of images and ‘re-framings’ which deliberately evoke earlier representations produced ‘within’ the penal colony? In what ways can these retellings challenge existing cultural representations of convict transportation and forced labour, opening up new readings and a more nuanced understanding of French Guiana’s carceral geographies?

82

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

It is worth noting briefly that the two comics form part of a wider corpus of graphic novels and visual albums taking up the theme of France’s penal colonies in both French Guiana and New Caledonia as well as its military prisons on North Africa. In a detailed overview of this material, Charles Forsdick (2019) has pointed out the capacity of the comic genre “to explore the diversity and complexity of the institution, beyond popular understandings” (p. 4). Fictionalised renderings of life in the bagne such as Paco: Les Mains Rouges (Sagot & Vehlmann, 2014–2017) have created space to explore friendship and romantic love between convicts thus challenging the dominant homophobic discourses found in popular memoirs and recent historical accounts of the bagne.6 Other comics and albums have taken up the built heritage of the penal colony in order to explore its contemporary legacy as ruins located across the territory (Luko, 2016; Nicoby et al., 2016). In choosing to focus on reworkings of Londres’ reportages, the aim is to explore two very different examples of re-framing based on original lived experience (Londres as witness and Dieudonné as transported convict) of the penal colony. Following this introduction, the chapter will provide a brief account of Albert Londres’ reportages for Le Petit Parisien considering, in particular, the framing of his accounts alongside cartoon images by the anonymous (convict) artist L.K. We will then examine how the two graphic novels, Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada, adapt Londres’ reportages via very different visual styles which nevertheless both draw on existing visualisations of the bagne. This will be followed by close analysis of various key markers used to represent the space and operation of the penal colony: the wider setting of French Guiana as carceral geography; the use of solitary confinement on the Iles du Salut; and the visual iconography of the guillotine. A final section will focus on how the comics might be repositioned within the genre of ‘prison comics’, as tools advocating decarceration and abolition despite the central role of adventure narrative and erasure of the racist discourse present in Londres’ original observations.

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

83

Albert Londres’ Reportages If you visit the small Musée du bagne located in the former Camp de la Transportation in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, you will learn the importance of Albert Londres in bringing about the eventual closure of the penal colony. Londres was one of many reporters who visited French Guiana during the operation of the penal colony. However, his reports for the newspaper, Le Petit Parisien in August and September 1923, offered one of the most sustained and comprehensive accounts of the penal colony to a predominantly working-class readership. As Evanson has argued, Londres’ reporting style was determined by his “place of publishing” (Evanston, 45) and therefore inevitably taken up with the exotic and sensational demanded by the largely working-class readership of Le Petit Parisien. This becomes particularly apparent when one looks at the original layout of his reportages in Le Petit Parisien. Frequently, the accounts by Londres are flanked, not by photographic images but cartoons produced by the anonymous artist known as L.K. While it is generally assumed that L.K. was a convict, his access to art materials and ability to represent different spaces within the penal colony firsthand also raise the possibility that he could have been a member of the penal administration. Regardless of his identity, his cartoons offer satirical renderings of life in the bagne and celebrate its more insalubrious characters and stories. For example, one of his drawings (part of a series published in Le Petit Parisien on 29 August 1923 under the report heading “Mon ‘Garçon de famille’ et quelques autres” dedicated to the different roles undertaken by convicts within the penal colony) features a convicted doctor carrying out an unorthodox operation on another convict to retrieve his ‘plan’ (a metal suppository carried by convicts in their lower intestines in which money and tools were hidden). The caption reads “The ex-doctor Brengues, sentenced to forced labour for killing his brother-in-law, who named his (Brengues) wife in his will, so as to get his inheritance sooner”.7 In featuring L.K.’s images alongside Londres’ reports, the newspaper offers a view of the bagne as perceived from ‘within’. Yet what is apparent in L.K.’s dark humour is the extent to which those living within the penal colony internalise perceptions projected from without, framing

84

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

their experience of the bagne in terms of the sensational and exotic imagined by those back in Metropolitan France. At the same time, L.K.’s images (where they appear) set the tone with which Londres’ text is read and understood. Following their popularity in Le Petit Parisien, Londres’ reportages were then compiled in book form as Au Bagne later the same year by Albin Michel thus reaching ‘an additional high-brow audience’ (Evanson, 2018, p. 34). Londres then published L’Homme qui s’évada in 1928, which was re-edited in 1932 as Adieu Cayenne! Beyond L.K’s satirical drawings, stories of convict escape and, indeed, other narratives such as gold prospecting situated within the wider setting of French Guiana have been extensively taken up by the comic form both during and after the closure of the penal colony. Where the adaptations of Londres’ work draw on the aesthetics and intrigue of these earlier adventure comics aimed at a pre-teen and adolescent readership, it is also possible to understand the narrative, aesthetic and framing techniques adopted via reference to recent comics scholarship focused on comics journalism, documentary and adaptation. As various scholars have noted (Lefèvre, 2013; Mickwitz, 2016; Schlichting & Schmid, 2019; Schmid, 2021; Smolderen, 2012), the very form of comics emphasises the fictional as well as processes of selection, framing and exclusion. As Schlichting points out: “In contrast to the naturalizing mediality of film or photography, however, the medium [comics] raises awareness of this dynamic as a means to authenticate their own work, but also to problematize reality-based representation, per se” (Schlichting & Schmid, 2019, n.p.). In the challenge to balance “fact-based information and ‘artistic in(ter)vention’” (Ward, 2011, p. 294), comics are uniquely positioned in their engagement with readers, drawing attention to how stories are constructed and details centred rather than simply presenting these as incontestable truths. This is particularly important for comics taken up with social justice and human rights (Bake & Zöhrer, 2017; Weber & Rall, 2017) including cultures of imprisonment as they actively encourage the reader to think about what they are being shown and told and why. Laurent Maffre’s 2006 comics adaptation of L’Homme qui s’évada is explicitly based on Albert Londres’s eponymous work. Maffre’s expressive pen and ink line-drawing artwork is reminiscent of George Jauneau’s

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

85

pen and ink bagnards portraits illustrating J. F. Louis Merlet’s Au bout du monde: drames et misères du bagne (1928). Maffre’s L’Homme qui s’évada starts with a depiction of the Bonnot gang’s bloody confrontation with the police, then Dieudonné’s condemnation, followed by journalist Londres’s arrival in French Guiana and their first meeting on Ile SaintJoseph in 1923. This initial encounter is immediately followed with an account of Dieudonné’s meeting with Londres in Brazil in 1927, leading to Dieudonné’s account of his escape attempts. The book ends with an account of the long and difficult processes leading to Dieudonné’s pardon. In Maffre’s version, the character of Albert Londres is presented as an observer gathering and transcribing Dieudonné’s account for investigative and advocacy purposes. Dieudonné is established as the protagonist with Londres acting as a framing device and a narrator collecting Dieudonné’s testimony. In contrast, the structure of Forçats—a 2-volume ‘bande dessinée’ by Fabien Bédouel, Patrice Perna and Florence Fantini—presents both Londres and Dieudonné as actively driving the narrative, giving them an equal amount of agency. Maffre’s L’Homme qui s’évada is characterised by a more explicitly pedagogical approach than Forçats, as evidenced by the great amount of information provided to readers. Visual representations are supplemented by arrows indicating word definitions and detailed explanations provided on forms of punishment and their lengths, food rations and diseases. In this respect, the comic takes on a similar role to the original ‘reportages’ in introducing an unfamiliar readership to a complex and distant space. Maffre’s text also emphasises Albert Londres’s propensity for metaphors, euphemism and ironic commentary remaining faithful to his personal style of observation. The text presented in Forçats’s narrative boxes also borrows from Albert Londres’ published work, as indicated in recurring footnotes.8 Londres’ targeted use of irony hints at the poignant sarcasm that is usually found in the accounts written by the real-life Londres.9 However, Londres’ writing style is displaced and, rather than being reproduced as Londres’ in-person narration, is reworked into Dieudonné’s lines. For example, when meeting Londres, Dieudonné mock-apologises for the “messy” state of his solitary cell, ironically highlighting the fact

86

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

that it is painfully bare.10 This displacement reinforces an image of Londres as a journalist merely recording the carceral conditions, transcribing exchanges with the ‘bagnards’ and gathering testimonies, and, as such, downplays Londres’ voice—instead letting his findings speak for themselves. Forçats offers a fast-paced, more sensationalist account to L’Homme qui s’évada. For example, three entire pages are dedicated to Dieudonné saving Londres from drowning and shark attacks (I: 50–52). Forçats also provides alternative versions of the events depicted by Maffre. In Maffre’s adaptation, Londres decides to try and find Dieudonné following the news released in July 1927 that he is alive and living in Brazil. According to the version of events provided in Forçats, however, Londres goes to Brazil to prove that Dieudonné is still alive after Le Petit Parisien published an article announcing his death. Moreover, in Forçats, Londres is depicted actively fighting on his own for Dieudonné’s freedom. While Maffre’s Londres is a listener gathering testimonies, Forçats features a version of Londres who is much more politically active and emotionally invested. As we will argue throughout this chapter, both versions and approaches provide opportunities to engage readers with the history and impact of the bagne which extends beyond a distanced voyeurism associated with dominant representations of the penal colony and carceral cultures more widely.

French Guiana’s Carceral Geographies The study of ‘carceral geographies’ as a particular focus within criminology is a relatively recent phenomenon (Moran et al., 2018). However, the parallel histories of ‘geography’ as scholarly discipline and the practice of mass incarceration including transportation both have their origins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonisation (see Moore, 2020). Contemporary conceptions of ‘carceral geography’ emphasise the complex configuration of both space and mobility in terms of punishment, constraint and exile (see, for example, Roscoe, 2018). As indicated above, the territory of French Guiana prior, during and

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

87

after the operation of the penal colony, is a space that is wilfully misunderstood. The multiple prisons, administrative centres and more-or-less temporary work camps located across the territory have been oversimplified in representations which tend to focus on Devil’s Island (one of the Salvation Islands) or Cayenne, the territory’s largest town whose existence pre-dates the penal colony. The administrative centre of Saint-Laurentdu-Maroni, where almost all convicts were initially sent for processing, is frequently represented via the foreboding entrance to the Transportation Camp yet the purpose-built prison town, once known as ‘le Petit Paris’, is frequently omitted from popular references to the penal colony. Moreover, visual representations of the space of the penal colony (and the territory more generally) are often subject to exaggerated fantasies or topographies conjured from elsewhere. Notable here are the fantastical images accompanying Frédéric Bouyer’s memoirs of a visit to French Guiana in 1862. These images include giant snakes and mythical sea creatures. More famous, perhaps, is the re-imagining of Devil’s Island as featuring 50-foot cliffs in both 1973 and 2017 versions of Papillon. There are no cliffs on Devil’s Island, just a shoreline composed of jagged low-level rocks which make it difficult to dock. The 2017 remake goes a step further, positioning a curious ‘cour des miracles’ structure filled with zombie-like inmates on the island in place of the small stone huts which housed only a handful of (mostly political) prisoners at any given time. Such (mis)representations give the impression that carceral geographies are interchangeable, defined only by their use as prisons. However, in the case of French Guiana, the lived experience of the bagne varied dramatically depending on where one was sent. The towns offered better forms of employment in comparison with the brutal physical labour and unsanitary conditions of the forest camps. The islands were healthier in terms of climate but many of those sent there were confined to cells following escape attempts. Comics are particularly effective in representing the complex space of the penal colony, as composed of multiple sites, topographies and mobilities. Notably, the comics form is an apt tool for exploring tensions between the various enclosed spaces of the carceral via the proliferation of frames to denote ‘prisons within the prison’ such as solitary confinement. Where this aptitude defines comics such as Panthers in the

88

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

Hole (Cénou & Cénou, 2014) dedicated to exposing the suffering and injustice at work in the prison industrial complex, graphic novels dedicated to convict transportation must also depict vast territories composed of alienating and unfamiliar landscapes. Before examining further the specific representation of cellular confinement, it is worth considering how the wider geography of French Guiana is represented in both Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada. Arguably, such representations are key to better understanding both the continuities and ruptures that mark the shift from slave plantations to convict labour from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The cover for the first volume of Forçats, subtitled “Dans l’enfer du bagne”, depicts Eugène Dieudonné, emerging from a blocky black foreground; behind him, birds and leaves twirl in the wind ominously. The verticality of the trees surrounding him repeat the verticality of the stripes on his convict uniform. Dramatic shadows put an emphasis on the wrinkles hardening his forehead, a sign of premature ageing and the mark of physical work and its toll on the body. In the darkness of the foreground, a few green leaves further heighten by contrast the intensity of the blood red sky above him. Dieudonné is facing the reader, yet his eyes are hidden by shadows, his gaze unavailable to us. On the cover of the second volume, subtitled “Le Prix de la liberté”, Albert Londres faces the reader, his gaze also unavailable to us. The sky behind him is dark blue, devoid of light or stars. His tie and hat hint at a civilian life outside the ‘bagne’, yet the wooden poles supporting the roofs of the nearby houses behind him are visually aligned with his shoulders, which constricts the space around him. The wooden structures raised above him suggest an enclosing of the space, a re-framing, like metal bars of a prison cell. While the covers provide distinct portraits, both volumes intertwine Londres and Dieudonné’s narrative accounts and their fate throughout. The two volumes were re-edited in 2017 into a ‘coffret’ edition. Here, the original detective noir aesthetic gives way to a new cover which juxtaposes colourful depictions of the forest and the water, the two elements that convicts had to navigate to achieve freedom. The new cover features two convicts, one on his knees in waist-high water, looking exhausted, maybe injured; the other by his side trying to help him up, while staring at the reader with an expression of shock

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

89

and horror on his face. The new cover thus emphasises the specific geography of French Guiana and, moreover, moves away from an image of individual heroism (found in the previous depictions of Dieudonné and Londres) to one of collective endeavour. The ambiguous relationship of convicts to the wider surroundings of the penal colony is explored in both comics. Evoking the sensational accounts of explorers like Bouyer, Forçats includes horrific descriptions and repulsing visual representations of snakes, ants and flies that lay eggs under your skin (I: 5–6). Nature is a space so hostile that it is repeatedly described as “Hell on Earth”, by Dieudonné, notably in a panel where a splash of blood red sky hangs ominously behind him as he states: “I often rubbed shoulders with the Devil at the “bagne”, but in this jungle I found Hell”.11 Yet elsewhere, he hints at a more benevolent aspect of the jungle, explaining to Londres how fellow escapee Jean-Marie and he survived “like monkeys” up the trees, eating what they ate (II:38). In L’Homme qui s’évada, Maffre’s account of the same period provides a more literal interpretation as Chapter 2 depicts monkeys picking edible fruits and offering them to Dieudonné and his peer Jean-Marie. Located in the Amazon, French Guiana has often been described as a ‘green hell’ due to the impenetrability of its rainforest. Arguably, this reference has played a significant role in limiting understanding of the territory and continues to do so (see Fuggle, 2022a). Here, Forçats, in contrast to the black and white line drawings of L’Homme qui s’évada, is worth further consideration. Colourist Florence Fantini’s use of complex colour palettes both affirms and exceeds the idea of ‘green hell’. Instead of featuring warmer colour schemes to suggest the tropical heat of French Guiana, Forçats is marked with dark colour schemes even during daytime scenes. Heavy blocks of black shadows fill the top third of most panels, closing the space around the characters’ silhouettes and increasing the sense of enclosed space, restrictions, dread, making any escape attempt almost impossible. Small but significant variations in the colour scheme—the highly symbolic splashes of bright colour in stark contrast to their dark surroundings—all appear violently disruptive. Page 19 of the first volume marks a short but significant break among the heavy, dark colour scheme, with its brief depiction of pastel yellow skies—in stark contrast to the dark blue Guiana skies of the previous

90

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

pages and the grey and navy-blue skies that follow in rainy Paris. This brief spell not only suggests morning daylight bringing hope and offering the possibility of escape, as the convicts paddle out to the sea, away from the bagne and towards Venezuela, but it also marks the arrival of Albert Londres on site as he wishes to bring to light the conditions in the bagne. This daytime scene is exceptionally peaceful, in stark contrast to a later daylight scene during which Londres is introduced to the practice known as “mouillage” whereby the corpses of deceased convicts are fed to sharks. Things turn horribly wrong when the boat capsizes, and Londres together with the guards and convicts fall into shark-infested waters. In a rapid succession of panels (pp. 50–52), the sea turns red with the blood of convicts and guards devoured by sharks. Many of the panels are page-wide yet relatively short (2.5 cm or 3.5 cm high × 20 cm wide). These thin strips heighten the sense of emergency and intensity by restricting viewpoints of what is happening, while suggesting the openness of the sea and the sense that there is no escape to shore in sight. During this episode, the light blue sky turns fiery orange behind Londres and Dieudonné (pp. 53–54). Their faces are covered in blood. Both volumes of Forçats explore tensions between ‘life’ inside and outside the bagne: “You want me to tell you about the ‘bagne’? I’ll tell you about Guiana then, as Hell is not here within these prison walls. Hell is outside. Hell is all around”.12 The final part of this statement by Dieudonné to Londres appears in a speech-balloon placed above the trees growing behind the penal colony’s walls. This panel is directly followed by a bird’s-eye view of the jungle surrounding the house of the penal colony’s director in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni (p. 36). These visual clues suggest, at first glance, that Dieudonné’s statement refers to the jungle itself. However, it also hints at the fact that life ‘beyond the bagne’ is a form of hell defined by the law of ‘doublage’. This law required convicts to spend an equal amount of time in French Guiana after the completion of their sentence (and life for those with a conviction of more than 8 years) for purposes of colonial development. Due to the abundance of free labour provided by the convict population, those released often found themselves living in abject poverty without the rations and shelter previously offered them by the penal administration. As Godfroy (2004) has pointed out, “as surprising as it may seem, life outside the ‘bagne’ is

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

91

much worse than inside”. The issue of ‘doublage’ thus further complicates the spatial ambiguities of the penal colony, adding a temporal dimension to the tension between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. As we shall see in the next section, ‘doublage’ is taken up in both comics in their respective reproductions of Londres’s critique of the bagne and its repressive apparatus which Londres describes as a “crushing machine”.

Repressive Apparatus ‘Doublage’ is the very first piece of information provided to 1973 Papillon viewers right after the film title appears on the screen: “As of this moment, you are the property of the penal administration of French Guiana; after serving your full terms in prison, those of you with sentences of eight years or more will remain in Guiana as workers and colonists for a period equal to that of your original sentences”. The 2017 remake of Papillon makes a more explicit reference to doublage as part of the colonisation process: “This is for the greater good that is French expansion”. With the mention of ‘doublage’ early on, the intention in both Papillon films is to emphasise that there is no way back to France for the two protagonists, Papillon and Dega, rather than offering a critical statement about what happens, more generally, to convicts who make it to the end of their sentence. Conversely, in L’Homme qui s’évada, Maffre points out the impossibility of ‘reinsertion’ for former ‘bagnards’ after their sentences: former convicts, known as ‘libérés’ looking for jobs were in direct competition with ‘forçats’ who were forced to provide free labour. Former convicts were not allowed to work outside the colony and were often further restricted to the environs of Saint Laurent or Cayenne. Consequently, they were reliant on charity or pushed to commit thefts to survive. The representation of the effects of these processes of dehumanisation on ‘libérés’ is significant in Forçats: the line between animality and the convicts is blurred when a group of ‘libérés’ are depicted trying to steal food off a carcass picked at by vultures. The narrative caption describes men dispossessed of their humanity, “piled together like beasts” (I: 42). While this scene echoes pro-bagne propaganda of the time, it also flips

92

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

it completely, suggesting that the convicts’ beast-like behaviour is the result of the bagne itself rather than the ‘nature’ of the convicts justifying their condemnation and punishments. This is made explicit where Dieudonné tells Londres that “[regulations] turn us into amoral beasts. Any redemption is illusory”.13 While Forçats places significant emphasis on the nightmarish jungle surrounding the bagne, both volumes also highlight the systems by which the bagne “crush” the convicts. The bagne is said to have been designed with three objectives in mind: getting rid of the criminals far from the metropole, providing low-cost workers to Guiana colony and giving men a moral compass (I: 37). Forçats’s Londres makes it clear that only one objective is achieved: making the condemned disappear. Albert Londres’s indictment of the bagne: “The penal colony is no well-defined, regulated, invariable punishment machine. It is a factory of misfortune that works without plan or matrix. One would look for the mould that is used to shape the convict – to no avail. It crushes them, that’s all it does, and the pieces go where they can” (Londres, 1923, p. 35)14 —is reduced in Forçats to a single, concise sentence: “Guiana is a crushing machine, without distinction or remorse” (I: 42).15 Both comics draw attention to the disjunct between the conception of the penal colony as utopian, colonial and disciplinary project imposed from without and the realities of its chaotic and cruel operation on the ground. However, they also describe and represent the extra-disciplinary mechanisms transposed from Metropolitan France onto the colony. In Forçats, there is a passing mention of the role of discipline and rules in these processes, as Dieudonné points out to Londres that “[i]n the penal colony, the cruellest thing is not the guards but the rules”.16 This echoes claims concerning the debilitating bureaucracy of the penal administration (Toth, 2006, p. xv) while hinting at the fact that these processes are tricky to represent visually. Unsurprisingly, however, the two adaptations both dedicate significant space to the depiction of the ‘prison within the prison’—the solitary confinement cells located on Ile Saint-Joseph where Dieudonné is sent (I: 30, 32) following his second escape attempt (I: 3– 19). While these scenes adopt similar techniques to other prison comics, it is worth noting the specific brutality of the cell design found at sites in both French Guiana and other French colonial prisons dating from the

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

93

1930s.17 Sometimes referred to as ‘tiger cages’, the cells have bars across the top allowing guards to look down from a viewing platform. In Maffre’s adaptation, these cells are represented in full, via the detail and precision of a technical drawing—notably indicating clearly how the guards can access the top of each cell and walk along them. Forçats, by contrast, provides a more subtle representation of the cells from the convict’s viewpoint. On page 33 of Volume 1, cell bars’ shadows surround Dieudonné. Then, as Londres leans and sits down next to him, the cell bars’ shadows also stripe Londres’ face and body. Londres’ eyes widen as the realities of solitary confinement dawn on him. The reader realises, as Londres does, that the cell has no ceiling, only bars. The toll of solitary confinement on the senses is also suggested in Forçats through textual and visual representations of the cell’s ‘soundscape’. The representations of noises in solitary confinement may seem merely illustrative in comparison with the emotional and traumatic impact of the soundscape in other Forçats scenes. Contrasting with the overwhelming presence—in terms of sheer amount as well as size and width of lettering to match the amplification of volume—of onomatopoeia [written transcriptions of sounds and noises] accompanying gunshots in flashback scenes and escape scenes in both Forçats volumes, volume 1 makes scarce but significant uses of onomatopoeia in its representation of the wider ‘soundscape’ in the colony, during key narrative moments. A faint “frshh” heard by the escapees through the jungle’s vegetation suggests at once hope and danger: Is this the guide they hired? or bounty hunters? (I: 9); a similar approach is used in Maffre’s Chapter 2, with Dieudonné hearing a “crik” sound in the jungle—his eyes widening in panic as he envisages two interpretations in two thought-balloons separated by a “-ou-” [-or-]: one with a bounty hunter reloading his rifle and the other featuring an anteater stepping on a dry branch. Both comics make it clear that misinterpreting sounds of the jungle can be fatal. Small lettering is used in Forçats volume 1 for the transcription of the sounds of the machete beheading an escaped ‘bagnard’ and opening his guts in a failed attempt to obtain his “plan” (I: 15), and an even smaller, thinner “slurp” accompanies a bagnard ingesting a sputum that he paid

94

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

200 francs for, in hope of catching tuberculosis, “his ticket to the infirmary, a bed and a bacon soup every day”, Dieudonné explains to Londres (I: 45).18 In contrast to these stomach-churning moments, sounds heard in the solitary cell may seem anecdotal, but by providing a transcription of the noises heard by Dieudonné while in solitary confinement— water dropping in a bucket and footsteps of the guard (and Londres) approaching (I: 33), loud banging (of a metal door being opened) (I: 33)—Forçats suggests the repetitiveness of these noises. Maffre’s adaptation of L’Homme qui s’évada provides an even more striking visual representation of the silence of Saint-Joseph’s disciplinary quarters, with a written transcription in the shape of the wave of the wind howling, across panels. Speech-balloons containing the onomatopoeia “ting” appear repeatedly. The last panel of the row attributes the source of the “ting” sounds to the clicketing of the barbwire. This unusual use of speechballoons to represent a noise transcription not only suggests monotony through the idea of time passing but also the oppressive nature of the noise; moreover, it hints at the fact that barbwire metal sounds are the only ‘voice’ to be heard here. Both comics suggest the oppressive effects of the soundscape on the convicts, which notably hints at the impact on the mental health of those subjected to long periods of solitary confinement.19 The format of the comics grid is used for varying purposes which include the repetition of alienating tasks and an increase in tensions. As Dieudonné is arrested again and taken to solitary confinement, the narrative insists less on reporting when and how he got caught, and instead dedicates more panels to representations of Dieudonné sitting in a cell, thus suggesting how time in solitary confinement slows down. These temporal ellipses suggest repetitions of the arbitrary and the inevitable.

Dry Guillotine Albert Londres’ report from 12 August 1923 in Le Petit Parisien is accompanied by a cartoon from L.K. based on the convict-executioner, Hespel Le Chacal. Hespel is operating the guillotine. In lieu of a severed

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

95

head, an inset image shows Hespel’s huge dossier compiled of punishment slips and the frequent requests and complaints he addressed to the administration.20 Londres’ meeting with Hespel shortly before his (Hespel’s) own execution for murder is serendipitous (for Londres) and works to emphasise various dark ironies of the bagne. Yet, the use of the guillotine in French Guiana was rare with executions taking place once or twice a year during the operation of the penal colony. The penal colony itself was nicknamed ‘dry guillotine’ due to the slow, drawn-out deaths from malnutrition and disease inflicted on those sent there in contrast to the bloody efficiency of Dr Guillotin’s invention.21 Despite its exceptionality, the guillotine features heavily in the mythology of the bagne. Encounters with the convict-bourreau, especially Hespel, are staple material in memoirs (Belbenoît, 1938; Krarup-Nielsen, 1935; Vaudé, 1977) and travel writing (Tripot, 1910). W. Somerset Maugham, who visited the penal colony in 1931, penned a short story “An Official Position” (Maugham, 2002, pp. 489–527) set in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni about a former policeman sent to French Guiana for murdering his wife who takes on the position of convict-bourreau. Postcards featuring an execution, most likely staged, were produced by the printer Maurel and sold in France during the early 1900s.22 Convicts would also craft miniature guillotine’s which functioned as cigar cutters and were sold to guards and visitors.23 In addition to L.K’s irreverent depiction of Hespel, the collection of artworks produced by the forger Francis Lagrange—whose paintings dominate popular iconography of the bagne—also includes an execution scene. The guillotine is over-used in visual and textual representations of the bagne both at the time and after its closure. In both adaptations of Papillon, upon their arrival the ‘bagnards’ are made to stare at the guillotine in the middle of the courtyard; in 1973 Papillon, the guillotine is operated as a clear warning. Later, during an execution scene, right after the blade descends, Déga hears the words “Mr Déga, did you get the money?” in his ear, with the visual of the guillotine in the foreground turning escape planning into a matter of urgency. In one of 2017 Papillon’s guillotine scenes, the bagnards are forced to take a position similar to the condemned’s: “Down on your knees. (….) At the moment of execution, you’re all to bow your heads”. After the blade goes down,

96

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

the camera zooms in and pans on the new victim’s fresh blood as it drips down the wall stained with the dried blood of previous executions. Given this wider iconography, it is unsurprising, therefore, that the guillotine presents itself in both Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada. However, unlike both Papillon filmic adaptations and Maffre’s L’homme qui s’évada—whose first chapter’s very last three panels feature a guillotine execution—in Forçats, the guillotine is only mentioned in dialogues. The actual guillotine is visually absent from Forçats and is only alluded to through the presence of guillotine-like shadows, especially as a threat in scenes where Dieudonné is fighting for his freedom. In response to a description of all convicts as “blood-thirsty, remorseless murderers who would slice your throat for your hat”, Forçats’s Londres points out that “this verdict is as sharp as a guillotine blade” (I: 19),24 highlighting that the bagne is a death sentence and thus suggesting the mechanisms by which the perception of the condemned lead to the justification of such a sentence. Guillotine imagery is also suggested in Forçats in the scene depicting Londres’s first meeting with Dieudonné in his solitary confinement cell (I: 32–34), following Dieudonné’s second escape attempt. Before Londres is finally allowed to enter Dieudonné’s cell (I: 32), Dieudonné’s head and neck appear through the small opening in the metal door of his cell. This guillotine imagery in the visual representation of their encounter in Forçats is more subtle than in Albert Londres’s account of his first encounter with Dieudonné in Au Bagne, which refers much more explicitly to the guillotine: “The door was not opened, only the metal flap. A head appeared as if through the eye of the guillotine”.25 References to the guillotine are missing from the depiction of the same encounter in Maffre’s L’Homme qui s’évada, where instead Londres is represented leaning forward towards the metal door’s small opening, only to see a pitch-black space, a reference to the fact that the cells were kept in complete darkness for twenty days per month.

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

97

From Adventure Narratives to Prison Comics As Forsdick has pointed out in his overview of recent comics focused on France’s overseas penal colonies, the “bande dessinée – with its potential for the construction of more complex story worlds linking past and present, or creating geographical connections across the carceral archipelago – has become a space of creativity in which some of the most challenging and innovative recent representations of the institution have appeared” (Forsdick, 2019, p. 8). Evoking Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg, 2009), Forsdick notes, in particular, the ability of comics to explore multiple timeframes, disrupting straightforward chronological representations of life in the penal colony. One way in which this occurs is via the flashback. Rather than using Albert Londres’s 1923 visit as a pedagogical device allowing the reader to see the penal colony progressively through Londres’s eyes as is the case with Maffre’s L’Homme qui s’évada, the narrative of Forçats starts with one of Dieudonné’s failed escapes and then alternates accounts of Dieudonné’s arrest and trial with scenes of Londres’s Guiana visit and flashback scenes from Dieudonné’s life before the bagne. The extensive and significant uses of flashbacks allow for an examination of more complex relations between past events, notably the muddy circumstances surrounding Dieudonné’s arrest, his botched trial and the French authorities’ justifications of the working conditions and treatment of the condemned. Although flashbacks are also used in filmic representations of the bagne (notably the scenes with Papillon’s girlfriend Nenette in the 2017 remake of Papillon), it is more interesting to consider the techniques and functions found across the comic genre and, specifically, in other prison comics. Flashbacks in comics tend to be established via softer colours and/or softer borders—akin to blurred or sepia effects in films—and/or splash pages featuring various memories represented within the same panel, to suggest the process of reminiscing—either a timeline of events or a flood of memories coming back at once. Such techniques can be found, for example, in Jessica Oublié and Marie-Ange Rousseau’s 2017 comic Peyi An Nou, an enquiry into the history of BUMIDOM, a migration scheme the memory of which has long been suppressed as a source

98

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

of shame by both French government authorities and those subject to its programme (see, in particular, Oublié & Rousseau, 2017, pp. 106, 132, 143–145). Political prison comics like Cénou’s Panthers in the Hole (2014) use flashbacks to not only depict how lives came to be ruined (petty crimes and frame-ups) but also establish systemic injustice. In Forçats, emphasis is on continuity rather than rupture, produced through colour and style as a means of suggesting clear memories as vivid as the present and , on occasion, the means by which the present is transcended and thus survived. In Forçats, the flashbacks focus on Dieudonné’s association with the Bonnot gang and, in particular, their criminal activity. Without directly questioning Dieudonné’s innocence, the emphasis on this association works to move the wider narrative beyond his heroic exceptionalism, something that is arguably over-emphasised in Londres’ original account. This reconfiguration which also sees Londres repositioned as protagonist rather than mere observer is key in the comic’s emphasis on a more overarching critique of the penal colony. To what extent does L’Homme qui s’évada demonstrate the efficacy of advocacy and campaigning which also offers the opportunity to present a more sustained critique of the bagne beyond the individual plight of Dieudonné? In thinking through the potential of both comics to re-imagine Londres’ narrative and undertake a retrospective critique of the penal colony at large, various challenges arise. Most important here are the ways in which the complex racial politics of the penal colony are overlooked and directly erased by the comic adaptations. Both texts offer a white-focused account based on the experience of a metropolitan convict. Little attention is given to the plight of other convict populations transported from France’s colonies in North Africa and Asia. Maffre’s line drawing tends to visually homogenise the convicts’ racial identities which could be seen as erasure and whitewashing; by contrast, both Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada hint at racial diversity among the ‘passeurs’ (II: 38–42): in both comics, some speech-balloons contain attempts at transcribing local and foreign accents. Maffre refers to one ‘passeur’ as “le Chinois”, and Forçats features “un arabe relégué” and “un bon nègre”—while making sure to indicate that the latter comes from real-life Eugène Dieudonné’s verbatim quote (II: 38–42). Maffre’s

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

99

text brushes on colonial heritage of the bagne: in the scene depicting Londres’s arrival in Cayenne, Londres is drawn reading out loud the inscription on Square Victor-Schoelcher’s statue celebrating the abolition of slavery. While this scene emphasises the continuity between slavery and convict transportation as two forms of forced labour unsuccessfully imported to ‘develop’ the colony, it rewrites Londres’ own commentary, neutralising his targeted, racist critique of Herménégilde Tell, director of the penal administration. Although omitted from the original reportage, Londres’ account of Tell in Au Bagne identifies him as a despot ruler, emphasising he is “un nègre” in charge of “le capitale du crime” and whose second in command is “white” (Londres, 1923, p. 141). In addition to this direct attack, Londres’ account also reproduces a racist attack on Tell by the anarchist Paul Roussenq who mocks Tell’s slave heritage (p. 109). Tell was the first black director of the penal administration and worked his way up through the ranks. In the aftermath of Londres’ damning account, he was forced into early retirement in 1925 by the governor of Guyane. Although these references are brief, they were nevertheless instrumental in drawing public attention to the reversal of racial hierarchies within French Guiana. The image of the washed up ‘libérés’ known as ‘vieux blancs’ [old whites] living in abject poverty was offset against that of a middle class composed of a Black and Creole population. If the complex, racist underpinnings of the bagne and, indeed, its closure are missing from these recent comic adaptations of Londres’ reportages, how might they nevertheless offer a valid critique of convict transportation to French Guiana for a twenty-first-century reader? Can Londres’ observations and advocacy be read usefully without attending to his affirmation of a racist, white agenda (Rachedi, 2017)? In focusing on the specific case of Eugène Dieudonné, can we situate the two comic adaptations alongside other prison comics aimed at exposing the systemic injustices of incarceration? While these texts frequently affirm dominant perspectives on the bagne via the figure of the innocent, white convict, they also explore the potential of individual causes to capture public imagination, using this as a lever for wider critique. In this respect, the different aesthetic and narrative approaches of the two texts are both aimed at re-humanising those subject to the de-humanising effects of life in the penal colony.

100

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

This re-humanisation occurs most powerfully at the end of the second volume of Forçats where Dieudonné and Londres enter a bookshop for the launch of Dieudonné’s book La Vie des forçats. Dieudonné is henceforth identified as “Dieudonné the writer” in sharp contrast to his previous title “Dieudonné de la bande à Bonnot” (II: 35). The last panel is that of Londres smiling to himself and by implication, smiling to Dieudonné and to the reader, about his success in rebranding Dieudonné and help him reclaiming his agency and redefining his identity, far from the image shaped and imposed by the police reports, press coverage, judicial system and the bagne.

Conclusion Albert Londres’ conclusion that the bagne is a “factory of misfortune” implies he does not view it, as others have done, in terms of a failed project which somehow falls short of its utopian aims but rather as an operation designed to fail in its purported goals of rehabilitating criminals and developing the colony. Although the legislation that effectively ended transportation did not come into effect until 1938 (Donet-Vincent, 1992), Londres’ investigative journalism continues to be considered as instrumental in bringing about wider critical attention to the bagne. In the first instance, it led to stricter regulation of visits to the penal colony by the Ministry of Justice keen to control narratives produced about the bagne. As Jean-Lucien Sanchez (2018) has pointed out, Londres’ concluding remarks on the bagne, which took the form of an open letter to the Minister of the Colonies, proposed reform rather than abolition. Moreover, as indicated above, we cannot fully understand the impact of his critique without attending to its underlying racist logic. Nevertheless, what emerges in the later investigative journalism undertaken by Détective and other publications is an increasingly critical position towards the penal colony. Sanchez emphasises how, rather than dismissing Détective for its sensationalist treatment of crime and punishment or its select focus on celebrity convicts, it is possible to identify an increasingly abolitionist discourse. This shift which occurs from the early 1930s onwards is the combined result of the ‘hostility’ of the Minister

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

101

of the Colonies, who had previously encouraged journalists to visit the penal colony, and a wider awareness of the ‘harsh realities’ of the institution. Moreover, by the 1930s, the newspaper had an array of sources including former convicts as well as families and lawyers who were able to provide a more complex account of the lived experience of the bagne. Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada re-frame the investigative journalism of Albert Londres within different comic aesthetics that draw on existing iconographies, adventure and comic-noir as well as prison comics. As such, they assert the potential of comics to re-visit complex histories of colonial oppression, forced labour and imprisonment within a contemporary context that nevertheless moves beyond an uncritical penal spectatorship. Such comics usefully draw our attention to the persistence of popular imaginaries and iconography even as these are called into the service of discourses of decarceration and abolition. The representation of space plays a role in contestation and resistance. Both Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada use the comics form to give a voice to the bagnards and their experience. As they enclose the penal colony in the comics grid, they project fantasy onto these spaces. Focusing on Dieudonné’s escape attempts, both narratives speak against the atrocities of the bagne experienced by ‘innocent’ convicts; this approach bears similarities with Cénou’s non-fiction comics Panthers in the Hole which denounces solitary confinement by focusing on the Angola Three. Panthers in the Hole, Forçats and L’Homme qui s’évada ask their sympathetic reader: ‘What is it like to spend decades in [solitary confinement/a penal colony] for a crime you did not commit?’ This question opens up space for a more challenging approach, which would involve centring figures guilty for their crimes while still advocating for decarceration or abolition. Such an approach would undoubtedly further divide readers while pushing the potential of the comics form to rehumanise and push questions of social justice further still. Acknowledgment Fuggle’s archival research for this chapter was generously supported by an AHRC early career fellowship ‘Postcards from the bagne’. Grant ref: AH/R002452/1.

102

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

Notes 1. Belbenoît was given U.S. citizenship in 1956. 2. Notable here are the ‘barre de justice’ which saw convicts attached by their ankles to a metal bar running the length of their sleeping quarters and the widespread use of ‘plans’—metal suppositories containing money or tools. Both feature in Le journal du forçat Clemens, an illustrated account of the dockyard prisons dating from 1825 (1992). 3. French Guiana, which is France’s largest department, is frequently mistaken for an island despite being part of the continent of South America. On this see Fuggle (2022b). 4. During the operation of the penal colony, such stereotypes were actively fostered by the administration who placed North Africans in the role of portes-clés [lackeys] which gave them additional privileges and power over other convicts. Vietnamese prisoners were kept in camps apart from other convicts. 5. Unless otherwise stated, translations into English are the authors’ own. For clarity, we have opted to reproduce cited text from the two sets of comics in the original French as footnotes. 6. Notable here are the repeated statements made by Charrière about homosexuality in Papillon (1969) but also the reference to ‘forced homosexuality’ in Danielle Donet-Vincent’s La Fin du bagne (1992). 7. Available: https://www.retronews.fr/journal/le-petit-parisien/29-aug1923/2/53856/1. A different version of the same image includes the caption “In the operating theatre, an ex-surgeon makes his way in the penal colony”. https://criminocorpus.org/en/library/page/48562/. 8. Key excerpts from Albert Londres’ articles are quoted in vol. 1 on pages 36 (Le Petit Parisien, 10 August 1923) and 41 (Le Petit Parisien, 23 August 1923) and in vol. 2, page 55 (Le Petit Parisien, 26 November 1927). 9. Londres: Commandant:

Londres:

5 ans dans le noir et le silence ? Seigneur … Non, ils passent seulement 20 jours par mois dans le noir et 10 dans un cachot semi-éclairé, sinon ils deviendraient aveugles … L’administration sait faire preuve de compassion, ditesmoi. (I: 31)

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

103

10. “Excusez-moi, je n’attendais pas de visite…” (I: 32); “Si j’avais su que vous veniez, j’aurais fait un brin de ménage” (I: 33). 11. “j’ai souvent côtoyé le diable au bagne… mais, dans cette jungle, j’ai découvert l’enfer !” (II: 45). 12. “Vous voulez que je vous raconte le bagne ? Alors, je vais vous parler de la Guyane, parce que le véritable enfer n’est pas ici, entre les murs de ce cachot. Mais dehors, tout autour …” (I: 34–35). 13. “[les règlements] font de nous des bêtes amorales. Toute rédemption est illusoire” (I: 34). 14. “Le bagne n’est pas une machine à châtiment bien définie, réglée, invariable. C’est une usine à malheur qui travaille sans plan ni matrice. On y chercherait vainement le gabarit qui sert à façonner le forçat. Elle les broie, c’est tout, et les morceaux vont où ils peuvent.” 15. “La Guyane est une machine à broyer, sans distinction ni remords.” 16. “Au bagne, ce qu’il y a de plus cruel, ce ne sont pas les gardiens mais les règlements” (I: 34). 17. Similar cells can be found at both the former Bagne des Annamites and cell blocks located on Con Dao, Vietnam, the former French colonial prison island once known as Poulo Condore. See Tennant’s chapter in this volume. 18. Dieudonné: “Son billet pour l’infirmerie, un lit et une soupe au lard tous les jours. Il vient de lui refiler la tuberculose. Contre 500 balles, c’est un cachet qui a macéré dans un crachat de tuberculeux … Là, il lui a donné seulement 200. Pour ce prix il a droit à un molard qu’il va garder dans la bouche jusqu’à la visite” (I: 45). 19. Londres: Dieudonné :

Comment … comment fait-on pour supporter … ça ? On ne supporte pas, monsieur. On abdique. […] Le corps abandonne en premier, et tout le reste capitule. (I: 35)

20. Londres notes the size of Hespel’s file in comparison to Paul Roussenq’s dossier which weighed about 5 kg (p. 107). 21. The title of René Belbenoît’s memoir Dry Guillotine is translated from the French ‘Guillotine sèche’ and the term was first used in English by journalist Charles W. Furlong in an article “Cayenne: The Dry Guillotine” appearing in Harper’s Magazine in 1913. Londres also makes reference to the nickname (1923, p. 89).

104

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

22. In his account of the depiction of the guillotine and executions on postcards in French Indochina, Vann (2010) points out the role of its iconography in assuring colonial repression across the French Empire. 23. Today miniature guillotines made in French Guiana are displayed in both the Musée du Bagne in Saint Laurent du Maroni and the Musée Ernest Cognacq on Ile de Ré in France. 24. “Voilà un verdict aussi tranchant qu’une lame de guillotine.” 25. “On n’ouvrit pas la porte, mais le guichet. Une tête apparut comme une lunette de guillotine” (Londres 1923, p. 103).

References Bake, J., & Zöhrer, M. (2017). Telling the stories of others: Claims of authenticity in human rights reporting and comics journalism. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 11(1), 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/175 02977.2016.1272903 Bedouel, F., Perna, P., & Fantini, F. (2016). Forçats, Volume 1. Dans l’enfer du bagne. Les Arènes. Bedouel, F., Perna, P., & Fantini, F. (2017a). Forçats, Volume 2. Le prix de la liberté. Les Arènes. Bedouel, F., Perna, P., & Fantini, F. (2017b). Forçats, Volumes 1 and 2. “coffret” . Les Arènes. Belbenoît, R. (1938). Dry guillotine: Fifteen years among the living dead . E.P. Dutton. Brown, M. (2009). The culture of punishment: Prison, society and spectacle. New York University Press. Cénou, B., & Cénou., D. (2014). Panthers in the hole. La Boîte à Bulles. Charrière, H. (1969). Papillon. Gallimard. Donet-Vincent, D. (1992). La fin du bagne, 1923–1953. Editions OuestFrance. Evanson, K. (2018). Grand reporters in Guyane: Bringing the exotic back home. In C. MacLeod & S. Wood (Eds.), Locating Guyane (pp. 41–55). Liverpool University Press.

4 Re-framing Albert Londres’ ‘Reportages’

105

Forsdick, C. (2019). Bande dessinée and the penal imaginary: Graphic constructions of the carceral archipelago. European Comic Art, 12(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3167/eca.2019.120202 Fuggle, S. (2022a). From green hell to grey heritage: Ecologies of colour in the penal colony. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 24 (6), 897–916. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2021.1892507. Fuggle, S. (2022b). Toxic colonialism: Sickness and sanctuary on Ilet la Mère, French Guiana. Islands Studies Journal, 17 (1), 26–43. Furlong, C. W. (1913). Cayenne—The dry guillotine. Harper’s Magazine, 127 (757). Godfroy, M. (2004, May 3). “C’était le bagne…”, entretien avec Marion Godfroy, de Marianne Payot. L’Express. http://www.lexpress.fr/region/c-eac ute-tait-le-bagne_489768.html Krarup-Nielsen, A. (1935). Hell beyond the seas: A convict’s own story of his experiences in the French penal settlement in Guiana (E. C. Ramsden, Trans.). The Bodley Head. Lefèvre, P. (2013). The modes of documentary comics/Die Modi dokumentarischer Comics. In D. Grünewald (Ed.), Der dokumentarische Comic Reportage und Biographie (pp. 30–60). De Gruyter. Londres, A. (1923/1932) Au bagne. Albin Michel. Londres, A. (1928). L’Homme qui s’évada. Les éditions de France. Luko. (2016). Patrimoine: Les plus beaux sites et bâtiments des Antilles-Guyane. Caraibeditions. Maffre, L. (2006). L’Homme qui s’évada (d’après Albert Londres). Actes Sud BD. Maugham, W. S. (2002). An official position. In Collected short stories (Vol. 4, pp. 489–527). Vintage. Merlet, J.-F. L. (1928). Au bout du monde: drames et misères du bagne (avec 43 dessins de Georges Jauneau). Delpeuch. https://dokumen.tips/documents/aubout-du-monde-drames-et-miseres-du-bagne.html?page=24 Mickwitz, N. (2016). Documentary comics. Graphic truth-telling in a skeptical age. Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, J. M. (2020, May 3). Not without irony. Carceral Geography in Birmingham. https://jmmoore.org/2020/05/03/not-without-irony/. Moran, D., Turner, J., & Schliehe, A. K. (2018). Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 666–686. Nicoby, Copin, O., & Joub. (2016). Les jeunes aventuriers 2. Salut les îles. Plume Verte. Niles, B. (1928). Condemned to Devil’s Island: The biography of an unknown convict. Grosset and Dunlap.

106

C. Cointot and S. Fuggle

Oublié, J., & Rousseau, M.-A. (2017). Peyi an nou. Steinkis. Pierre, M. (Ed.). (1992). Le Livre noir du bagne: Le Journal du Forçat Clemens (1825). Gallimard. Rachedi, M. (2017, July 21). Journalisme: faut-il relire Albert Londres? Jeune Afrique. https://www.jeuneafrique.com/mag/457329/culture/journa lisme-faut-il-relire-albert-londres/ Roscoe, K. (2018). A natural hulk: Australia’s carceral islands in the colonial period, 1788–1901. International Review of Social History, 63(S26), 45–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859018000214 Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford University Press. Sagot, E., & Vehlmann, F. (2014–2017). Paco les mains rouges (2 vols). Dargaud. Sanchez, J.-L. (2018). Le traitement du bagne colonial de Guyane par le magazine Détective. Criminocorpus, 12. https://doi.org/10.4000/criminocorpus. 5112 Schmid, J. C. P. (2021). Frames and framing in documentary comics. Palgrave Macmillan. Schlichting, M., & Schmid, J. C. P. (2019). Introduction to graphic realities: Comics as documentary, history, and journalism. ImageTexT, 11(1). https://imagetextjournal.com/introduction-to-graphic-realitiescomics-as-documentary-history-and-journalism/ Smolderen, T. (2012). Internet, les bandes dessinées du “Graphic” et de l’illustrated London news. Neuvième Art 2.0. http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/ spip.php?rubrique71 Spieler, M. (2012). Empire and underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Harvard University Press. Toth, S. (2006). Beyond Papillon: The French overseas penal colonies, 1854–1952. University of Nebraska Press. Tripot, J. (1910). Au pays de l’or: Des forçats et des peaux-rouges (2nd ed.). Plon. Vann, M. G. (2010). Of pirates, postcards, and public beheadings: The pedagogic execution in French colonial Indochina. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 36 (2), 39–58. Vaudé, R. (1977). Passeport pour le bagne. Henri Veyrier. Ward, P. (2011). Animating with facts: The performative process of documentary animation in the ten mark. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6 (3), 293–306. Weber, W., & Rall, H.-M. (2017). Authenticity in comics journalism. Visual strategies for reporting facts. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 8(4), 376–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2017.1299020

Part II Exploring the Penal Colony

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River: Between the Prison and the Museum Sophie Fuggle

Introduction To travel to Abashiri feels like taking a train to the edge of the world. Three hours or so into the journey from Sapporo, Hokkaido’s largest city famous for its eponymous beer and hosting the 1972 Winter Olympics, the train comes to the end of the line and stops briefly before almost doubling back on itself as it heads down towards Abashiri. Everyone in the carriage swivels their seats around so as to remain travelling forwards. There is no need to go backwards. The story of Hokkaido and the convict labour that underpins the development of its present-day economy and infrastructure is only ever told in terms of progress. In this chapter, I explore the role of the Abashiri Prison Museum in telling the story of Japan’s colonial expansion into Hokkaido at the S. Fuggle (B) History, Heritage and Global Cultures, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_5

109

110

S. Fuggle

end of the eighteenth century. While the use of convict labour was relatively short in comparison with the duration of penal colonies elsewhere around the globe, the prison museum attests to the continuities that emerged as Abashiri became a permanent prison still in use today. The focus here will be on how the museum forms a penalscape which extends physically and symbolically beyond its own parameters and those of the city. Key attention will be given to how the carceral landscape is offered up to visitors as something to be consumed, framed and reproduced. Similar to other penal colonies, the penalscape in Abashiri has a very specific ideological function which maintains the image and understanding of Hokkaido as an empty, hostile space awaiting colonisation and development by the Japanese. Yet, as Mason (2012) and others have argued, this construction works to efface the colonial violence and the erasure of the indigenous Ainu population’s culture and land rights. Today the prison museum can be situated within a wider carceral culture in Japan that continues to couple punishment and forced labour, albeit in different fashion. Following brief historical contextualisation and discussion of the methodological and theoretical approaches adopted, the chapter’s main sections—‘Beholding Abashiri’, ‘Photographing Abashiri’ and ‘Owning Abashiri’—offer perspectives on what it means to engage or participate in a site like Abashiri as a visitor from elsewhere. As will be further explained, these all engage in some way with W. J. T. Mitchell’s provocation on ‘owning a view’. In what ways are tourists invited to ‘own’ Abashiri? How might this ‘owning’ be transformed into an ‘owning up to’ our responsibilities as observers or witnesses to different manifestations of global cultures of incarceration?

Context Abashiri is located on the Eastern coast of Hokkaido [literally Northern Sea Circuit or Region], Japan’s second largest island. It is 43 km from the maritime border with Russia. It was to secure against the threat of Russian invasion in the mid-nineteenth century that Japan seized control of Hokkaido [formerly known as Ezo] from the indigenous Ainu

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

111

population as part of what is known as Japan’s ‘inland territorial expansionism’, the subsumption of surrounding territories into the Japanese mainland. Between 1881 and 1895, convict labour was co-opted to the development of Hokkaido’s infrastructure and mining. Abashiri prison was initially created as a temporary outpost for convicts, often political prisoners, completing work on the main highway running from east to west across Hokkaido. Winter conditions were particularly harsh for the convicts carrying out logging and road building work. The prison’s remote location and severe reputation have inspired a number of martial arts films including most famously the series of Abashiri Bangaichi [Abashiri Prison] films made between 1959 and 1972. As such Abashiri like Alcatraz or Devil’s Island belongs to a popular imaginary of incarceration and it is important to situate public interest in the prison museum within this cultural context (Botsman, 2005, p. 186). According to Sakata (2018), the policy of convict labour is frequently considered a ‘transient’ initiative which was abandoned after a relatively short period due to the huge loss of life incurred. Between 1885 and 1894, over 44,000 people died in Japanese prisons. Botsman points out that the majority of these deaths were due to malnutrition, exhaustion and accidents during forced labour. The highest deaths rates occurred amongst the work details sent to construct the highways. Out of the 1,015 convicts sent to Abashiri to complete work on the highway in 1891, 186 died, a rate of over 10% (Botsman, 2005).1 Following the abolition of convict labour in 1895, contract labourers were recruited to undertake mining and construction work in Hokkaido. These workers came from the poorest parts of society and were subject to ‘quasi-penal’ conditions as part of the takobeya system, with Japanese workers replaced with Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s (Morris-Suzuki, 2015, p. 169). Both Botsman and Sakata emphasise the pre-history of the policy of convict labour as well as its enduring legacy in Hokkaido. Indeed, Abashiri embodies this legacy as a satellite camp which later became a permanent high-security prison still in operation today. It is this

112

S. Fuggle

complex, shifting role that makes Abashiri prison and its museum a key case study for exploring contemporary questions around carceral heritage and the continuities which exist between penal history and our difficult and contested carceral present. The Abashiri Prison Preservation Foundation was established in 1980 with the aim of preserving original prison buildings slated for demolition under plans to renovate Abashiri prison announced in 1973. Buildings from the original site were relocated to a site across the river inside the Abashiri Quasi-National Park and the museum opened to visitors three years later. In 2010, a new penological museum was created on the site as part of activities marking the Foundation’s 30-year anniversary. As a point of reference, the museum’s website emphasises that the site is 3.5 larger than the Tokyo Dome (Abashiri Prison Museum, n.d.). Despite its size, multiple exhibition halls and combination of restored and reconstructed historical architecture, Abashiri prison museum has, to date, been largely omitted from studies by scholars of penal tourism. Scholarship looking at Japanese colonial prisons has primarily been focused on sites subjected to Japanese colonial occupation which have since regained their sovereignty. These include, notably, Seodaemun Prison in South Korea (Huang & Lee, 2019, 2020; Welch, 2015), Chiayi (Huang & Lee, 2020), Jingmei and Green Island (Lin, 2017) in Taiwan and Lushun (Huang & Lee, 2019, 2020) and Qingdao in China (Massing, this volume). Huang and Lee (2020) conclude their volume dedicated to colonial prison heritage in East Asia with the suggestion that Abashiri prison museum (along with other sites in Japan) is focused on a postmodern ‘dark tourism’ experience aimed at entertainment rather than deeper understanding of difficult pasts. As Mason (2012) has pointed out, the colonial history of Hokkaido has been largely excluded from scrutiny within Asian postcolonial studies despite the role of Japanese expansion in erasing the Ainu population and their culture from Hokkaido. Her own analysis of the literature and political discourse emphasises how descriptions of the territory successfully perpetuate an image of Hokkaido as always already part of Japan prior to colonisation. She also briefly references Abashiri prison museum as a site where colonial narratives are constantly ‘updated and renewed’ via new narrative, presentation and interpretive techniques. She notes,

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

113

in particular, how the convict experience has been re-imagined as part of the collective sacrifice required to build contemporary Hokkaido.

Theory and Method To talk of ‘framing the penal colony’ invites consideration of the way it is imagined by both those inside and outside, and transposed into discourse, images and myth. At the same time, the use of convict transportation and labour, even as failed or short-term project, imposes a frame onto a territory or space, forever changing its configuration and the relationships and connections subsequently created and negotiated. The idea that Abashiri is a journey to the edge of the world results from its location at the end of both the Okhotsk-Taisetsu and the Senm¯o Main Line. The Senm¯o line runs along the same route as the highway constructed by convicts from Kushiro and for which Abashiri, as Botsman puts, marked the ‘end point’ (Botsman, 2005, p. 186). But as Morris-Suzuki points out, the lines which now demarcate Abashiri as endpoint and which delineate the border with Russia, efface other older, more complex sets of lines: To see the region as a ‘frontier zone’, of course, is to see it from the perspective of colonialism and the nation state. Originally, the Okhotsk Sea did not divide as much as connect the societies on its shore. Recent research reminds us that small and relatively mobile societies, like larger and more static ones, generally have a well-defined sense of territorial limits, and of attachment to particular landscapes. In this sense, the Okhotsk Sea has perhaps been crisscrossed by borders since the earliest phases of human settlement, yet these boundaries between territories were points of contact and interaction as much as separating lines. (Morris-Suzuki, 1999, p. 61)

What is at stake in this chapter is not a retelling of Abashiri’s longer history but rather an exploration of how the prison museum continues to define Abashiri in terms of its penalscape, at the same time as the prison itself disappears largely from view. Or, more precisely, how the

114

S. Fuggle

prison becomes part of everyday infrastructure and ceases to be an exceptional space. Yet, it is via the museum that the prison, as we shall see, comes back into relief. In positing the ‘penalscape’ as a physical, material and heavily mediated set of spaces which are often experienced vicariously, the theoretical approach taken in this chapter moves beyond the original use of the term ‘penalscape’ by Joy James (2007) to describe the complex links between education and incarceration in the United States. It seeks to develop an understanding of the ‘penalscape’ as one in which multiple temporalities and spatialities play out (Fuggle, 2020) in particular ways via different forms of penal heritage. The case of Abashiri invites consideration not only of how carceral continuities between historic and contemporary forms of imprisonment and penal labour are maintained across the penalscape but, moreover, how visitors are rendered complicit in the ongoing commodification of punishment. However, rather than simply identifying and lamenting this complicity as a form of ‘penal spectatorship’ (Brown, 2009), I propose the development of a more reflexive visual ethnography (Pink, 2021) intended to actively deconstruct my own photographic practice at sites of penal heritage. The notion of the penalscape will be explored via three foci: the museum’s physical location; visitor photography; and the production and sale of commodities at the museum and prison. In discussing the location of the museum which reproduces as well as contains former ruins and reconstructed buildings from the prison, it is possible to explore how the museum resists conventional notions of ‘sitedness’ usually associated with penal and other dark heritage. The discussion of photography will be taken up with consideration of images which exceed the defined limits of the museum and its interpretive practices. This includes aerial images of the museum and prison as well as photos taken by the author and other visitors. Here, methods from visual culture will be adopted and will draw on existing scholarship on photography and museums including Walby and Piché’s insightful reflections (2016) on using photographic methods at former prison sites and Schept’s call for the development of ‘counter-visual ethnographies’ with which to analyse the ‘visuality’ of the carceral state (Schept, 2014). The final area of focus will also look at how the prison is represented beyond its physical parameters through the

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

115

commodities produced for sale. In the case of Abashiri, this does not refer only to souvenirs, which are very specific forms of commodity linked to penal tourism (Brown, 2013; Luscombe et al., 2018), but rather to a wider system of commodification embedded in the present-day carceral system in Japan. Linking up these three areas of discussion and analysis is the tricky question of positionality. What does it mean to ‘behold’ a landscape qua penalscape such as the one found in Abashiri? What does it mean to do so as an outsider, a visitor from elsewhere, a researcher who is also a tourist? I have deliberately chosen the word ‘behold’ rather than ‘view’ because of the implication of ‘holding’, ‘possessing’ and ‘owning’ it implies. In a certain sense, I am adopting W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of ‘owning a view’ and the implications of taking this ownership literally (Mitchell, 2002, p. 29). To use ‘behold’ in this way implies something we ‘hold’ in other words, something we have access to, something we can ‘own’ . Yet at the same time, to behold something implies a certain distance—it is something we gaze upon with a certain awe and reverence perhaps, but also something that might be exotic or removed from our everyday experience hence why it evokes our awe. Of course, the penalscape is embedded in multiple ways across space and time and often is more diffuse and less remarkable than sites like Abashiri prison museum which invite and command our gaze. But it is precisely in thinking about how those sites invite our gaze and what it means to ‘behold’ such views that we might think about what is rendered invisible or hidden. What continuities are openly endorsed, and which ones are obfuscated? The verb ‘to behold’ emphasises that we are in a position of actively gazing and taking ownership of what we see in different ways. But in this act of beholding, might we also consider the ways in which we are also ‘beholden’? As Mitchell suggests, owning also means ‘owning up to’, acknowledging or taking responsibility for the landscape we behold. What responsibilities do we have in beholding the history of the penal colony and its legacies?

116

S. Fuggle

Beholding Abashiri To enter the gates of the prison museum in Abashiri, visitors must first walk across a small footbridge known as the ‘mirror’ bridge. Newly convicted prisoners, we are told, would cross the bridge on their way to serve their sentence. They would be expected to pause to look into the water, and on seeing their reflection, reflect on their crimes. In this way visitors are invited, it seems, to follow in the footsteps trodden by those who once served time in the prison. Except that this rite of passage happened elsewhere. The bridge is a miniature replica of the one that leads prisoners across the Abashiri River to the actual prison, still in operation today. Instead of the glittering, flowing waters of the river that links the Okhotsk Sea to Lake Abashiri, with all the possibilities for redemption via the passage of time this evokes, visitors are invited to seek out their own reflections in a large pond largely obscured by lily pads. To put it bluntly, Abashiri prison museum is a fake, a simulacrum of the real prison, located a mile or so away on the other side of the river. If the museum’s mirror bridge fails to convince us we are entering the grounds of the prison, its entrance gate does better as a near perfect facsimile of the one found across the river. Yet to call the museum a fake is also not quite accurate. Since around 1985 many of the buildings which originally date from the early 1900s have been dismantled from the original site and reconstructed or reassembled at the museum site. This includes, most impressively, the 5-wing radial prison building originally built in 1902. Temporary buildings and structures that formed part of the Futamigaoka prison farm located in Western Abashiri have also been relocated to the museum grounds as has the old but nevertheless more recent regional courtroom building which dates from 1952. There is something strange almost uncanny about this doubling which occurs on the two sides of the Abashiri River.2 As such, the museum confuses straightforward taxonomies defining penal heritage (Dalton, 2017). The museum is located at a remove from the original site of incarceration. At the same time, it is not an entirely purpose-built museum since in addition to its use of replicas, original architecture has been relocated here. This includes ruins as well as complete structures from the old prison including a small section of early prison wall together with a small

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

117

shrine which fell into disuse in the mid-twentieth century. The removal and repositioning of the shrine seems, in particular, to eschew notions of sacred space and discourage any such identification with the prison. This refusal of what Paul Williams (2007) has referred to as ‘sitedness’ seems counter-intuitive given visitors are usually drawn to the precise physical locations of past events. Yet implicit in this refusal is a wider affirmation of Abashiri’s penalscape as exceeding the limits marked out by the prison walls. To further explain this, it is useful to think about the way in which the museum redefines the landscape in Abashiri. To do this, I will now refer to a series of aerial maps used when planning my visit to Abashiri. Aerial maps are interesting in themselves as the aerial view of the prison forms part of a common aesthetics of incarceration which positions the prison at a distance, providing a totalising view of its architecture. Where access to the insides of prisons is often heavily restricted, the aerial view functions as a stock image which emphasises prison architecture as utopian design project. Yet, even after a prison becomes defunct or left to ruination, the contours of its original design continue to mark the land when viewed from above. If you conduct a search for ‘Abashiri’ using Google Maps, the first view offered (at a scale of 1.8 cm:10 km) centres Abashiri Prison Museum which is clearly marked by Google’s tourist attraction symbol. A similar centring occurs when zooming in closer to a ratio of 1.8 cm:5 km. The actual prison is not identified on Google Maps until you zoom in much closer. The prison museum is a far more significant marker of the penalscape than the actual prison. This becomes clearer still when using the satellite view which offers a well-defined image of the old radial prison building located on the museum site. A bird’s-eye view of the radial prison is also featured on the museum’s website (https://www.kan goku.jp/). Conversely, when I zoom in to locate the actual prison on Google Maps it marks the landscape in a less obvious way. Its buildings, when viewed in satellite mode, resemble those of any industrial or commercial estate and, while slightly larger, these are indistinct from nearby residential buildings. Viewed thus, the prison museum does not simply render the carceral more visible but insists that the marks made by the carceral remain indelible even when this means transposing them elsewhere.

118

S. Fuggle

What is also missing from these aerial views is the presence of the Ainu population. When the first batch of convicts were sent to Abashiri they doubled the number of around 600 villagers. Located almost next to the prison museum is another museum—the Museum of Northern Peoples, which tells the story of the indigenous Ainu population. The juxtaposition of these two museums is significant. A modest collection housed in a single stone building, the Museum of Northern Peoples is eclipsed by the prison museum.3 Thus considered, the Abashiri Prison Museum is not simply taken up with telling the history of convict labour and the subsequent role of the city as prison-town. It also ensures the penalscape continues to define the space as colonial frontier, erasing or annexing the landscape’s longer histories and populations. Having introduced the representation of Abashiri, its museum and prison via the museum’s re-purposing and recreation of built heritage as well as Google Maps, the next section considers how the space is captured and circulated via photographs taken by visitors to the museum and city. How is Abashiri further framed by visitor photography? What are the dominant images that circulate? How might photographs taken at Abashiri prison museum offer useful pause for reflection around the use of photography as research methodology at sites of penal heritage and, more specifically, those incorporating multiple buildings and outdoor spaces?

Photographing Abashiri Miyakawa (2003) describes initiatives to shift dominant images of Abashiri as a ‘remote and lonely place’ into one both celebrated for its natural beauty and recognised as an important centre of research and industry. Citing a study from the mid-1990s, she points out that for most tourists visiting the city, it is the prison that provides the dominant image followed by that of the drift ice which forms along the coastline during the winter season. However, a quick search on Instagram for images tagged with #Abashiri reveals that these two sets of images continue to be most frequently shared by visitors. Moreover, we might suggest that the prison museum and its ongoing development

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

119

both work to maintain the image of Abashiri as remote and isolated at the same time as the museum presents itself within more recent narratives of industry and development. Following Mason (2012), one can argue that both sets of narratives co-exist as extensions of earlier colonial discourses which presented Hokkaido as a space that was empty and hostile prior to Japanese expansion/invasion into the territory and which, today, has benefited from the infrastructure and industry imposed upon it. However, rather than simply identify the prison museum as a persistent and perhaps even metonymic image of the city of Abashiri, I want to consider how my own photographs of the site not only frame and reproduce this enduring image but, at the same time, might offer a means to think more critically about such framing. The taking of photos is heavily embedded in the visitor experience at many museums and sites dedicated to former incarceration. The Justice and Police Museum in Sydney invites visitors to take ‘mug shots’ and share these on Instagram and Twitter. Similarly, in the Penological Museum located within Abashiri Prison Museum it is possible to have an instant photo taken which imposes the frame of a convict photo. Some visitors leave their photos behind and these have been posted up to form a display around the photo booth. Even when photography has not been instrumentalised as a form of promotion via visitor use of social media, there are multiple opportunities and displays which are deemed worthy of snapping on phones or digital cameras. For a researcher interested not only in what is displayed but the practicalities of its display, it is possible to come away with several hundred images. Often these remain saved onto a hard disk or memory card, with only one or two ever seeing the light of day as part of a conference presentation or to illustrate a journal article. Yet, I wonder how we might look at the images we take differently? The same prolific image taking might take place at any kind of museum or heritage site as researchers interested in museological/curatorial decisions snap away with the intention of reconstructing the experience back in the office. But there are different ethical stakes at play at sites which can be defined as ‘dark tourism’ and, in this case, of the former prison or penal colony camp. In other words, how do we take stock of our own ‘penal optics’ (Brown, 2017) with the aim of deconstructing how we look and what we see?

120

S. Fuggle

Given the restrictions on photography in working prisons, the prolific production of images at sites linked to former incarceration and forced labour should invite pause for thought.4 Writing in a slightly different context about tourist photography at Auschwitz, Pedersen (2017) draws on Urry’s seminal notion of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry & Larsen, 2011) together with Sontag’s writing on photography and suffering (Sontag, 1977) to suggest that, on the one hand, tourist photography at sites like Auschwitz constitute a form of ‘collecting’ or ‘accumulation’ and, on the other hand, taking a photo defers or refuses rather than engenders understanding and empathy. To the extent that this general indictment holds, it fails to be sympathetic to the often-overwhelming amount of information and exhibits presented at sites associated with past suffering. It also perfectly articulates the behaviour of most researchers who, visiting a heritage site for the first time, feel obliged to document (collect) as much detail about the site and its exhibitions as possible for future analysis and comparison. Photography waylays the fear that we cannot commit to memory both the intensity and the detail of the visit. Yet, and herein lies the paradox, in the quest to document everything, to render our experience into a viable piece of ethnography, in the same way other visitors assert their presence via the selfie or group photo, the camera and the photographic frame often become a distraction from what is going on around us. One strategy, at sites like Abashiri, might be to think about how to seriously limit the images taken, for example, by using an instant camera. Another, which I want to explore here, involves making better use of the images we come home with, the collection which attests to our attempt to ‘own’ a landscape. How do we start to think about the photos we take, as well as the accounts we offer, beyond the purely descriptive or illustrative? To what extent might it be useful to consider our approach to taking photos as key to interrogating our research methods and, indeed, our objectives in presenting the space of the prison museum to a global audience whether academic or non-academic? What can I learn about my own photographic practice which might help me look differently or quite simply take better, more critically engaged photos? As Walby and Piché (2016) have argued in relation to their own photographic research methods at former carceral sites in Canada,

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

121

photographs can act as an aide-mémoire particularly in the context of text-based writing. The grounds of former prisons and camps are often immense and thus lend themselves to a wide range of possibilities in terms of exhibitions. Sometimes tours are organised so that each layer of history is systematically offered up. Elsewhere, cells and other spaces are given over to temporary exhibitions which engage with wider themes of imprisonment, human rights, etc. At Abashiri, the site which calls itself an ‘outdoor’ museum, despite having many buildings dedicated to indoor exhibitions and reconstructed scenes, allows for a visit which is unstructured in terms of which building or outdoor exhibit you go to first. This means that it was useful for me to return to my photos in order to reconstruct my visit. Yet, these remained difficult to decipher partly due to the sheer number. How could I look at these holistically to get a wider sense of the space and see patterns both in terms of how things were presented but also in the iconography and frames I consciously and unconsciously sought out? During my visit to Abashiri prison museum in July 2015, which lasted several hours, I took over 400 photos. These were taken initially on a small Nikon 1 S1 and subsequently on my smartphone once the camera battery ran out. On returning to the UK, I wanted to carefully consider the complexity of the museum and all the different elements of the visit. To do this, I decided it would be useful to print the photos in order to look at them all together. However, I had not thought through how much space this would take up and laying them out on a table or floor area did not suffice. This led me to come up with the idea of putting them on the wall. I had a fairly large expanse of free wall in my kitchen which became an ad-hoc exhibition space (Fig. 5.1). The advantage of this space was that the images could stay up for a longer period than originally planned thus allowing for slower reflection over a few months. It also invited questions from visitors about my research and obliged me to explain various things. Not all the photos were particularly interesting or aesthetically competent. Some of them simply showed poorly framed pieces of text from exhibition panels. However, when displayed as a whole, the collection produced some important reflections and also, perhaps more significantly, encouraged me to keep thinking about the prison museum itself and its content as well as how to continue to

122

S. Fuggle

develop meaningful and reflexive approaches to documenting visits to former sites of incarceration. Walby and Piché also discuss the use of photographs as visual data, enabling, for example, further analysis post-visit of the interpretation of different artefacts and other displays. Such analysis in their work appears to involve single images and their specific content rather than viewing their photographic practice as a form of collecting and framing. Yet, what emerges from my images when viewed collectively was a desire to impose

Fig. 5.1 Photo wall of images taken at Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author)

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

123

certain aesthetics of the carceral even as the museum itself exceeds these limits. This is perhaps not surprising but something which all researchers of penal tourism need to bear in mind in the taking and using of photography as part of their methodology. It is also something which we can find on Instagram where (if you search the hashtag #Abashiriprisonmuseum) the most common images of the museum are the views from the centre of the radial prison building and the entrance replicated from the original gates of the prison. But the other pervasive image, reproduced in the photo wall, was the ubiquitous presence of mannequins in orange prison uniforms which occupy all parts of the museum indoor and out (Fig. 5.2). These mannequins haunt the museum with their silence. Yet, in the months during which their photos appeared on my wall, I felt compelled to think more about their existence and this silence. Across the photo wall, the colour orange denoted this uncanny presence and served to remind me of the limited presentation of real convict narratives within the museum.

Fig. 5.2 Mannequins making horseshoes. Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author)

124

S. Fuggle

Despite its vast size and numerous exhibitions, I counted a total of two convict narratives during my visit. The first, presented in the radial prison building, is a short description of the bitter cold of the prison cells, taken from the memoir 18 years in Prison published in 1947 by Kyuichi Tokuda and Yoshio Shiga. The second is the story of ‘Long Nail’ Torakichi presented in cartoon form in the penological museum. Long Nail escaped from Abashiri and, despite stepping on a 5-inch nail, managed to run 10 km before being caught. After multiple prison escapes, he became a model prisoner and on release toured the country with heart-warming tales of his time in prison. The cartoon version has him reflect nostalgically on his time in Abashiri. He has been given his own statue outside the main entrance—a mascot of sorts who affirms the ultimate success of the prison system against a wayward inmate. Thus, unlike prison museums elsewhere such as Phu Quoc in Vietnam, where mannequins act out scenes of torture and resistance, in Abashiri the mannequins represent docile bodies, products of the modern and model prison system Japan imported from Europe. In the outdoor areas, these mannequins are frequently employed in different forms of manual, agricultural labour alongside displays of historical tools, machines and other implements. If these life-sized scenes were not enough to emphasise the role of convict labour in the agricultural development of the region, miniature dioramas (Fig. 5.3) depicting additional farming scenes can be found as part of the indoor exhibitions. While the museum’s outdoor spaces are heavily landscaped and do not accurately represent the dense forest that convicts had to clear, the use of these spaces works to create the image of a landscape rendered habitable and sustainable due to convict and subsequent takobeya labour. The other thing I started to notice on the photo wall was the number of scenes, from different sites across the museum, in which the mannequins were eating (Fig. 5.4). Such scenes affirm a narrative in which convicts are supported in terms of their material needs in exchange for obedient labour. However, the cumulative effect of these scenes and their emphasis on sustainability only really became apparent to me after creating and looking at the photo wall. Thus, the photo wall provides the possibility of developing what Schept (2014) has termed a ‘counter-visual’ ethnography in making visible the specific ‘penal optics’ presented at a site but

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

125

also creating a reconfigured space in which to see what is being obscured or erased. Another set of juxtapositions emerged via the photo wall between the agricultural implements (photographed both with and without mannequins) and artefacts on display and the products for sale in the museum gift shop that I had photographed. This continuity draws our attention to how the legacy of convict labour in Japan lies not only in the contemporary infrastructure of Hokkaido and in the colonial framing of the island as a place to be conquered or as one in which criminals could face their inner demons via the hostile environment. It also served as a reminder that today prisoners in Japan continue to be expected to conduct labour as part of their sentences. Where such continuities might be glossed over elsewhere, here they are not only openly acknowledged but visitors are invited to actively participate in the contemporary penal economy operating across Japan.

Fig. 5.3 Agricultural scene forming part of a diorama. Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author)

126

S. Fuggle

Fig. 5.4 Mannequins representing convict mealtime. Abashiri Prison Museum (Photo by the Author)

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

127

Owning Abashiri Taking photos and purchasing souvenirs are distinct activities but both play a key role in how visitors assume ownership of the penalscape at Abashiri. Many prison museums, in their exposition of the daily lives of former prisoners, show how inmates were occupied and often include narratives of the self-sufficiency of the prison as a result of penal labour. At Abashiri, the prison is not simply presented as self-sufficient but, rather, as underpinning the economy of the entire local region. The museum acts as a testament to agricultural production as much as it does to architectural innovation. The history of the prison is also a ‘universal’ history of agriculture, industry, technology and architecture.5 Having spent a day at the museum, it felt necessary to also visit the actual prison in Abashiri in order to try and make sense of all of I had seen. It was evident from the small groups lingering outside that a number of other tourists had come to the same conclusion. This also seems to be anticipated by the prison authorities in various conflicting and contradictory ways. There are, for example, signs requesting visitors not take photos of the inmates. However, the tiny rooms on either side of the entrance gate have been turned into display cabinets—a miniature cabinet of curiosities that seems to invert the gargantuan scale and detail of the official museum. The actual site of the prison here becomes the unofficial, somewhat arbitrary, version of the story. Opposite the prison is a small gift shop selling objects made by inmates, doing time both in Abashiri and in prisons across Japan. The prison gift shop is the third we visit during our time in Abashiri. The museum also has a large shop selling official souvenirs, including objects made by current inmates. Immediately outside the museum there is an unauthorised gift shop, a warehouse chock full of factorymade goods including t-shirts in child and adult sizes bearing the slogan ‘Abashiri Prison Escape’. Where this invitation to consume the carceral with playful abandon resembles similar shops found at tourist attractions like the London Dungeons, the objects sold in the prison shop are of a somewhat different order. All prisons in Japan have these shops and there is also a dedicated showroom located in the Nagano district of Tokyo. Most of the

128

S. Fuggle

objects available to purchase in the showroom—woodwork, notepads and shoes—are good quality, practical items associated with the idea of productive, rehabilitative labour. Yet these also lend themselves in one way or another to crude humour about prison life but not least the bars of soap in their evocation of prison rape and by-products of the Nazi concentration camps. However, in the strange space of the prison museum at Abashiri, the transgressive, abject aura of criminality and the criminal body has been purged. The tattooed mannequins in the museum’s recreated prison bathhouse are not anatomically correct but sexless. This is a space in which the inmate is rendered visibly impotent—no violent, subversive threat and no frisson of sexual transgression is present in the museum’s displays or narrative. Everything that often excites people about prisons is absent. Unlike U.S. prisons, to cite the best-known example, where work is presented as a privilege to an increasingly warehoused, unwanted labour force, in Japan it is compulsory, essential to an ideology of rehabilitation based on individual discipline and productivity.6 Objects produced through prison labour in the United States are often distributed and sold in such a way as to conceal the modes of production involved due to public hostility towards prison labour. Such hostility manifests from both the right and the left. From one political perspective prison labour takes jobs from law-abiding citizens by undercutting wages, from another, prison labour is exempt from minimum wages, union regulation and other legal regulations affecting places of work and thus constitutes a form of exploitation. On a visit to Attica in 2012, I was told by a Correctional Officer that the large, metal cabinets made in the prison workshop were assembled elsewhere, effectively concealing the supply chain in order to avoid problems with the unionised institutions including universities which purchased them. In Japan, however, the products of contemporary prison labour are openly flaunted and sold as edgy consumerism and original souvenirs. Value for money is identified in the offset of quality materials against the free labour of the prisoners. Both narratives of warehousing and rehabilitative work involve a form of social cleansing embodied in the soap—advertised as the Nakano store’s ‘bestselling’ item. If such cleansing seems to be directed at the invisible inmates caught up in what Angela Davis (2003) and others have

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

129

called the ‘prison industrial complex’, the purchase of a bar of soap or, indeed, the patronage of any material or cultural object produced by or through the labour and suffering of those incarcerated, surely represents a consciously planned cleansing of public conscience. Passive complicity with the carceral becomes active consumerism at the same time as the contemporary, working prison is rendered museum via its production, display and sale of collectible objects.

Conclusion To conclude, I want to return to Mitchell’s provocation about ‘owning’ a landscape. I think this provocation is useful for thinking about how we as visitors, whether local or international, whether as academics or activists, interact with such landscapes, with the penalscape as it proliferates across time and space, as it disappears from view only to re-emerge in a different more complicated form on the horizon. Abashiri’s penalscape invites such a provocation in its presentation as museum and prison across a territory which is redefined via convict transportation as a limit or frontier. Moreover, the images we take and share often affirm our complicity in reproducing the penalscape and thus require deeper analysis and attention. Finally, the notion of owning takes on a further and more literal form as we are invited to purchase objects made by current inmates. In leaving Abashiri, the enduring landscape for me is not of the radial prison building or the gates that appear twice. It is not the image of the fire festival in which barrels of fireworks were lined up along the pier for an hour-long display. Instead, it is the river which leads out to the sea in one direction and into the huge and tranquil waters of Lake Abashiri in the other. It is the Abashiri River which holds the museum and prison apart even as it also brings them together. This is the same river where prisoners were once invited to look at their reflections. We too should take up this invitation to reflect. We should reflect upon how the routes we travel to the former prison or penal colony, across time and space, determine in advance our experience and perceptions, and the desire to

130

S. Fuggle

‘own’ the landscape that awaits us. We should also reflect upon the images we produce, collect and circulate of the penal colony at the ends of our worlds. These images are never just descriptive or illustrative. Nor are they simply evidence that we were there.

Notes 1. Sakata puts the mortality rate for those sent to work on the highway construction at 200 out of 1,000 prisoners. 2. Ivy (1996) has drawn on Freud’s notion of the uncanny [unheimlich] in her analysis of T¯ono Furusato Village, a museum/theme-park dedicated to the theme of folklore and the paradoxical concept of ‘furusato’ which emerged during Meiji-era Japan, and which might be understood in terms of a nostalgia for an imagined rural homestead. 3. See Higashi (2014) on the problematic representation of Ainu peoples in museums elsewhere in Hokkaido. 4. For an excellent resource on a range of different prison photography including work with those currently in detention, see Pete Brook’s blog prisonphotography.org. 5. On its website, the museum claims to be working with communities ‘to improve the museum as “universal museum”’. This self-identification as a ‘universal’ museum is unusual for a prison museum and will be the subject of further attention and analysis elsewhere. 6. For an early study comparing prison labour in Japan and the United States, see Johnson (1994).

Works Cited Abashiri Prison Museum. (n.d.). Basic information. https://www.kangoku.jp/ multilingual_english/basic_information.html Botsman, D. V. (2005). Punishment and power in the making of modern Japan. Princeton University Press. Brown, J. (2013). Dark tourism shops: Selling ‘dark’ and ‘difficult’ products. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 7 (3), 272– 280.

5 Strange Reflections on the Abashiri River

131

Brown, M. (2009). The culture of punishment: Prison, society and spectacle. NYU Press. Brown, M. (2017). Penal optics and the struggle for the right to look: Visuality and prison tourism in the Carceral Era. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (pp. 153– 167). Palgrave. Dalton, D. (2017). Juxtaposing prison and other carceral sites: Interrogating taxonomic differences and empathetic possibilities. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (pp. 85–110). Palgrave. Davis, A. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Open Media. Fuggle, S. (2020). Reimagining the ruins of the penalscape: Patrick Chamoiseau’s carceral ruinology. Social Identities, 26 (6), 811–828. Higashi, J. (2014). Heritage and the reframing of Japan’s national narrative of Hokkaido: Negotiating identity in migration history. In L. Gourievidis (Ed.), Museums and migration: History, memory and politics (pp. 244–258). Taylor & Francis. Huang, S., & Lee, H. K. (2019). Difficult heritage diplomacy? Re-articulating places of pain and shame as world heritage in Northeast Asia. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25 (2), 143–159. Huang, S. & Lee, H. K. (2020). Heritage, memory, and punishment: Remembering colonial prisons in East Asia. Routledge. Ishii, T. (Director). (1965). Abashiri Bangaichi. Toei Tokyo. Ivy, M. (1996). Discourses of the vanishing: Modernity, phantasm, Japan. Chicago University Press. James, J. (2007). Warfare in the American homeland: Policing and prison in a penal democracy. Duke University Press. Johnson, E. H. (1994). Opposing outcomes of the industrial prison: Japan and the United States compared. International Criminal Justice Review, 4, 52–71. Lin, H. W. (2017). Taiwan’s former political prisons: From incarceration to curation. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (pp. 217–240). Palgrave. Luscombe, A., Walby, K., & Piché, J. (2018). Making punishment memorialization pay? Marketing, networks, and souvenirs at small penal history museums in Canada. Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, 42(3), 343–364. Mason, M. (2012). Dominant narratives of colonial Hokkaido and imperial Japan: Envisioning the periphery and the modern nation-state. Palgrave Macmillan.

132

S. Fuggle

Mitchell, W. J. T. (Ed.). (2002). Landscape and power. (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Miyakawa, Y. (2003). Expansion of the frontier and city of freedom. Ekistics, 418(419), 84–100. Morris-Suzuki, T. (1999). Lines in the snow: Imagining the Russo-Japanese frontier. Pacific Affairs, 72(1), 57–77. Morris-Suzuki, T. (2015). Asianisms from below: Japanese Civil Society and visions of Asian integration from the late 20th to the 21st century. In M. Frey & N. Spakowski (Eds.), Asianisms: Regionalist interactions and Asian integration (pp. 156–180). NUS Press. Pedersen, C. (2017). Screening tourist encounters: Penal spectatorship and the visual cultures of Auschwitz. In J. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (pp. 131–151). Palgrave Macmillan. Pink, S. (2021). Doing visual ethnography (4th ed.) Sage. Sakata, M. (2018). Japan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In C. Anderson (Ed.), A Global history of convicts and penal colonies (pp. 307–335). Bloomsbury. Schept, J. (2014). (Un)seeing like a prison: Counter-visual ethnography of the carceral state. Theoretical Criminology, 18(2), 198–122. Sontag, S. (1977). On photography. Penguin Books. Tokuda, K., & Shiga, Y. (1947). Gokuchu juhachi-nen [Eighteen years in prison]. Japanese Communist Party. Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2011). The tourist Gaze 3.0. Sage. Walby, K., & Piché, J. (2016). Reflections on visual methods from a study of Manitoulin island’s penal history museums. The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, 5, 264–290. Welch, M. (2015). Escape to prison: Penal tourism and the pull of punishment. University of California Press. Williams, P. (2007). Memorial museums: The global rush to commemorate atrocities. Berg.

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Heritage Trail Maps: Global Connections and Local Views of the bagne in French Guiana and New Caledonia Claire Reddleman

Introduction The former French penal colonies are known as the bagne, a name that has had a variety of referents over time,1 including a great variety of sites spread across French Guiana in South America (Guyane, presently a French département d’outre-mer) and New Caledonia in the south-west Pacific (Nouvelle Calédonie, presently a French collectivité d’outre-mer). If we include further sites in mainland France at which the imprisonment and transportation of bagnards (convicted people) began (Sanchez, 2018), and former colonial sites of the bagne at Côn Ðao in Vietnam (Fuggle, 2018, 2021); Gabon (Forsdick, 2018); Senegal (Konaté, 2018); Algeria and Tunisia (Kalifa, 2016), and Louisiana (Sanchez, 2018), the bagne emerges as an even larger and more distributed ‘geographical ij

C. Reddleman (B) Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_6

133

134

C. Reddleman

abstraction’ (Redfield, 2000, p. 54). To try to encounter such an extensive geographical and historical phenomenon through an in-person visit to one site or another is a delicate proposition. This chapter reads selected encounters with maps of the bagne via two different sets of heritage signage in French Guiana and New Caledonia, to try to conceive of the bagne as a more distributed and complex entity than can readily be apprehended by looking at, and representing, one place.2 Two differing cartographic views of the former penal colony are brought together in what follows: those found on the sentier du bagne des Annamites at Montsinéry-Tonnegrande in French Guiana; and some of those included in the itinéraire du bagne in the southern region of New Caledonia. The maps included in the heritage trail on the sentier du bagne des Annamites in French Guiana depict the site, along with text and illustrations, as a locus for the forced migration of convicted people from Indochina, and offer a somewhat global and interconnected perspective of the penal colony. In contrast, archival maps included in the itinéraire du bagne in New Caledonia give useful context but also exploit the capacity of maps to convey an impression of knowledge through their form, and they ultimately direct attention relatively narrowly to the local history and geography of the penal colony in New Caledonia alone. This framing depicts sites as somewhat regionally or nationally self-contained, ultimately downplaying the much wider geographical and historical extent of the bagne.

Mapping Narratives In this chapter, I give particular attention to the role of maps in conveying narratives about the bagne. Maps are often critiqued for creating authoritative and limiting depictions of the complex reality of real places (Cosgrove, 2008; Harley, 1989; Reddleman, 2018; Wood et al., 2010). They tell particular stories about places, whether at the scale of the whole of planet Earth (Cosgrove, 2001) or the micro-detail of the street (Wood, 2010). They have the capacity to foreground particular narratives, arguments, emphases and perspectives. They are also a commonplace form of depiction, with which most viewers of heritage

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

135

signage will be deeply familiar. This often has the effect of making it hard to see how much interpretive and narrative work they are carrying out in a specific context. I will suggest that, in the two contrasting heritage trails discussed in what follows, maps are engaged to support quite different heritage narratives (Palmenfelt, 2010)—one offering more emphasis on international relationships, the other more focussed on telling a local history. Current opportunities for cartographic viewing of the bagne are uneven and difficult to access, both in terms of physical and visual access to sites, and access to media representing those sites; cartographic depictions are distributed across heritage signs, archives, atlases, and tourist maps and sites. While there is a lack of adequate representation of these sites and their histories, this chapter argues for considering the current situation as in some ways offering scope for interpretation and room for ambiguity. In the context of considering the intricacies of remembering and memorialising the history of the penal colony at its sites and in its spaces—what Sophie Fuggle has more broadly termed the ‘penalscape’ (Fuggle, 2020)—Fuggle invites us to give careful attention to “reimagining the space of the bagne in a way that contests singular dominant narratives of colonialism” (Fuggle, 2020, p. 817). Historian Stephen A. Toth also proposes that “the history of the bagne itself has remained opaque and obscured, caught between myth and monolith” (Toth, 2008, p. 149). These calls for nuance and careful attention help us to assert that the bagne needs to be seen as multiple, distributed, and more complex than a depiction of a single site, or group of sites, can afford. Maps can be deployed to tell stories about geographic place in multiple ways. One of the ways in which maps have been influentially critiqued in the recently-emergent tradition of critical cartography is as ‘lies’ (Monmonier, 1996). As Mark Monmonier argues, it is unavoidable that map-makers must engage so thoroughly with distortions of geographical and spatial reality in the process of translating aspects of the world into codified, two-dimensional pictures, that it is reasonable to characterise their predicament as one of ‘lying’ (Monmonier, 1996, and see also Reddleman, 2018, p. 6). This deliberately provocative framing of cartography is at one end of the spectrum in terms of how maps may be understood. To illustrate the opposite end of this imagined spectrum, I might

136

C. Reddleman

offer anecdotally the response I have most frequently received upon telling people that I research maps: ‘I love maps’. While the tradition of critical cartography deconstructs (Harley, 1989) maps as instruments of discursive and political power, they continue to be popularly (and critically) appreciated as aesthetic objects associated with beauty, memory and place (see Rossetto, 2020), as well as to be relied upon as authoritative sources of information. With an acknowledgement of maps’ ‘lies’ and an appreciation of their (frequent) aesthetic appeal, we can recognise maps as always productive—whether of imagery, narratives, arguments, selections, understandings, and knowledge.3 Maps also offer the capacity to understand and depict spatial data as fundamentally relational. As critical cartographer Denis Wood asserts, [m]aps are about relationships. In other words, they are about how one landscape— a landscape of roads, rivers, cities, government, sustenance, poison, the good life, […]—is positioned in relation to another. The map synthesizes these diverse landscapes, projecting them onto and into one another. (Wood et al., 2010, p. 98)

This aspect of the representational work maps are able to do in the world is particularly helpful in considering the narrative work that in situ maps carry out in the context of the heritage trail. Maps deployed on heritage signage on the sentier du bagne des Annamites in French Guiana, and the itinéraire du bagne in New Caledonia, ‘position’ the historical ‘penalscape’ in relation to the present-day environment in which the visitor finds themselves.

Seeing the Penal Colony in a (Somewhat) Global Context: Reading the Signs on the sentier du bagne des Annamites Upon arriving at the parking area for the bagne des Annamites Montsinéry-Tonnégrande, a prominent map sign presents visitors with the sentier du bagne des Annamites [the Annamese4 penal colony trail], a path depicted in bright red indicating the ‘Vestiges du bagne’ [penal

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

137

colony ruins or remains] halfway along, with the route concluding at the Rivière de Tonnégrande. The site of the bagne is not the only reason visitors make use of this path, as it also affords access to the swimming and recreation area at the river, which is popular for picnics and leisure outings. There are relatively few traces of the bagne visible at this site, as the majority of the structures were constructed out of wood and have not survived to the present day.5 The map sign depicts the surrounding forest environs using a painted green depiction of forest canopy, over which are superimposed isolines which are not explained by a legend. Against this backdrop, the key map elements are two intersecting roads in bright yellow, including squares and rectangles for buildings; the red ‘sentier’; and the Rivière de Tonnégrande in blue. Directions for onward travel are included where the roads leave the map edge, and illustrations of a bird (Onychorhynchus coronatus) and a threatened endemic plant species (Bactris nancibaensis) punctuate the lower corners. The existence of the vestiges is prominently presented alongside the biodiversity interest for visitors. Occasional arrow signposts on the path give further guidance to visitors. The second illustrated sign on the sentier gives a brief historical background of the ‘Annamites’ in French, alongside illustrations of their arrival at Pointe Buzaré in Cayenne, French Guiana. In 2020, this was the site of temporary homes for migrants from the Middle East, especially Syria, as well as people migrating from Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba (Oberti, 2020); it was formerly the site of Cayenne’s penitentiary depot. A second illustration depicts the ship ‘Le Martinière’ which transported convicted people from Saint-Martin-de-Ré, on the French mainland, to Guyane; and an accompanying world map depicts with a dashed blue line the ship’s voyage from Indochina in 1931, south and west across the Indian Ocean and past the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, westwards across the Atlantic to arrive in Guyane. The map gives way to the sign’s title and the ‘Le Martinière’ illustration, leaving out the southern part of South America and most of Australasia. This design choice helps to focus our attention on the narrative at hand; but it also has the effect of omitting New Caledonia from the visual story. Penal transportation to New Caledonia had already ceased in 1897 (Barbançon, 2003; Toth, 2005), so the choice to retain focus on the

138

C. Reddleman

Indochine-Guyane relationship is understandable, but is also a missed opportunity to conceive of sites of the bagne as inter-related. Political boundaries are not depicted, in favour of an orange wash of paint for land, and white for seas, with only three place names included: Indochine, France, and Guyane. Indochine and Guyane are coloured red, giving them prominence on a map that appears to be based on the Mercator projection, which renders equatorial regions much smaller in relation to northern and southern latitudes. This cartographic choice affords mainland France greater size on the map in relation to its colonial possessions. Lastly, a small inset map depicts Guyane in the ‘island mode’ popular in contemporary postcards of the département; with no indication of surrounding environs, whether land or sea, the cartographic outline of Guyane is provided in two colours to illustrate the two territories described in the accompanying text—Guyane and Inini, the latter constituted in 1930 to facilitate the exploitation of the rainforest’s natural resources (Sanchez, 2018). As the French text on the sign explains, political protests in Indochina in the 1920s prompted official anxieties of an uprising, and the governors of Indochine and Guyane and the Minister for Colonies agreed a circumvention of the law barring political convicts from forced labour.6 This deal served the colonial desire to remove protesters from Indochine, as well as to create a labour force to exploit the territoire de l’inini in Guyane. It paved the way for the transportation of 538 imprisoned Indochinese people to Cayenne in 1931.7 The third sign on the sentier is titled ‘la chimérique conquête de l’inini’ [The chimerical conquest of the Inini] and narrates in more detail the creation of the camp at Crique Anguille in the context of the creation of the territoire de l’inini (Fig. 6.1). The sign is dominated visually by an illustration of forced labourers engaged in forestry and accompanied by a smaller inset map depicting “travaux routiers réalisés et projetés dans la colonie” [road works carried out and planned in the colony]. The map is undated but describes an unfolding vision of territorial management through road- and trackbuilding, by including coloured lines showing ‘pistes’ [tracks] and ‘routes’ [roads] both ‘construites’ [built] and ‘en projet’ [projected]. The orange line extending from the site of Crique Anguille deep into the rainforest and returning north to join up with the bagne des Annamites ‘La

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

139

Fig. 6.1 Third sign on the sentier du bagne des Annamites at MontsinéryTonnégrande, French Guiana. ‘La chimérique conquête de l’inini’ [The chimerical conquest of the Inini], 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman)

Forestière’ covers the largest area shown on the map and yet is a projection of a planned track, rather than a depiction of an existing state of affairs. The other prominent line is the black border separating the territoire de l’inini from the coastal zone of Guyane proper, described by the sign’s text as a ‘ligne théorique’ [a theoretical line]. Gunnar Olsson and John Pickles have observed the foundational power of the act of drawing a line in the process of map-making: “‘What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpreting of a line?’ And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects? Which lines we draw, how we draw them, the effects they have, and how they change are crucial questions” (Pickles, 2004, p. 3). Maps are powerful visual and conceptual tools for both depicting and planning, but can easily be misinterpreted as only operating in ‘depiction’ mode. Most of the lines included on this map are ‘theoretical’, manifesting the classic facility of maps to project ownership over spaces that the map-making entity or authority has not yet occupied or necessarily even visited. In

140

C. Reddleman

2022, roads have not been created as far inland as the projected orange route. On encountering remaining iron train tracks embedded in the forest path, a fourth sign tells the story of the location of the camp itself. A sketch map depicts the layout of the prison camp, with three main ‘quartiers’ as well as other buildings and a banana plantation; the ‘quartier administratif ’ [administrative district], ‘quartier des condamnés’ [district of the condemned], and ‘quartier des tirailleurs sénégalais’ [district of the Senegalese soldiers]. The sign does not offer further comment on the tirailleurs sénégalais, colonial soldiers recruited from France’s African possessions from 1857, as this phrase indicates a familiar trope for Francophone visitors,8 but it indicates to the reader that convicted people are not the only group being moved between different parts of the French Empire. A fifth sign continues to focus on the construction of the railway line and includes an undated archive map depicting the relationship of the camp to the railway line and River Tonnegrande. While the geographical area depicted is small when considered in relation to the broader territory of Guyane, the map highlights the site of Crique Anguille as embedded within a landscape that is framed as productive, with communication links being constructed by convict labour. A final sign featuring significant cartographic content returns the viewer to the framing of the sentier as a place for leisure in a forest environment that is subject to management by the Conservatoire du littoral, a public body responsible for managing large areas of French coast and bodies of water. The sign is designed in the same style as the first in this series, signalling a transition out of the historical or heritage environment and back to the sentier as a means to gain access to the river. The vestiges are given strong prominence in the map image, with locations of buildings symbolised with bold black rectangles. Taken as a whole, I find this series of heritage signs offers a cartographic view of the bagne at Crique Anguille that places it in a relatively global context (albeit without mention of New Caledonia); emphasises the forced movement of convicted people from Indochine to Guyane, as well as soldiers (tirailleurs sénégalais) from Senegal; and gives detailed consideration to the importance of convicts’ labour, in terms of being both a

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

141

motivation for their forced migration, and a deeply shaping force in the landscape of Guyane today.9

Viewing Ambiguously on the itinéraire du bagne in New Caledonia For the visitor to the bagne in New Caledonia, the stylishly rusted information signs of the ‘itinéraire du bagne’10 become a familiar sight, almost to the extent that they function as a kind of guarantee of the presence of penal heritage. They cover the southern region of the island, and include the Île des Pins, the island to the south-west of ‘Grand Terre’ which functioned as a hub for the penal colony outside Nouméa. The signs offer a rich selection of visual information, prominently including archival maps of each site in question, photographs, commentary in French and (albeit shorter) in English, and a characteristic trio of maps based on satellite imagery, showing the site at local, regional and island scale (see Fig. 6.2), along with a list of all the 34 sites covered by the itinéraire. While heritage trails have been influentially conceived of as ‘linear spaces’ (Timothy & Boyd, 2015), and the concept of the ‘itinerary’ evokes an idea of visiting places in a sequential order, the itinéraire du bagne does not prescribe or expect visitors to engage with its locations in a pre-conceived order. The sites are distributed across a large, noncontiguous area, and the signs’ narration addresses visitors without an expectation that they have necessarily already encountered other sites of the bagne. I interpret the itinéraire signs as a collection of maps. A collection, because of the consistency of the signage in terms of style and distinctiveness; their detailed use of archival maps, labelled photographs and satellite images, sub-headings and text boxes; and their prominent branding with ‘l’itinéraire du bagne’ and ‘Province Sud’ (the name of the local government subdivision, covering the southern section of ‘Grand Terre’ and Île des Pins) giving geographical cohesion. Of the 34 signs placed at sites across Province Sud, six are located on the Île des Pins. To give a more detailed sense of the included locations, the bagne sites on

142

C. Reddleman

Fig. 6.2 ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ sign located at Kuto Bay, Île des Pins, New Caledonia, side panel featuring the trio of satellite maps, 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman)

the Île des Pins are listed as: Cimetière des déportés [cemetery for deportees]; Cimetière des surveillants [cemetery for guards]; Vestiges du bagne [remains of the penal colony]; Château d’eau [water tower]; Maison du médecin de la pénitentiaire [house of the penal colony doctor]; and wharf et enceinte fortifiée [wharf and old fortifications]. In the light of the series’ apparent authoritativeness and reach, then, the absence of the familiar signage at a given site prompts questions as to why the series has chosen to remain silent about that place; and whether the place is ‘really’ a heritage site of the penal colony or not. At the time I visited, in 2018, the absence of signs at some key sites stood out as possible instances of ‘cartographic silence’. Harley uses this

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

143

idea to describe the “political” (Harley & Laxton, 2001, p. 85) decisions made by cartographers as to which features and qualities of the world to select for depiction in the map, and which to de-select for inclusion. He contrasts this selection process with ‘blank spaces’ produced on maps as a result of “geographical ignorance, lack of data, error, the limitations of scale, deliberate design or other aspects of specification and technical limitation” (Harley & Laxton, 2001, p. 85). As I have argued (Reddleman, 2018), cartographic silence can function as a significant part of the range of meanings produced by a single map or map series. This effect is especially pronounced in, for example, debates surrounding the suppression of local and indigenous knowledge and cultural meanings in colonial mapping (Sparke, 1998). However, in practice, when reading a particular map, it is sometimes a more difficult matter to confidently assert what has caused a map’s silence on a specific aspect of reality. The silence can be noticed, but, often, not satisfactorily explained. On the Île des Pins, this ambiguity came up at the site of the ruins at Uro, and at the presumed site of the ruins of the convent of St Joseph of Cluny, slightly further up the road from Uro. Both sites are clearly marked on the archival map ‘Territoire de l’Île des Pins’, 1889, produced by the Service Topographique, displayed on the heritage sign at Kuto Bay, Île des Pins (see Fig. 6.3). For the inquisitive visitor, who is already making their way to the ‘designated’ heritage site of the cimetière des condamnées, the possibility of seeking out the convent on the way is a tempting prospect. For me, acting simultaneously as a researcher and a tourist, the opportunity to locate and explore a beautiful and little-visited complex of ruins at the presumed convent, ‘backed up’ by the knowledge provided by the archival map that the site was ‘really’ a key part of the penal infrastructure on the island, was deeply rewarding. The joy of encountering without being instructed by an institutional voice (whether in the form of heritage signage, tourist map, audio guide, or other intervention) is rare for the visitor trained in the British attitude towards heritage preservation. Stuart Hall has noted this attitude for its emphasis on “preservation and conservation: to keeping what already exists” (Hall, 1999, p. 3), and cultural commentator Amber A’Lee Frost has characterised it as “the unconscious compulsion of pathological hoarders”

144

C. Reddleman

Fig. 6.3 ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ sign located at Kuto Bay, Île des Pins, New Caledonia, showing the main information panel, 2018 (Photograph by Claire Reddleman)

(Frost, 2018). However, this is not a claim that such an experience of joy and autonomy is unmediated, or a favourable model to be followed elsewhere. It is negatively produced through years of informal training in the touristic consumption of heritage sites in many places, but also through the implicit claim to expansiveness (if not quite comprehensiveness) established by the prolific signage and branding of the itinéraire du bagne. There is a risk, in this telling, of pitting a certain framing of ‘experience’ (as direct, joyful embodied) against ‘knowledge’ (as distanced or mediated, about learning rather than enjoying, and disembodied and cerebral). I do not wish to propose an unhelpful binary opposition in this way. While the question of appropriate emotional and behavioural

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

145

response at heritage sites has received attention (Barnes & McIntyre, 2017; Leibovitz, 2016; McKercher et al., 2008), this is not a question of proper conduct, but rather of the ways in which the in-person visitor can derive meaning from heritage sites in relationship to their cartographic depiction, or lack thereof. This less overtly mediated site visit was still organised through the site’s inclusion in the heritage sign at Kuto Bay, offering a level of confidence in responding to the site as a ‘true’ part of the bagne. The absence of specific information offered at Uro encourages an interpretive tendency to assimilate the concrete reality of the site itself to the larger geographical abstraction of ‘the bagne’, in lieu of any details about the specific uses of the buildings, the experiences of the people incarcerated or carrying out forced or paid labour there, or dates and circumstances of the buildings’ construction. The interpretive opportunity to connect the ruins at hand with the bagne as an international geographic abstraction is valuable, particularly when we consider that heritage signage is often able to function with a similar authority and ‘knowledge effect’ to that produced by the map. A rich offering of information and descriptive detail can create a superficial impression of knowledge, and satisfy the visitor’s wish for a useful and informative tourist experience, but without furnishing the means to build up greater insight about broader historical, cultural and economic dynamics involved in the development of the place. The absence of heritage narration at Uro and the convent can by no means guarantee visitor freedom—to form a more nuanced historical and geographical interpretation about the lives and places shaped by the penal colony in the Île des Pins, as well as the larger social, political and economic dynamics that created the penal colony. However, from my point of view as a researcher and visitor, the non-inclusion of these two sites in the cartographic depiction scheme of the itinéraire heritage signage created an unexpected opportunity to consider whether there are benefits to allowing some places in a larger network of sites to remain un-narrated. I argue that this non-narration can be worthwhile, because focussing our heritage attention exclusively on sites at which ruins can be seen is not necessarily the only, or the most useful, approach. This is particularly so in a territory whose infrastructure (notably roads and mines) has been so extensively shaped by the labour of convicted people (Spieler, 2011;

146

C. Reddleman

Toth, 2008, p. 151) and native people coerced into interaction with the bagne (Sanchez, 2018). Should we focus only on picturesque and photogenic sites, at the expense of recognising the extent to which convicted labour has shaped the infrastructure of contemporary life? Maps are much better placed than, for example, photographs to provide an overview that is able to synthesise different kinds of spatial data. Photographs are bound to always produce a perspectival depiction, and the distortions and omissions that come with that. However, the map is not so constrained and is able to make infrastructure and broader spatial relationships visible within one image. This facility enables the map viewer to gain insight about individual locations’ relationship to other parts of the whole, and to shift attention from rich and compelling details of sites towards larger relationships and dynamics of penal colonialism, labour exploitation and convicted people’s forced mobility. This is worth considering as a legitimate aim for heritage presentation. However, the interpretive prospect of synthesis is not necessarily assured by refraining from heritage narration at specific sites. We may instead find ourselves with no meaningful framework through which to understand the place we encounter. Perhaps, though, the cartographic silence produced through the absence of such narration, when it is contrastingly provided at nearby sites, creates an interpretive opportunity to recognise the ambiguity and interestedness that marks cartographic knowledge in general. While maps are continually ‘lying’, making ‘arguments’ and putting forward interpretations as authoritative truth claims, the visitor can perhaps take this un-narrated moment to reflect on what we know about the bagne, and how we think we know it. Zooming out, so to speak, from this moment of cartographic ‘silence’, I argue that one aspect of the history of the bagne that we learn from the heritage signage on the itinéraire, is that it is a historical form concentrated on the archipelago of New Caledonia. The frequent, and informative, inclusion of archival maps, as well as the consistent use of the trio of satellite maps orienting the immediate site in its island context, both work to tell a larger story about the bagne as a historical phenomenon of New Caledonia. This is important work. However, this emphasis also forgoes the opportunity to draw out more of the

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

147

global connections among sites of the bagne and the people who suffered, laboured, died, and lived through its brutal programme. Maps must be selective in order to do any useful work of depiction, and, by extension, so must any programme of heritage signage. As Stuart Hall has remarked on the British context of heritage preservation in relation to national history, “No single programme or agenda could adequately represent this cultural complexity” (1999, p. 10). The same can be said of the complex histories and geographies of the bagne. Rather than aiming for over-arching, definitive and authoritative heritage depiction, then, there is room for multiplicity—archival maps and satellite views, national and global narratives, joy, learning, and ambiguity.

Notes 1. The focus of this essay is on sites of the bagne in New Caledonia and French Guiana. For more extensive background on these sites, see Fuggle (2020). The name originally transferred from dockyard penal sites based in galleys in Marseille, Toulouse, Rochefort and Brest, France, in operation during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries (Sanchez, 2018). For a French language account of the ‘origin and meaning of the word bagne’, see Audisio (1957) (with thanks to Sophie Fuggle for this reference). 2. I visited and photographed both heritage trails in the summer of 2018, as a postdoctoral researcher on the project ‘Postcards from the bagne: tourism in the shadow of France’s overseas penal history’, a research project led by Dr Sophie Fuggle and funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Grant ref: AH/R002452/1. The project blog is available at: https://cartespostalesdubagne.com 3. For a fuller account of these issues, see Reddleman (2018). 4. Three sites in Guyane have borne the name ‘bagne des Annamites’, meaning penal colony sites created to incarcerate people from France’s colonial possessions in south east Asia, known as Indochine française [French Indochina] until 1954. The term ‘Annamites’ derives from the French colonial name ‘Annam’ given to the central region of present-day Vietnam. All three sites were operational in the 1930s. As part of the research project, I visited two of the three sites: bagne des Annamites La

148

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

C. Reddleman

Forestière (operational 1931–1935) located in the north of Guyane near Apatou, on the River Maroni; and bagne des Annamites MontsinéryTonnégrande, also known as Crique Anguille (operational 1931–1938), located to the west-south-west of Cayenne on road route D5 (Lasserre et al., 1979, p. 19). The third site, Saut Tigre or Camp du Tigre (operational 1933–1938), was located on the River Sinnamary in the central northern region and was lost when the area was flooded for the creation of a hydro-electric dam (Redfield, 2000, p .233). On the broader issue of the disappearance of traces of the penal colony and of early colonial development efforts, as well as indigenous people, see Spieler (2011). The text on the sign reads: “Les deux gouverneurs et le ministre des colonies s’entendent entre eux: les Indochinois indesirables iront travailler au profit de ‘Inini” (‘The two governors and the Minister of the Colonies arranged it between themselves that non-desirable Indochinese people would be sent to work for the benefit of Inini’ trans. Fuggle, Sophie). For a broader historical account of the movement of convicted people between sites of the bagne, particularly Indochine and Guyane, see Sanchez (2018), although he minimises the central importance of the exploitation of convicted people as labourers. The presence of the tirailleurs sénégalais is also subtly acknowledged in the sign’s illustration of forced labourers constructing the railway, who are watched by two soldiers with brown faces and red hats resembling the fez worn by the Banania tirailleur sénégalais. See Murphy (2020) for an account of the cultural persistence of this figure. For a more detailed consideration of the labour of convicted people in a global historical context, see Anderson (2018), who emphasises the mobility of people for purposes of imperial expansion as well as the extraction of forced labour, and that this mobility has often taken place within and among the territories of a given imperial power rather than moving only in one direction from centre to periphery. In the specific contexts of French Guiana and New Caledonia, see Toth (2008) and Sanchez (2018). For a brief account of the itinéraire with more photos, see the post ‘Itinéraire du bagne’ available on the ‘Postcards from the bagne’ project blog: https://cartespostalesdubagne.com/2018/07/29/the-itiner aire-bagne/.

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

149

Bibliography Achille, E., Forsdick, C., & Moudileno, L. (Eds.). (2020). Postcolonial realms of memory: Sites and symbols in modern France. Liverpool University Press. Audisio, G. (1957). Recherches sur l’origine et la signification du mot bagne. Revue Africaine, 98(452–453), 363–368. Anderson, C. (Ed.). (2018). Introduction: A global history of convicts and penal colonies. In A global history of convicts and penal colonies. Bloomsbury. Barbançon, L.-J. (2003). L’ Archipel des forçats: Histoire du bagne de NouvelleCalédonie (1863–1931). Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. Barnes, J., & McIntyre, J. (2017). “A funny place” for a prison: Coastal beauty, tourism, and interpreting the complex dualities of Trial Bay Gaol, Australia. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (pp. 55–83). Palgrave Macmillan. Cosgrove, D. E. (2001). Apollo’s eye: A cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination. Johns Hopkins University Press. Cosgrove, D. E. (2008). Geography and vision: Seeing, imagining and representing the world . I.B. Tauris. Forsdick, C. (2018). Postcolonializing the bagne. French Studies, 72(2), 237– 255. Frost, A. A. (2018). Nostalgia Mining. The Baffler. https://thebaffler.com/alltomorrows-parties/nostalgia-mining-frost Fuggle, S. (2018). In search of a name... In A poetics of space: Images of Côn Ðao. Pavement Books. Fuggle, S. (2020). Reimagining the ruins of the penalscape: Patrick Chamoiseau’s carceral ruinology. Social Identities, 26 (6), 811–828. Fuggle, S. (2021). Geopolitics of the colonial prison island: The case of Poulo Condor (Con Dao). Island Studies Journal, 16 (2), 215–234. Fuggle, S., Tennant, M., Massing, K., Forsdick, C., & Fox, C. (2018). A poetics of space: Images of Côn Ðao. Pavement Books. Hall, S. (1999). Whose heritage? Un-settling ‘the heritage’, re-imagining the post-nation Third Text , 13(49), 3–13. Harley, J. B. (1989). Deconstructing the map. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 26 (2), 1–20. Harley, J. B., & Laxton, P. (2001). The new nature of maps: Essays in the history of cartography. Johns Hopkins University Press. ij

ij

150

C. Reddleman

Kalifa, D. (2016). Biribi: Les bagnes coloniaux de l’armée française. Éditions Perrin. Konaté, D. (2018). Prison architecture and punishment in colonial Senegal . Lexington Books. Lasserre, G. (Ed.), Sautter, G., Boyé, M., Brasseur, G. (Ed.), Réaud G., Cabaussel G., Menault J. (1979). Atlas des départements français d’outre-mer: 4. La Guyane. C.N.R.S. I.G.N. Leibovitz, L. (2016). The case for Pokémon at Auschwitz. Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/the-case-forpokemon-at-auschwitz López Salas, E. (2021). A collection of narrative practices on cultural heritage with innovative technologies and creative strategies. Open Research Europe, 1, 130. McKercher, B., Weber, K., & du Cros, H. (2008). Rationalising inappropriate behaviour at contested sites. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 16 (4), 369–385. Monmonier, M. S. (1996). How to lie with maps (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Murphy, D. (2020). Les tirailleurs sénégalais. In Achille, E., Forsdick, C., & Moudileno, L. (Eds.). (2020). Postcolonial realms of memory: Sites and symbols in modern France. Liverpool University Press. Oberti, C. (2020). French Guiana: A new migrant gateway to France buckles under pressure. InfoMigrants. https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/28188/ french-guiana-a-new-migrant-gateway-to-france-buckles-under-pressure Palmenfelt, U. (2010). Narrating cultural heritage. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, IV (1), 63–73. Pickles, J. (2004). A history of spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping, and the geo-coded world . Routledge. Reddleman, C. (2018). Cartographic abstraction in contemporary art: Seeing with maps. Routledge. Redfield, P. (2000). Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. University of California Press. Rossetto, T. (2020). Object-oriented cartography: Maps as things. Routledge. Sanchez, J.-L. (2018). The French Empire, 1542–1976. In C. Anderson (Ed.), A global history of convicts and penal colonies. Bloomsbury Publishing. Sparke, M. (1998). A map that roared and an original atlas: Canada, cartography, and the narration of nation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(3), 463–495. Spieler, M. F. (2011). Empire and underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. Harvard University Press.

6 Seeing the Penal Colony Through Maps

151

Timothy, D. J., & Boyd, S. W. (2015). Tourism and trails: Cultural, ecological and management issues. Channel View Publications. Toth, S. A. (2005). Review of Louis-José Barbançon, L’archipel des forçats: Histoire du bagne de Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1863–1931. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003, 447 pp., ISBN 2 85939 785 X. Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 9 (2), 148–150. https://doi.org/10.4000/chs.336 Toth, S. A. (2008). Beyond papillon: The French overseas penal colonies, 1854– 1952. University of Nebraska Press. Wood, D. (2010). Everything sings: Maps for a narrative atlas. Siglio. Wood, D., Fels, J., & Krygier, J. (2010). Rethinking the power of maps. Guilford Press.

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony: Starting from the End with Patti Smith and Jean Genet Samuel Tracol and Glória Alhinho

The desire to be sentenced to prison and to serve time in the French Guiana penal colony runs throughout the literary work of Jean Genet, mainly, The Man Condemned to Death 1 (1942), Miracle of the Rose (1946), The Thief’s Journal (1949), Our Lady of the Flowers (1951), and Le Bagne (1994). Patti Smith, a contemporary American writer, was profoundly affected by Genet’s territorial attachment, particularly through her reading of The Thief’s Journal. She set herself the mission of accomplishing his desire by travelling to French Guiana to collect some stones from its soil and to give them to Genet in person, so that the French poet could finally touch his beloved land . S. Tracol (B) Sorbonne Université, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] G. Alhinho Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_7

153

154

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

M Train (2015) starts with her voyage to French Guiana in February 1981. It was a physical as well as a literary journey across the poetry of Jean Genet. It ends with the meaningful dream of her owning and operating a café on the beach of Rémire-Montjoly.2 The desire to own a café, as a haven for writers and poets, is recurrent in the writing of Patti Smith. It is related to the creative process—developing, for instance, the map of a new journey or a new dream in her life and literary experiences. In that sense, dreaming and wandering is a way of following a mental line (Smith, 2017, p. 5), that is, at once, a line of writing as well as a line of life. Collecting stones in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni is a starting point for Patti Smith as she seeks to build an expression of Jean Genet’s geography. She starts her mission at this end precisely to remind us that this continuum of life, the life of Jean Genet, also expresses the continuum of artistic work. Jean Genet invites the reader to enter his own work in a similar way, saying that his writing draws on the geography of the French Guiana penal colony. Comparably, the death of the convict is a starting point from which we can read his life (Genet, 1949, p. 12). An historical overview of Genet’s itinerary from delinquency to literature will guide us, firstly, towards the attachment he developed in his fiction for this notorious forced labour prison, the bagne. Genet’s interior experience of prison produces an aesthetic work of French language that transformed our manner of seeing the carceral world. This world is no longer a negative one, furthermore it can be attached to creativity through the desire for the Guianese Penal Colony. Secondly, we will go through the desire that drove Patti Smith to the concrete act of collecting stones in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, converting Genet’s attachment to this territory into an artistic purpose. Finally, the story of that journey leads us to examine how the sensory experience of French Guiana for both poets transforms its prison into a meaningful and sacred place. We can approach this sacredness through the word devotion in the way Patti Smith uses it to explain the creative process of writing. This devotion expresses an endless journey through artistic creation, because in art as in life there is no end, just the continuum of a stream. By doing that, Smith and Genet give us guidelines so that we can see those marginal spaces from a poetic, political,

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

155

and research point of view. Our purpose is to follow both poets through artistic creation as a pathway to the understanding of the meaning of carceral spaces for the human condition. They both build an aesthetic and singular point of view which allows us, today, to look at these spaces, realising their inherent human and natural heritage.

A Historical Overview of Jean Genet’s Writing Experience: Carceral World and Desire At the end of his life, Jean Genet said that the only thing that remained of all he had done was a history of his own geography: “My life is coming to an end. I’m seventy-one, and you have before you what’s left of all this, my story and my geography. Nothing more” (Lambert, 2016, p. 7).3 This personal geography refers to both a real and imaginary territory: the carceral world in the French Guiana penal colony. Prison is a real and multifaceted space for Jean Genet, a powerful social imaginary, and a consequential part of his own biography. Convicted and sentenced fifteen times, he was incarcerated for a total of six years in fourteen different prisons. His life as a delinquent had four different periods: first as a teenager, between 1925 and 1929, constantly committing illegal acts and escaping from children’s prisons. Then, after serving in the army for seven years, he returned to his delinquent life between 1936 and 1937, lived an erratic life through Europe, and was incarcerated in several countries. Finally, after returning to France in 1940, Genet continued committing violations such as falsifying documents and petty theft. Between 1941 and 1943, he was caught stealing books, but in the context of his heavy repeat offender profile and the arbitrary justice of the collaborationist Vichy government, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1943 as a relegué.4 He only avoided this sentence thanks to his friendship with the authors Jean Cocteau and André Gide. He had no more convictions after 1943 and was pardoned by President Auriol in 1949. The prison had been a writing space for Genet where he drafted Our Lady of the Flowers 5 in 1942 and, Miracle of the Rose in 1944. Genet’s delinquent youth occurred simultaneously with the apex of the social imaginaries of the underworld, called by Dominique Kalifa

156

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

“bas-fonds” (2013). During the nineteenth century, the meaning of “underworld” evolved from the designation of infamous urban areas to working-class neighbourhoods and, finally, to encompassing their inhabitants. The expression is transformed from a topographical term to a broader definition, which includes a social dimension. These “basfonds” refer to districts, specific places, such as brothels, workhouses, and prisons, as well as to a moral figure. They became, then, an inverted image of good society at the intersection of three characteristics—vice, crime, and misery. Three modes of expression are central to the spread of this “social fantastic ” (Mac Orlan, 1928) during the 1930s: popular songs, reportages, and serialised novels. For instance, the songwriter Aristide Bruant created in his songs an atmosphere permeated with the Parisian soundscape of the underworld, prisons, and jails. One the most famous anarchist songs of that time was Cayenne, in reference to the bagne.6 Furthermore, the press went through a golden age, coinciding with the complete literacy of the French population.7 In this context, Dominique Kalifa showed the prominent place of crime in these publications and its role in a global aspiration to the “defence of society” (Kalifa, 1995). The most famous reporters, who followed the militant and popular subject of the bagne,8 were published in important newspapers such as Le Petit Journal or Paris-Soir.9 This new kind of press, largely apolitical, “stimulates the occurrence of moral panic by pointing to successive scapegoats” (Fureix & Jarrige, 2015) as the young delinquent. Initially, their work was published in instalments, then compiled by editors such as Gallimard, which founded the Grands reportages collection in 1924, including works by Jacques Dhur and Albert Londres. Genet was aware of this journalism, mentioning the work of Londres and Alexis Danan on the French Guiana penal colonies in Miracle of the Rose (Genet, 1946, p. 143). This reporting was reinforced by the rise of photojournalism, which spread sensationalism across the front-pages of newspapers and magazines.10 At the same time, a specialised press emerged: Détective, founded by Gallimard in 1928, and Police Magazine in 1930, became major publications. Genet was a regular reader of Détective during his youth, mentioning this magazine in his books.11 In The Thief’s Journal , he cites

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

157

its editorial policy and its famous photographs.12 Such readings, especially by a young man, were frowned upon socially. The dominant moral order considered these magazines to be perverting and even criminogenic (Fureix & Jarrige, 2015) for the popular classes, who were cast as victims of such “paper streams” (Artiaga, 2007). The bagne is a central issue for these publications. For instance, the weekly Police Magazine covered it on seven front-pages in 1931, and Détective, on 19 front-pages between 1928 and 1939. The characteristics of the convict’s uniform are always recognisable: striped jacket and beanie. This representation was popularised by literary figures such as Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Les Misérables (Hugo, 1862) and was known even before the foundation of the Guianese penal colony in 1852. In the period that preceded the colonial bagne, the uniform, the legends, and the vocabulary devoted to the penal field were already well established.13 Novels about colonial affairs were very successful in this same period. As underlined by Dominique Kalifa (2009, p. 63), these fictional stories “contribute to a sad and disillusioned approach to colonisation, a particularly lasting black vision of the Empire”. The physical and human geographies of French Guiana became a familiar world of crime and horror for French society. Public opinion was fascinated by the penal colonies, at the crossroads of two main narratives: the first one related to the criminal life of the convicts, started in France in the underworld, and the second one representing French Guiana as a green hell . Jean Genet joins these narratives and associates them with his own history. His poetry portrays the royal galleys14 and he redraws the history from this first period via the metropolitan bagnes of Brest and Toulon up to the modern prison in his novel Our Lady of the Flowers.15 Both his writings and pictures use powerful stereotypes that created social fears of the underworld. Genet was not only a spectator and a reader, but also a typical representation of what Mac Orlan called “the misfortune battalion” (Mac Orlan, 1933). Raised by Assistance Publique,16 sentenced to the agricultural penal colony of Mettray for his indiscipline in his foster family, a thief and prisoner, and finally almost condemned to relégation, Jean Genet is a good example of lost children who were the nexus of society’s fears. This trajectory is shared by thousands of children who constitute a community, with its social codes,

158

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

its language,17 and its friendships. Being a settler in the juvenile bagnes was an initiation into an everyday life that shared a likeness with that experienced in the French Guiana penal colony.18 It also constitutes an entry to the criminal career they all knew they would take up: “the kids were waiting to be able to commit real crimes, as an excuse for going to hell” (Genet, 1951/1963, p. 210).19 When Genet arrived in jail, he found friends that he had met in Mettray, in Paris streets, or in other prisons. In this context, the bagne had two functions: a prestigious destination where the stars of newspapers and courts were sent,20 and the final destination for Genet’s companions in misery, finally condemned to relégation as repeat offenders. This fatality is strongly expressed in The Thief’s Journal : “I feel sure that only in prison shall I be able to continue a life which was cut off when I entered it” (Genet, 1949/1964, p. 256).21 The carceral experience runs throughout Jean Genet’s childhood and teenage years as well as his adulthood. He wrote about it in several books and specifically Our Lady of the Flowers, which is also his first novel, written in 1942. This book, as well as Miracle of the Rose, was written when he was a prisoner in Fresnes. In the latter, he evokes his childhood in the children’s colony of Mettray. The Thief’s Journal is a testimony of his young adult life as a vagrant in different European countries. This fictional cycle ended, Jean Genet wrote the play Le Bagne during the 1950s and 1960s but it was never published during his lifetime.22 Genet writes his penal trilogy in the context of the closure of the bagne determined by the décret-loi of 1938.23 In the criminal career shared by Genet and thousands of inmates, this closure represented a paradigmatic change, expressed as a regret by Genet. The end of the bagne is the end of a prison from where it is possible to escape towards South American ports. The forced labour sentences were still applied, but in conventional prisons: “the home prisons have their power: it is not the same. It is minor” (Genet, 1949/1964, p. 11).24 All Genet’s literary work about his prison experience converges with the significant imaginary around the French Guiana penal colony. Patti Smith, having read his work throughout her youth in New York, was profoundly touched by the writing and life experiences of Genet, not only related to the prison experiences, but mainly due to the impact of the French Guiana imaginary. In a very intimate moment of her life,

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

159

which was the beginning of her marriage to Fred Smith, she chose to interconnect that meaningful event with the literary work of Jean Genet by travelling with her husband to Genet’s beloved, infamous land, the bagne.

Patti Smith’s Gestures and Traces: Gathering the Stones of the Bagne Patti Smith was profoundly touched by Genet’s territorial attachment, mainly through her reading of The Thief’s Journal . It is, indeed, in this text that Genet expresses an intimate bond with French Guiana: “thus my excitement extends as far as that region of myself, which is Guiana” (Genet, 1949/1964, p. 16).25 In this statement, Genet again expresses the idea of a personal geography and, this time, he includes the Guiana territory. This geography starts in Mettray, where all his experiences as a prisoner are rooted, a world of flora, and a metaphor of French Guiana: “Mettray, though now destroyed, carries on, continues in time, and it seems to me too that the roots of Fontevrault are to be found in the vegetable world of our children’s hell” (Genet, 1946/1965, p. 53).26 Patti Smith is sensitive to this geography and its consequences in Genet’s writing, because she started to relate it with her own life in New York, notably the first years that she lived there with Robert Mapplethorpe. At that time, she used a poetic image, created by Genet to capture the impact of the prison experience on his literary characters, the rose, to deal with the new intimate world that she was experiencing with Robert Mapplethorpe: “For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. I too desired to feel more of the world” (Smith, 2010, p. 79). The poetic world of Jean Genet, filled with male sexual images, a virile imaginary inhabitated with criminals, poor artists, sailors, and soldiers, is the one from which she reads the metamorphosis of her partner. She soon noted that while she was reading Genet’s Miracle of the Rose to Mapplethorpe, he was already becoming Genet himself: “while I was reading Genet, it was as if he was becoming Genet” (Smith, 2010, p. 70).

160

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

In Just Kids, the title of the narrative where Patti Smith describes their life experience and long friendship, the presence of Jean Genet goes beyond an aesthetic sensitivity or a style of life. The French author’s poetry permeates her lines and creates an imaginary reference from which she can understand herself, in order to understand life itself. For instance, when confronted with Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality, she states that her own experience was purely poetic: “In my literary imagination, homosexuality was a poetic curse, notions I had gleaned from Mishima, Gide, and Genet. I knew nothing of the reality of homosexuality. I thought it irrevocably meshed with affectation and flamboyance. I had prided myself on being non-judgmental, but my comprehension was narrow and provincial. Even in reading Genet, I saw his men as a mystical race of thieves and sailors. I didn’t fully comprehend their world. I embraced Genet as a poet” (Smith, 2010, p. 77). While she admits only having a literary point of view of homosexuality, because of her appreciation of Genet’s writing, it still helps her to understand Mapplethorpe beyond his sexuality. Her awareness of Genet’s homosexuality as she accepted that of Mapplethorpe is understandable in the broad context of the creative process. From within the artistic world, it is possible to understand reality. In that sense, a metaphor of a flower, Genet’s rose, clarifies the lives of both Genet and Mapplethorpe and connects them to each other through Patti Smith’s vigilance of the work of art. In Just Kids, Patti Smith reveals not only a real dimension to Genet’s literary writing, but also perhaps to a geographical body, that of Jean Genet as it was perceived by Genet himself. In this context, we can understand her mission, years later, to achieve her desire to travel to French Guiana with the aim of collecting some stones of its soil, so that the French poet could touch his “beloved land”. She arrived in that territory with her husband, Fred (Sonic) Smith, in 1980. When her husband asked her to choose a destination for their wedding anniversary trip, Patti Smith chose Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni “without hesitation” (Smith, 2015, p. 10). Her journey to French Guiana had a poetic and artistic purpose: collecting stones from the bagne, delivering them to Jean Genet—who was still alive in 1980—via the intermediary of her friend William Burroughs. It was also a tribute to the intimate link she nourished with the work and very being of Jean Genet.

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

161

Patti Smith started on that journey in the Detroit Public Library by studying the history of Suriname and French Guiana (Smith, 2015, p. 12). It was not an easy undertaking in 1980, and the obstacles were numerous: a sojourn in Miami, a flight crossing many Caribbean islands until they reached Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname. A military atmosphere marked their stay in Suriname, a few months after a coup d’état and not long before a drawn-out civil war. Furthermore, Fred and Patti Smith experienced the solitude of American travellers in the early 1980s on the Guyanas plateau. After a journey of 150 km along a forest road and then across the Maroni River in a pirogue, they finally arrived at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, a little town of around 6000 inhabitants in 1980. After a night there, they visited the ruins of the Camp de la Transportation, and Patti Smith collected the three promised stones outside the ruins of Saint-Laurent prison and put them into a Gitane matchbox. She deliberately sought a place that “might have been pressed by the hard-calloused feet of the inmates or the soles of heavy boots worn by the guards” (Smith, 2015, p. 17). After accomplishing her main purpose through this Guianese journey, they started on a wandering of their own in the Cayenne Island. Their access to the capital of French Guiana in a smuggler’s car was interrupted, in Kourou, by the Foreign Legion, which had haunted Smith’s dreams of adventure ever since childhood: “I dreamed of travel. Of running away and joining the Foreign Legion, climbing the ranks and trekking the desert with my men” (Smith, 2010, p. 10). That route was also the convicts’ road, the road zero (Londres, 1923/2008) whose construction cost so many convicts lives over a century of forced labour. Then, the journey to Cayenne, coinciding with Fred and Patti Smith’s wedding anniversary, allowed them to experience the well-known Guianese imaginary: the Carnival dances, “parrots, spaceships and men of the Foreign Legion” (Smith, 2015, p. 23), Chinese merchants, Devil’s Island. Following the celebrations of Carnival, they finished their journey in French Guiana at the beach of Rémire-Montjoly. This place inspired the idea of a café, and the narrative of this journey ends with Patti Smith, on her knees in the sand, sketching out plans for an imaginary shelter for writers. This was the end of a story that started in Café’Ino in New York and with the old dream of having one of her own.

162

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

A café is a meaningful space in the writing of Patti Smith. It is related to the ritual of having coffee, yet it goes beyond. Several important life experiences converge to the space of a particular café,27 but it is the dream of having her own that comes and goes, giving a rhythm to the narrative itself. It functions as intimate pauses to create movement and, simultaneously, a silent space from which she practices a vigilant presence before the work of art. Two life experiences translate this vigilance: the creation of an intimate space around the familiar ritual of having a coffee; and the consequent perception of time during those moments. The creation of this intimacy has its roots in her childhood when her mother used to wait in front of the stove, as the coffee brewed, or drinking a cup of coffee at the kitchen table (Smith, 2015, p. 72). In New York, this ritual consisted in drinking coffee at Caffé Dante and reading Mohammed Mrabeth’s The Beach Café while dreaming of opening a café of her own called the Café Nerval, “a small haven where poets and travellers might find the simplicity of asylum” (Smith, 2015, p. 9). In Michigan, when living with her husband and having no café nearby, she became a solitary drinker and repeated the ritual of walking to a café to have a coffee and a jelly donut, as she used to do before her arrival in New York.28 Patti Smith states that her writing process started during those sixteen years that she lived in Michigan.29 She talks about motherhood and the discipline of writing, but the experience can be also related to the consequent perception of time and how it is related to the ritual of having a coffee. An entire chapter of M Train, entitled “Clock with No Hands”, is dedicated to this way of living with no specific time frame: “We lived around the clock, moving through the days and nights with little regard for time” (Smith, 2015, p. 85). Along with this life experience, Fred’s dream of a TV show, Drunk in the Afternoon, with a segment called Coffee Break, in which Patti Smith would discuss prison literature and authors such as Jean Genet, were inspired by this idea of drinking and talking endlessly. During these years, she wrote incessantly without publishing and Fred achieved his pilot’s licence without being able to afford to fly a plane. They lived dreams along with practical day-to-day tasks but reserving “the right to ignore the hands that kept on turning” (Smith, 2015, p. 87). Although dreams were not achieved, Patti Smith took from this life experience Fred’s lesson: not all dreams

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

163

have to be accomplished. The continual dream of having a café can be understood from this perspective.30 The perception of time has, though, with the movement of writing, a significant place through all these memories. The reflections about time are related to memory, reality, and dreams, at times attaining the status of a character (Smith, 2015, p. 85). Although, when associated with the “private ritual” of having a coffee, it always involves an artistic creation: that of listening to Strawberry Fields by John Lennon, of reading Mrabeth’s The Beach Café, the contemplation of the photo of Albert Camus in her kitchen, the dreamed metamorphosis of a “whitewashed cement outpost of 7-Eleven” into the city of Tangier, inhabited by writing and writers: “I sat on the ground in the corner surrounded by low white walls, shelving real time, free to rove the smooth bridge connecting past and present. My Morocco. I followed whatever train I wanted. I wrote without writing—of genies and hustlers and mythic travellers, my vagabondia. Then I would walk back home, happily satisfied, and resume my daily tasks. Even now, having at last been to Tangier, my spot behind the bait store seems the true Morocco in my memory” (Smith, 2015, p. 71). That familiar and intimate space opens a powerful moment, in which past and future happen simultaneously, creating this feeling of writing without writing. Maurice Blanchot associates this movement with the gaze of Orpheus.31 This refers to the desire to write as an experience of looking at the past, and the city of Tangier as a metonymy for the Beat writers, as their port of call, and to the future, her own writing as a heritage of their fictional legacy.32 The city was already, in the 1930s, a port of call for Genet, during the time he lived in Spain. He was aware of its cinematic and literary representations as a terrible place, where disreputable trafficking from all over the world occurred and he considered the city as a symbol of treason. He would try to reach Tangier three times, taking different paths, without success‚ before finally living there in the 1970s. Many years later, the city would become Patti Smith’s own port of call . In 1997, she was invited to interview the American writer Paul Bowles in Tangier. During this visit she planned to deliver the stones to the grave of Jean Genet, who is buried in the cemetery of Larache, just outside the

164

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

city. In April 2013, she would be invited to talk about the Beat writers and it inevitably became the right moment to fulfil her mission to deliver the stones. Two arguments converged for her to take that decision: she and her friend Lenny Kaye had long dreamed of working in Tangier, and April 15 would mark the anniversary of Jean Genet’s passing. Ultimately, this desired and fascinating city for both authors was to become their meeting point. The stones of French Guiana were just a pretext to the convergence of different actions through which their artistic works and lives were intertwined. The Thief’s Journal , a poetic autobiography through which Genet wanted to give an artistic dimension of his life—“that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext” (Genet, 1949/1964, p. 119).33 The French poet’s life would, effectively, be a poetical guide for Patti Smith’s own life, going even beyond words, creating new poetic emotion. The celebration of his life occurs in a natural way in Larache’s cemetery. A little boy sat in the same place where the stones were buried and spread rose petals on the ground around himself. Then, he offered the remnants of a rosebud to Patti Smith, which she placed in the same matchbox that had previously contained the stones. The encounter with the child concluded this journey by accomplishing the miracle of the rose because the miracle was not in the stones themselves but “within the cells of the child guardian, Genet’s prisoner of love” (Smith, 2015, p. 228).

Listening to and Touching Matter: Lessons for Our Contemporary Societies The ritual around the burying of the stones that celebrates the life of Jean Genet opens a different meaning for death itself. Death, or even the strangeness of each being in relation to each other, does not matter in this context. Patti Smith’s poetic action has the same meaning as the writing of the Journal for Genet: it is not a nostalgic search of the past, but a movement towards the work of art. The poetic emotion, desired by Genet, can emerge from the most infamous margins of society as well as from those who remain inside its invisible places. The mission that

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

165

Patti Smith assigned herself in the 1980s in French Guiana, which ended in Morocco in 2013, follows Genet’s work, allowing space for different ways of being and being part of a community. It is a way also to look at difference, not inferior or even concurrent, but alternative ways of considering the whole of a society. It is a concrete poetical gesture that honours the sacred meaning of that territory for Jean Genet and opens our reading of the French author to other dimensions. The encounter between the French poet’s literary imagination and the physical presence of Patti Smith in French Guiana is a starting point for a new and different relation with Jean Genet. By going to Saint-Laurent, she really wanted to touch something beyond what she already knew and experienced in New York with his writing. She wanted to reach the “hallowed ground and the inmates incarcerated” to whom Genet dedicated such “devotional empathy” (Smith, 2015, p. 11). Patti Smith shows us that his devotional empathy is not only for inmates like him, but also, above all, it expresses devotion to the sacredness of poetry. It works as an ultimate reality, a path to catch the infinity of each human being. The poet metamorphoses the penal colony’s darkness and shamefulness, from a Republican and bourgeois point of view, into a transitional world where a human being can reach his innermost infinity and connect with God. By enlightening perspectives, experiences both of sacredness and of God can be reached, especially in prison, because it offers an unlimited space and time to explore his innermost being (Genet, 1946/1965, pp. 58–59). The fictional work of Genet establishes a duality between the sacred and violence or, more precisely, a state of sacredness attained through the violence of incarceration. The poet works, then, in a transition between the most violent and dark side of the convict and the purest of states, that by which he can reach God. The sacredness of the prisoner begins when he enters Mettray, the main agricultural colony for children up until the 1930s. The path of glory that will lead the prisoner from one prison to another, from their first steps as criminals until the most vicious and condemned acts of violence, according to normative society. Genet talks about this path as a poet rather than in the mental understanding of those criminals and inmates: “faults sometimes—they are deeds—produce poetry. Though beautiful, these deeds are none the less a danger. It would be difficult for me—and impolite—to present

166

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

a report here on Harcamone’s mental faculties. I am a poet confronted with his crimes, and there is only one thing I can say: that those crimes gave off such a fragrance of roses that he will be scented with them, as will his memory and the memory of his stay here, until our waning days” (Genet, 1946/1965, p. 59).34 This personal itinerary, from an abandoned childhood towards a prisoner’s sacredness, is shared by Genet and Harcamone, who were both inmates in Mettray. From the beginning of Miracle of the Rose, the narrator knows that the prison of Fontevrault is inside a valley, but it can also be a Cathedral at the top of a mountain. In the same way, the metaphor of the roses, which covers already the walls of Mettray, and by analogy, its child prisoners, follows them to Fontevrault. That is why Harcamone is still perfumed and covered by roses when they meet again in this prison. In The Thief’s Journal , the convict is so covered by them that he becomes a flower himself. The flower, especially the rose, has a funereal and glorious dimension (Ernst, 2014). It is not only a glorification of death and a tribute to sainthood, but also the trigger of a metamorphosis: the miracle that transforms a prisoner into a saint. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the agricultural colony is the lost paradise of Genet: the time of the prisoners is the eternal return to this abandoned childhood and is consequently related to a religious community: “Genet has no profane history. He has only a sacred history, or, if one prefers, like so-called “archaic” societies he is continually transforming history into mythical categories” (Sartre, 1952/2012, p. 5).35 Even if the Central prison is a cathedral where prisoners continue the “tradition of the monks” (Genet, 1946/1965, p. 16),36 it is never a question of religion or, more precisely, the Catholic religion. The poet sees a direct connection between the soil and the sky in the carceral environment. That is why prison is an unlimited space and religion is a limited one because, according to the poet, the latter has a symbolic roof .37 However, the bagne is the holiest place where the convict can reach the highest degree of saintliness: “Yet the life I lead requires the giving up of earthly things that the Church, and all churches, require of their saints. Then saintliness opens, in fact, forces a door which looks out on the marvellous. And it is also recognized by the following: that it leads to Heaven by way of sin” (Genet, 1946/1965, p. 57).38 When the prisoner

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

167

is condemned to the penal colony he becomes a Saint, in the sense that he is, at the same time, condemned to a future and certain death: “Like the Saint, his life is readable by the end, in a death prepared in advance and participating in his own lightening” (Fontvieille-Cordani, 2014, p. 57). Mettray and the bagne are two important sacred places in Genet’s literary work, the roots and the sky of holiness, two lost paradises closed by the French government in the 1930s: “It is saintliness too that I am returning to seek in the unfolding of this adventure. I really must go in quest of a God who is mine, for as I looked at pictures of the penal colony my heart suddenly clouded with nostalgia for a land which I knew elsewhere than in Guiana, elsewhere than on maps and in books, and which I discovered within myself ” (Genet, 1946/1965, p. 56).39 The death penalty is a final step in this glorious and sacred path. According to Genet, Harcamone could realise this sacredness and, at the same time, a transcendent glory.40 The “convict’s ideal” in The Thief’s Journal as well as the character of Harcamone in Miracle of the Rose, are two devices by which Genet tells stories of an unrequited desire, that of being sentenced to prison and to serve time in the French Guiana penal colony. The narrator compares himself to this character by saying that he could never attain this absolute power of being condemned to the penal colony and, simultaneously, to death. This internal death is the condition of writing for the poet: “I wanted to make this book [Our Lady of the Flowers], out of the transposed, sublimated elements of my life as a convict. […] The world of the living is never too remote from me. I remove it as far as I can with all the means at my disposal. The world withdraws until it is only a golden point in so sombre a sky that the abyss between our world and the other is such that the only real thing that remains is our grave. So I am beginning here a really dead man’s existence” (Genet, 1951/1963, pp. 187–188).41 The inmate metamorphosis, which consists in the miracle of transforming a prisoner into a saint, is an expression of Genet’s desire and love for the marginalised worlds. This miracle thus transformed the margins into the centre of a literary work for Jean Genet, and into a meaningful experience for Patti Smith. With her ritual around the stones, she intended to liberate Genet from his prison of love (Smith, 2015,

168

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

p. 228).42 The child that appears at the grave when she completed her ritual is a guardian, not only of the memory of Jean Genet as an abandoned child but also of Patti Smith’s love of Jean Genet’s poetry. Her ritual around the stones links the experiences of life and literature. It is a clarification of all the contradictions that we find in Jean Genet’s poetry: his abandoned childhood, prison experiences, the expression of unsatisfied and unaccomplished desire, and finally, the act of creation itself. The Larache journey is part of a peregrination of memory, which is at the heart of M Train. Patti Smith describes different poetical liturgies around her favourite authors and artists: Jean Genet, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, Silvia Plath, and Frida Kahlo. She establishes a ritual for each one around a meaningful object, a prayer, or a memory. Writing about nothing, the sentence that occurs several times in the first pages of M Train, states the difficult task of writing about a vanished presence. With her journeys, Patti Smith creates a meaningful stream and maps a geographical space for poetry, responding to Jean Genet’s own desire: “my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext” (Genet, 1949/1964, p. 119).43

Conclusion The stones buried in the grave of Genet have this purpose of connecting his literary world with a geography of the margins: that of the French writer himself, of his inmates, and ultimately, that of Patti Smith herself. The experience with the concrete world of matter, which the stones represent, is a stream that connects life and the work of art, one from which both authors can never move away. For Genet, the experience of Mettray is the first step of the geography designed by the tangible prison through which he learns a self-discipline to handle the secret of his innocence and, henceforth, to embrace the accusations against him. This metamorphosis is only the beginning of a major training process to transform poverty and the most infamous behaviours into glorious accomplishments through his literary work. Genet compared it with a

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

169

spiritual exercise, working with his own values, being the solitary hero of his own adventure (1949/1964, p. 199). He became stronger and, from prison to prison, he would finally attain the most prestigious among them: the bagne. In this sense, Mettray is, in the same way, a starting point and already the future: “the Mettray Reformatory Colony, the sanctuary to which our childhood dreams aspired. I felt that its walls preserved […] the very shape of the future” (Genet, 1946/1965, p. 7).44 This geographical space, from Mettray to the bagne, is built with the purpose of transforming the most infamous reality into the light of sacredness, through the work on French language (Genet, 1949, p. 235). Genet writes mainly about his own life, although his narrative is not autobiographical, but rather, it is a sacred cosmogony, according to the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1952). In his extensive essay about Genet’s work and life, Sartre states that Genet is not describing facts about his life. His descriptions and vocabulary are around thefts, as its inherent objects and spaces are ritualised, and its geographies mythicised. At the peak of his cosmogony, there is a sky which is inhabited by all those figures, such as Harcamone, Divers and Bulkaen, who make up his childhood. Jean Genet and Patti Smith both reconcile themselves with the world through the work of art. The one where every person, like every object, has the same value and, consequently, marginalisation or abandonment do not exist. The encounter with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti has, for Jean Genet, the same artistic and intimate gesture of reconciliation as the one of Patti Smith collecting and burying the stones. After six years of silence, this encounter is a new start to his creative process.45 In Giacometti’s artistic world, every object like every person can be loved in its difference, uniqueness and even solitude. Genet recognises therein the intersection of his own values: care, sympathy, friendship, and respect towards the essence of beings or objects (Genet, 2007). Genet is touched by the dialogue that Giacommetti’s sculptures maintain with the dead. They communicate a knowledge about the inherent solitude of each being and object, showing, at the same time, how every life is precious. Patti Smith invites us to open up a space for this solitude in order to listen to the dead for those same reasons: “[the dead] send words of comfort and solidarity. They salute the breath of man.

170

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

The solid ground, the pure waters, the sky, open as a wound blooming on the belly of a fawn. All life is precious” (Smith, 2008, p. 3).

Notes 1. In the translation of Diane di Prima, Alan Marlowe, Harriet and Bret Rohmer, 1960. In 1981, it was translated “The man sentenced to death” in the translation of Steven Finch and Bill Sullivan. 2. A town in the suburbs of Cayenne, French Guiana. 3. “Ma vie s’achève à peu près. J’ai soixante et onze ans et vous avez devant vous ce qui reste de tout ça, de mon histoire et de ma géographie. Rien de plus.” 4. The law of 1885 introduced the relégation sentence, condemning repeat offenders to very long-term sentences in French Guiana and New Caledonia penal colonies. This very severe law is inspired by the criminology of Lombroso and Lacassagne, considering recidivism as a manifestation of a criminal gene. French republicans voted for this law believing in the protection of society from these presumed threats. 5. Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, published by Gallimard, a third edition in 1951. Published in a first edition by Aux Dépens d’un Amateur, Monte Carlo, Monaco and, in a second edition by L’Arbalète, Lyon, France. 6. This song is often attributed to Bruant, but its history is uncertain. Its chorus asks for the death of policemen and evokes the sexual violence committed by the bourgeois against prostitutes. In contrast, it proclaims “Long live the convicts! ”. 7. The Ferry laws of 1882–1883 plan compulsory, free and secular education until the age of 13. 8. Jacques Dhur, in 1901–1902 was the first to publish in Le Journal a serial reportage about the bagne. Twenty years later, the Albert Londres inquiry (1923, reed. 2008) had a great impact on public opinion and led to the law of 1925 which softened the jail conditions in French Guiana. It was followed by other inquiries led by famous reporters such as Geo London (Aux portes du bagne, 1930), Alexis Danan (Cayenne, 1934) and Mireille Maroger (Bagne, 1937). 9. Genet mentions an article in Paris-Soir in which he read about the death of Clément, one of the characters from the novel Notre-Dame-desFleurs. “I paid close attention. Clément was handsome. You know from

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

171

Paris-Soir that he was killed during the jailbreak at Cayenne” (Genet, 1951/1963, p. 178). [“J’étais attentif. Clément était beau. Vous savez par Paris-Soir qu’il fut tué, lors de la révolte de Cayenne.”] Mac Orlan considered photography a major vector for the spread of the social fantastic: “The social fantastic of our time is the product of great industrial adventure. For this reason, it escapes from the laws of literature and art, and even more from the critics which judge all the sentimental phenomena of this time with the standard yardstick of current literary and artistic culture. It is, in short, a new form of art, a new product of the human imagination which is being born. Photography seems to correspond perfectly to what we desire as plastic in the absolutely anarchical evocation of an ulterior motive” (Mac Orlan, 1928). Ivan Jablonka considers that, among Genet’s readings, “it is Détective which interests him the most” (Jablonka, 2004, p. 79). “This face also merges with that of Rasseneur, a crook with whom I worked around 1936. I recently read in the weekly Detective Magazine that he has been given a life sentence, whereas that very same week a petition signed by writers demanded that the President of the Republic grant me a reprieve from the very same punishment. The photo of Rasseneur in court was on the second page. The journalist stated ironically that he seemed quite pleased at having been condemned to relégation. That doesn’t surprise me” (Genet, 1949/1964, p. 51). [“Ce visage se confond aussi avec celui de Rasseneur, un casseur avec qui je travaillais vers 1936. Par l’hebdomadaire “Détective” je viens d’apprendre sa condamnation à la relégation quand cette même semaine une pétition d’écrivains demandait, pour la même peine, ma grâce au Président de la République. La photo de Rasseneur devant le tribunal était à la deuxième page. Le journaliste, ironique, affirme qu’il paraissait très content d’être relégué. Cela ne m’étonne pas.”] In Our Lady of the Flowers, he also evokes the photograph of Pilorge, a condemned man who exercises a strong impression on Genet. The bagnes portuaires were established in the military ports of Brest, Toulon and Rochefort by the royal decree of 1748, removing the galleys from the Royal Navy. Until their closures in 1848 in the beginning of the 2nd Republic, those condemned to forced labour were employed for the Royal dockyards. He publishes in 1947 La Galère [The Galley].

172

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

15. “[…] this chain, residue of a very ancient order, in which prisons were called keeps and dungeons, in which prisoners, like sailors, were galley slaves, dims the modern cell with a romantic Brest or Toulon fog” (Genet, 1963, p. 250) [“cette chaîne, résidu d’un ordre très ancien, où les prisons s’appelaient geôles ou cachots, où les prisonniers, comme les marins, étaient galériens, embue la cellule moderne d’un brouillard brestois ou toulonnais romanesque” 1951, p. 294.] 16. Institution created by the law of the 10 January 1849 to take care of the Seine district orphans. See the work of Ivan Jablonka (2006). 17. The Parisian argot was well-known by Genet, despite spending his whole childhood in the Morvan countryside with his foster family (Jablonka, 2004). 18. In Our Lady of the Flowers (1951, pp. 237–242), Genet describes the domination of some stronger boys, the tattoos, the love between inmates during nights in their hammocks… 19. “Les gosses attendaient donc, enfin, de pouvoir commettre de vrais crimes, comme prétexte d’aller en enfer” (1951, p. 237). 20. Condemned to Transportation, the forced labour sentence for blood crimes. 21. “J’ai la certitude qu’au bagne seulement je pourrai continuer une vie qui fut tranchée quand j’y entrai” (p. 292). 22. Le Bagne was an unfinished work, recomposed by Michel Corvin and Albert Dichy and published by Gallimard (1994). 23. The Front Populaire government, by the action of its subsecretary for colonies and representative for French Guiana Gaston Monerville, decided the closure of the bagne. The last convoy was sent this same year. Nevertheless, in the Second World War context, the effective closure of the camps was delayed. The Liberation and the overcrowding of the prisons provoked some hesitations and the Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni Transportation Camp finally closed in 1953. 24. “Les prisons centrales ont leur pouvoir: ce n’est pas le même. [que celui du bagne]. Il est mineur” (1946, p. 11). 25. “Ainsi mon trouble se prolonge-t-il jusqu’à cette région de moi-même: la Guyane”.(Genet, 1949, p. 16). 26. “Mettray, maintenant détruit, se continue, se prolonge dans le temps, et il me semble encore que Fontevrault a ses racines dans le monde végétal de notre bagne d’enfants” (Genet, 1951, p. 53). 27. See, for instance, Year of the Monkey (2019, p. 8).

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

173

28. “Every Sunday I would take a long walk to a deserted beach café to have a coffee and a jelly doughnut, two things forbidden in a home regimented by healthy food. I savoured these small indulgences, slipping a quarter in the jukebox and listening to “Strawberries Fields” three time in a row. It was my private ritual and the words and voice of John Lennon provided me with strength when I faltered” (Smith, 2010, p. 19). 29. For instance, Patti Smith gave an interview in 2015 entitled “Patti Smith says: “M Train” is the roadmap of her life” (q on cbc, s.d.). 30. “Just as I was mapping out where to install a sink and a coffee machine, Fred implored me to come and live with him in Detroit. Nothing seemed more vital than to join my love, whom I was destined to marry. Saying good-bye to New York City and the aspirations it contained, I packed what was most precious and left all else behind—in the wake, forfeiting my deposit and my café. I didn’t mind. The solitary hours I’d spent drinking coffee at the card table, awash in the radiance of my café dream, were enough for me” (Smith, 2015, p. 10). 31. Maurice Blanchot (1955). 32. Patti Smith uses the word transmission and talks about it in a very accurate way during this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b75 X42iheqY. 33. “Que ma vie doit être légende c’est-à-dire lisible et sa lecture donner naissance à quelque émotion nouvelle que je nomme poésie. Je ne suis plus rien, qu’un prétexte” (Genet, 1949, p. 133). 34. “Les fautes parfois - qui sont des faits – font surgir la poésie. Beaux, ces faits n’en sont pas moins un danger. Il me serait difficile - et impoli d’exposer ici l’examen mental de Harcamone. Je suis poète en face de ses crimes et je ne puis dire qu’une chose, c’est que ces crimes libérèrent de telles effluves de roses qu’il en restera parfumé, et son souvenir et le souvenir de son séjour ici, jusqu’aux plus reculés de nos jours” (Genet, 1946, pp. 83–84). 35. “Genet n’a pas d’histoire profane, il n’a qu’une histoire sainte, ou, si l’on veut, comme les sociétés dites ‘archaïques’ il transforme continuellement l’histoire en catégories mythiques” (Sartre, 1952, p. 13). 36. French central prisons stand in former monasteries and then prisoners are jailed in monks’ cells. For instance, Fontevrault, Poissy and Clairvaux. 37. “The physical or metaphysical sky is not a ceiling. The sky of religions is a ceiling. It ends the world. […] Abhorring the infinite, religions

174

38.

39.

40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

imprison us in a universe as limited as the universe of prison […]” (Genet, 1949/1964, pp. 58–59) “[…] Le ciel physique ou métaphysique n’est pas un plafond. Le ciel des religions est un plafond. Il finit le monde. […] Par horreur de l’infini, les religions nous emprisonnent dans un univers aussi limité que l’univers de la prison […]” (Genet, 1951, p. 58). “Pourtant la vie que je mène requiert ces conditions d’abandon des choses terrestres qu’exige de ses saints l’Église et toutes les Églises. Puis elle ouvre, elle force une porte qui donne sur le merveilleux. Et la sainteté se reconnaît encore à ceci, c’est qu’elle conduit au Ciel par la voie du péché” (Genet, 1946, p. 57). “C’est aussi la sainteté que je retourne chercher dans le déroulement de cette aventure. Il faut bien que j’aille à la recherche d’un Dieu qui est le mien puisqu’on regardant des images du bagne, j’eus soudain le cœur voilé par la nostalgie d’un pays que j’ai connu ailleurs qu’à la Guyane, ailleurs que sur les cartes et les livres, mais que j’ai découvert en moi” (Genet, 1946, pp. 79–80). “Harcamone” had “succeeded” (Genet, 1946, p. 8). “Ce livre, j’ai voulu le faire des éléments transposés, sublimés, de ma vie de condamné […] Le monde recule jusqu’à n’être qu’un point d’or dans un ciel si ténébreux que l’abîme entre notre monde et l’autre est tel qu’il ne reste plus, de réel, que notre tombe. Alors, j’y commence une existence de vrai mort” (Genet, 1951, p. 204). In the sense that Genet could liberate himself from the quest for the love of a mother he never knew. “Ma vie doit être légende, c’est-à-dire, lisible et sa lecture (doit) donner naissance à quelque émotion nouvelle que je nomme poésie. Je ne suis plus rien, qu’un prétexte” (Genet, 1949, p. 133). “La colonie de Mettray, le sanctuaire vers quoi montaient les rêves de notre enfance. Je sentais que ses murs conservaient (…) la forme même du futur” (Genet, 1946, p. 6). Marked by the publication of “L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti” in 1957.

7 Writing the French Guiana Penal Colony

175

References Artiaga, L. (2007). Des torrents de papier. Catholicisme et lectures populaires au XIXè siècle. Pulim. Ernst, G. (2014). Fleur: Vol. Dictionnaire Jean Genet. Honoré Champion. Fini, L., Genet, J. (1947). La Galère. Jacques Loyau Fontvieille-Cordani, A. (2014). Bagnard. In M.-C. Hubert (Eds.), Dictionnaire Jean Genet (pp. 55–59). Honoré Champion. Fureix, E., & Jarrige, F. (2015). La Modernité désanchantée. Relire l’histoire du XIXème siècle français. La Découverte. Genet, J. (1942). Le condamné à mort. S.n. English translation by D. Di Prima, A. Marlowe, H. and B. Rohmer (1965), The Man Sentenced to Death. Pirated Editions. Genet, J. (1946). Le Miracle de la rose. Gallimard. English translation by B. Frechtman (1965), Miracle of the Rose. Grove Press. Genet, J. (1949). Journal du voleur. Gallimard. English translation by B. Frechtman (1964), The Thief’s Journal. Grove Press. Genet, J. (1951). Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. Gallimard. English translation by B. Frechtman (1963), Our Lady of the Flowers. Grove Press. Genet, J. (1994). Le Bagne. Gallimard. Genet, J. (2007). L’atelier d’Alberto Giacometti. Gallimard Hugo, V. (1862). Les Misérables. Albert Lacroix et Cie. Jablonka, I. (2006). Ni père ni mère. Histoire des enfants de l’Assistance publique (1874-1939). Seuil. Kalifa, D. (1995). La Plume et le Sang. Récits de crimes et société à la Belle Epoque. Fayard. Kalifa, D. (2009). Biribi : Les bagnes coloniaux de l’armée française. Éditions Perrin Kalifa, D. (2013). Les Bas-fonds. Histoire d’un imaginaire. Seuil. Lambert, E. (Éd.). (2016). Jean Genet, l’échapée belle. Gallimard. Londres, A. (2008). Au bagne (Réédition (1ère, 1923)). Arléa. Mac Orlan, P. (1928). La photographie et le fantastique social. Les Annales, 2321. Mac Orlan, P. (1933). Le bataillon de la Mauvaise chance, un civil chez les Joyeux. Les Éditions de France Maurice, B. (1955). L’Espace littéraire. Gallimard. q on cbc. (s. d.). Patti Smith says “M Train” is the roadmap to her life. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFHTWuLRLzY

176

S. Tracol and G. Alhinho

Sartre, J.-P. (1952). Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Gallimard. Smith, P. (2008). Cahier. Actes Sud Smith, P. (2010). Just kids. Bloomsbury. Smith, P. (2015). M Train. Bloomsbury. Smith, P. (2017). Devotion. Yale University Press. Smith, P. (2019). Year of the monkey. Knopf.

Part III Framing and Reframing the Colonial Prison

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia: Visualizing the Bagne Charles Forsdick

From the period of its inauguration in the 1850s, the French penal colony (known as the bagne) has lent itself to a proliferation of visual representations of transportation, incarceration and forced labour. These began with the often sensationalist illustrations in travelogues such as Frédéric Bouyer’s La Guyane française: Notes et souvenirs d’un voyage exécuté en 1862–1863 (1867), prominent among which is an illustration of “forçats cannibales” [convict cannibals]; but the marked time lag between the emergence of the French bagne and the decline of its British equivalent subsequently permitted wholesale engagement with the mechanical reproduction of images. Notable examples of such modern material include postcards, produced to reflect multiple stages of the convict journey, beginning at Saint-Martin-de-Ré (the point of departure from metropolitan France) and extending to everyday life in the penal colony itself, as well as photographs in newspapers and C. Forsdick (B) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_8

179

180

C. Forsdick

the true crime magazines that proliferated in the interwar period. The richness of this iconographic archive is demonstrated by Louis-José Barbançon’s Mémorial du bagne calédonien (2020), a two-volume study of visual representations of the penal colony in New Caledonia, which also includes a series of cartoon-like sketches produced by convicts within the bagne itself (much as the artist Flag, pseudonym of Francis Lagrange, would later provide a graphic archive of the twentieth-century French Guianese bagne). The afterlives of the penal institution, following its eventual closure in French Guiana in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, have themselves been associated with a new set of visual representations, notably in recent photography projects on the ends of empire: Rodolphe Hammadi illustrated Patrick Chamoiseau’s Guyane: traces-mémoires du bagne (1994) and Thomas Jolion includes images of the penal colony in his Vestiges d’empire (2016), a photo-book on postcolonial ruination across sites of the former French empire. Privileged in this diverse visual archive is the bande dessinée, a key form of representation that has used the methods of graphic history to excavate memories of the bagne and assert the institution’s centrality to both local and global histories. Such works have played a key role in demonstrating the multifaceted nature of the carceral archipelago in which overseas penal colonies play an essential part. On the one hand, as the three volumes of Les Innocents coupables (2011, 2012, 2013) by Laurent Galandon and Anlor illustrate, they remind readers of the penitential establishments in France itself—the so-called bagnes agricoles—developed to create a brutal regime for the disciplining of young offenders such as Jean Genet (discussed by Samuel Tracol and Gloria Alhinho in this volume, in their chapter on Patti Smith); on the other, comics have illuminated largely silenced penal histories, such as the bagnes militaires in North Africa foregrounded by bandes dessinées including Biribi (2012) by Sylvain Ricard and Olivier Thomas. Within this corpus, it is French Guiana that has tended to play the more prominent role. France’s South American penal colony functioned for over a century, and its complex histories and varied ecologies have generated an extensive corpus of comics produced in France as well as in the Caribbean itself (Forsdick, 2019). Key to this development has been the recognition of a series of celebrity figures associated with the bagne,

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

181

ranging from convicts themselves (such as Henri Charrière, aka Papillon, Alfred Dreyfus, Eugène Dieudonné or Guillaume Seznec, a Breton found guilty of the murder of the wood merchant Pierre Quéméneur, conseiller général of Finistère) to reformers such as the journalist Albert Londres (whose graphic representation is discussed in this volume by Chantal Cointot and Sophie Fuggle).1 At the same time, however, comics have provided a site for the development of graphic microhistories, narratives that rehumanize the stories of individual and often anonymous bagnards, evident in albums such as Piero Ruggeri and Filippo Neri’s Jos: Maudits soient-ils (2018), the two volumes of Fabien Vehlman and Eric Sagot’s Paco (2013, 2017), or the remarkably multilayered and multidirectional narratives recounted by Blanco and Perrin in Aux Îles, point de salut (2011) and Cayenne, matricule 51,793 (2013). The period during which the penal colony of New Caledonia was active lasted around a third of that of French Guiana, although in both contexts—Melanesian and South American—the institution has continued to shape politics, culture and society into the present. Although underexplored, the New Caledonian bagne has nevertheless still generated a considerable body of representations in graphic form. This is linked in part to the fact that the Pacific territory, unlike French Guiana, has a well-established comics industry of its own, epitomized by Bernard Berger’s La Brousse en folie, a now substantial series launched in 1983. At the same time, New Caledonia reveals various continuities with French Guiana that lend themselves to graphic treatment. The ecologies of the penal colony—not least those of more remote spaces such as the île des Pins or the northern extremities of its main island, Grande Terre— form the context for a number of comics, and convicts transported to the Pacific also include several considered to be celebrity prisoners, such as the communard Louise Michel who herself features as a recurrent figure in a series of graphic histories (of which more below). This corpus reveals a number of the traits of the graphic history genre more generally. These include a capacity to recover silenced or marginalized voices while simultaneously eliciting empathy among its readers. In the particular case studied in this chapter, the genre is perhaps most remarkable for its function as a vehicle for penal historiography and indeed public history more generally. The aim is to provide an analysis of the place

182

C. Forsdick

of the bagne in graphic histories of New Caledonia. At the same time, it explores several albums focused exclusively on the penal colony while also introducing a strand of works representing other graphic stories in which the institution nevertheless plays a key role. These include most notably bandes dessinées about the Paris Commune, the revolutionary government that seized power in Paris in the early years of the Third Republic from March to May 1871. Finally, the chapter looks beyond representations of the bagne to consider graphic narratives describing the post-carceral society that followed the institution’s abolition, underlining the extent to which the aesthetics of the comic book permit the representation of penal afterlives as a form of spectral presence in the twentiethand twenty-first-century territory.

Colonial Histories of New Caledonia In a substantial four-volume graphic history of New Caledonia by Philippe Godard, Eric Loblanchès and Serge Sirac, Historial de la Nouvelle Calédonie en bandes dessinées (1982), the bagne is limited to a single volume. The comics project was an ambitious one, seeking to present a clear teleology of the territory’s history in graphic form, from first European contact to the 1970s. The first volume, covering 1730s to 1850s, focuses on “découvreurs, missionnaires et conquérants” [discoverers, missionaries and conquerors], setting out the initial Anglo-French rivalry over the archipelago and the progressive establishment of French rule. The third volume provides an overview of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It covers in detail the governorship of Paul Feillet but pays little attention over the space of two pages (Godard et al., 1982, III, 24–25) to his abolition of the penal colony, a process described by his colourful metaphor of turning off a dirty water tap. The emphasis is placed here on the possibility of a post-carceral alternative, associated with plans to encourage agricultural developments through the attraction of settlers as well as technological progress through the construction of railways. The fourth and final volume analyses the interwar period and the impact of the presence of U.S. troops on the islands in World War 2, culminating in the official visit of President de Gaulle in 1966. It is,

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

183

however, in the second volume, devoted to the period of military governors of the archipelago, that the brief period of existence of penal colony is addressed. This album begins with the arrival in May 1864 of 250 convicts onboard the frigate Iphigénie and provides an account of how these first prisoners were forced to build the infrastructure of the bagne. The narrative suggests at this stage the parallel and often segregated evolution of the penal colony and the colony itself, although it is clear from the outset that the former is a constant topic of conversation among the inhabitants of the latter, suggesting an inevitable convergence despite attempts at geographical and social distinction. The purpose of the Historial de la Nouvelle Calédonie collection was, across the four volumes, to present the emergence of New Caledonia as a territory in its own right, with the result that the period of the bagne becomes one influence among others on the development of the colony. There is an interest in key turning points, such as the arrival of the Paris Communards in November 1873 or the escape of radical journalist Henri Rochefort, but equal attention is paid in this second volume to the development of a mining industry, the emergence of a commercial infrastructure, the growing awareness of Kanak resistance to the French colonial presence and the recruitment of indentured Asian labour to support the burgeoning nickel industry. The penal colony is regularly associated with alcohol abuse and unrest, as if the institution was destined from the outset to be short-lived as New Caledonia rapidly sought alternative means of sustainability. What emerges therefore for the Historial de la Nouvelle Calédonie is a sense of historical compartmentalization as opposed to any of the active entanglement of histories that would become apparent in some later bandes dessinées. Far from granting the penal colony any foundational function in the determination of the territory’s identity, from its annexation by France in 1853 until the present day, the multi-volume work seeks instead to relativize the role of the institution within a broader historical sweep, foregrounding what in an Australian context would be considered the “convict stain” and proposing none of the sense of a foundational “convict aristocracy” that would eventually follow in its wake. Unlike in the case of French Guiana, there are few graphic narratives focused exclusively on the New Caledonian bagne, meaning that it is

184

C. Forsdick

not granted in this genre the definitive status in the territory’s history that a contemporary visitor might still detect in the persistent traces of the institution both in the built environment and the collective imaginary. One of the few publications that challenges this tendency is the lurid album L’île des pins (1984) by Bouquillard and Clavé. Set in the 1870s, little more than twenty years after the French annexation of the archipelago, the narrative is focused on three locations: the New Caledonian capital Nouméa and the then convict island, the île de Nou, offshore to its west; the island of its title, south of the main island of Grande Terre, to which political prisoners from the Paris Commune would be sent; and on-board the ship transporting these Communards to Melanesia. L’île des pins is primarily an account of the three-way struggle for control of the eponymous island between the Kanak population, the church authorities and the military seeking to use the space for the penal purposes noted above. This incomplete narrative, first published in Charlie mensuel , does not move beyond a first album and constitutes a fragmented work in which the focus on the island in its title is complemented by observations of everyday life in the penal colony as well as an account of life of the Communards on-board the convict ship (where the racing of rats around an elaborately constructed track reflects the broader sensationalism on which the work relies).

Other (Graphic) Histories The previous section has demonstrated the existence of a graphic corpus, part of which has been produced in New Caledonia itself, that illustrates (and often relativizes), with varying degrees of historiographic ambition, both the story of the bagne and the account of the institution’s role in the wider development of the colony. A parallel group of albums has a different function in that it underlines the role of the New Caledonian penal colony in wider frames, not only those of the Francosphere more generally but also of a broader global political history. The emphases in these works range from active marginalization of the colony, seen as a peripheral location in histories centred more on the Global North, to a more robust assertion of the role of the archipelago in a transnational

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

185

frame. Central to many of these works are political prisoners from the 1870s at a time when New Caledonia became the site of incarceration of a number of those involved in 1871 Paris Commune as well as of Kabyle rebels involved from March 1871 to January 1872 in the contemporaneous El Mokrani revolt in Algeria. It is these works that yield the closest the Melanesian bagne has to a “celebrity” prisoner in the person of Louise Michel. The narrative of Bouquillard and Clavé L’île des pins—discussed already above—unfolds against a backcloth of the Commune, with the arrival of Michel and her fellow activists associated with the album’s lurid and often sensationalist narrative of intercommunal rivalry. The two opening panels of the first page (1984, p. 3) portray the execution of Communards against the mur de fédérés [the so-called Communards’ Wall] in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and the subsequent departure of survivors to the bagne. As noted above, it shifts immediately, however, to portray simultaneous events on the île des Pins where the tensions between the indigenous population and the Catholic authorities form a central part of the narrative that follows. Other albums integrate New Caledonia more fleetingly into their wider narratives. The graphic version of Emile Zola’s short story “Jacques Damour” by Vincent and Gaël Henry (2017) begins with the reunification of the eponymous Jacques with his daughter, and it is only as the narrative progresses that his picaresque story becomes clear. An artisan in Paris in 1871, the protagonist reluctantly commits to the Commune, is imprisoned, tried and deported to the bagne. Recorded dead in a shipwreck after he has escaped the penal colony, he assumes a different identity before benefitting from an amnesty to attempt a reunification with his wife. She, however, is now remarried with a butcher with whom she has had two children. Jacques’s own daughter, the mistress of a rich Parisian, offers him the use of a rural retreat to where he withdraws from the world. In an album of over 130 pages, the New Caledonian episode fundamental to the plot is presented only towards the end, in the space of four of these. This twist in the plot provides an explanation for the mysteries regarding Jacques’s past, but a major conceit is that his companion Berru, who had originally persuaded him to join the Commune, interrupts the story that he claims to have heard innumerable times already. The truncated graphic account of the period in

186

C. Forsdick

New Caledonia covers many of the tropes evident in other bandes dessinées, including life on-board the convict ship La Virginie, the arrival at the île de Nou and construction by Jacques of his own dwelling on the île des Pins. Allowed to return to Nouméa on grounds of good behaviour, Jacques meets Louise Michel and becomes involved with her in the education of Kanak children, but, desperate to rejoin his family, he escapes (in the company of radical journalist Henri Rochefort) and begins his return to France. In the album, as in Zola’s story, this Melanesian interlude, despite its importance for the plot, ultimately plays a minor role in the author’s attempt to suggest that Jacques’s rural exile is a reflection of France’s own willingness to silence its own radical, even revolutionary past. The important place of New Caledonia in the experience of the Communards is given greater prominence in Des graines sous la neige (Michon & Rouxel, 2017), a graphic biography of the militant anarchist and feminist Nathalie Lemel, who was deported to the bagne with Louise Michel and Henri Rochefort but has often been eclipsed by more famous Communards in accounts of this period. The album exploits the technique of flashback, using Spanish director Armand Guerra’s visit to Lemel in 1913 (when he was researching his film on the Commune that he would direct the following year) as a way of presenting episodes from her life, starting from her childhood in Brest in the 1830s. A significant portion of the album is devoted to her deportation, with thirteen pages describing their itinerary on-board La Virginie from La Rochelle to Nouméa. Michon and Rouxel not only document in graphic form the everyday conditions (dietary and other) on the ship, where the women are largely segregated from the men, but also focus on the emerging relationships between Lemel, Michel and Rochefort that will become increasingly important in their exile. The details of the itinerary—including stops at the Canaries, Sao Paolo and Santa Catarina Island—are tracked carefully, and a full page is devoted to the linecrossing ceremony, the ritual for those crossing the Equator for the first time. A map of the journey dominates most of a page (2017, p. 98), underlining the length and extent of the voyage and demonstrating the major displacement constituted by this transportation to Melanesia. The arrival in Nouméa after 120 days at sea is captured in a frame that covers

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

187

a whole page (2017, p. 101), an approach adopted also for an image of the camp de Numbo on the Ducos peninsula (103) as the graphic artist seeks to give a clear sense of the penal context in which the prisoners were detained. Building on this detail, Des graines sous la neige proceeds to provide an imagined account of the everyday life of the transportés, outlining agricultural work, interactions between the prisoners and their relationship to nature. An important aspect of the album is its attention to the links between the Communards and the Kanak population, and, in an unexpected twist, Lemel’s sympathy for the Melanesian population (and sense even of a shared struggle) is reflected in her anger at discovering that the decapitated head of the rebel chief Ataï (leader of the 1878 revolt) is being transported to France in 1879 on the same ship as the amnestied prisoners. On returning to Paris, Lemel was employed by the radical paper L’Intransigeant and continued her political activism, but this period is not recounted in the album, which passes directly from New Caledonia to Louise Michel’s funeral in 1905. The result is a foregrounding of the experience of the bagne in the lives of the Communards and an associated privileging in the bande dessinée of the Melanesian sites of memory associated with them. The capacity of the comic form to explore the geographical entanglements evident in accounts of the transported Communards is central to another graphic biography, in this case of Louise Michel herself, in which the New Caledonian bagne again plays a definitive role. The red virgin and the vision of utopia by Mary and Bryan Talbot (2016) uses similar processes of graphic analepsis and prolepsis to those deployed in Des graines sous la neige, with many of these devices focused around Michel’s funeral in 1905. Following the sentence of deportation, the narrative recounts—as in the graphic biography of Lemel—the sea journey to Nouméa. It portrays, in the black and white style of the book with its occasional flashes of red associated with Michel’s scarf and books, the conditions below deck and the interactions between prisoners (including again Michel’s with Nathalie Lemel). The detailed stages of the journey are not tracked, however, and there is a self-referential focus to Michel’s reading and writing, with a particularly striking episode showing nightmares triggered by her reading of Jules Verne’s Twenty thousand leagues

188

C. Forsdick

under the sea. The arrival in New Caledonia in December 1873— initially imagined by Michel as a “tropical paradise” or “utopian vision” (2016, p. 77)—subverts the idealized topos of the Melanesian island by presenting instead the reality of the Ducos peninsula: an emaciated child and ramshackle housing. Central to the Talbots’ account is an element present but relatively marginal in the graphic biography of Lemel, i.e., Michel’s interactions with the Kanak population (and also with the Kabyle rebels transported at the same time as the Communards). The red virgin focuses on Michel’s work of educating Melanesian children, but also her attention to parallels between the Commune and the El Mokrani revolt: “Their struggle in Algeria was the same as ours. Surely you can see that ?” (Talbot & Talbot, 2016, 99; emphasis in the original). In a context of land disputes with the colonial authorities, Michel sides with the Kanak, tearing her red scarf in two to serve as bandanas for two rebels. The Talbots also provide an account of the Ataï rebellion of 1878, against the appropriation of indigenous land by the colonial authorities, and the violent repression the Kanak suffered in its aftermath. Amnestied in 1880, Michel campaigns for a pardon for all of the Communards. “The local people wept”, note the Talbots, “when Louise left for home” (2016, 105). Many portrayals of the bagne in visual culture, not least popular ones such as the filmed versions of Papillon, have implied the whiteness of the penal colony, but this is an emphasis undermined by The red virgin, in which the Talbots highlight the transcolonial flows of political (and often civil) prisoners with which the institution is associated. At the same time, they use the graphic form to explore notions of freedom, linking the struggles of the Commune with those of the Kabyle and Kanak rebels. The pages of the graphic novel become a site in which these connections are framed, and where, in the context of the penal colony, the limits of liberté , égalité and fraternité are revealed.

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

189

Post-Carceral Histories and Graphic Memories As the corpus of graphic histories of New Caledonia expands, there is now a growing interest within the form in the afterlives of the bagne— and most notably in the forms of labour, essential to the establishment and successful function of a future colony, that would replace that provided by the convicts themselves. Prominent in such a subgenre is Anthony Pastor’s La vallée du diable, a 2017 album that tells the story of a composite family who arrive as settlers in the post-World War 1 colony in the early 1920s, having travelled from their native Savoy. The graphic narrative continues a story begun in an earlier album, Le sentier des reines (2015), in which Pastor describes the previous journey across France of Blanca and Pauline, widowed when their husbands die in an avalanche having returned from the trenches, accompanied by an adopted orphan Florentin. In a series of adventures, Blanca seeks to return to the widow of her husband’s commanding officer a pocket watch the former had recovered at the time of the latter’s death. The album recounts this itinerary across France but at the same time constitutes a reflection on the condition of women in the immediate aftermath of World War 1. It ends with the protagonists—joined now by the war veteran Arpin, on-board a ship to London, from where they plan to travel to New Zealand— seeking the “odeurs de liberté” [smells of freedom] (Pastor, 2015, p. 120) of which they had previously been deprived. La vallée du diable—a project on which the colonial historian Isabelle Merle served as advisor, reflecting the serious grounding in historiography manifest in many albums of this type—picks up the narrative with the protagonists on-board a ship to Australia. The cramped conditions on ship represented in the colourless opening pages recall those of convicts who would have previously made a similar journey, reflecting the visual potential of the graphic form to create implicit parallels between a range of itineraries unwillingly undertaken. On arrival, the migrants meet James Jacques, a Franco-Australian cattle farmer, who persuades them to travel on to New Caledonia, a colony still, in the immediate wake of the bagne, seeking “des colons vertueux” [virtuous settlers] (Pastor, 2017, p. 5). The graphic narrative explores the fortunes of these migrants as they attempt to settle in an environment—based

190

C. Forsdick

on the North Province commune of Koné—where social and interethnic tensions are complemented by a profound uncertainty about the new life these new arrivals seek to lead in the colony. Central to this situation is often violent confrontation between Kanak characters and the white French settler population, but this is compounded by the spectral presence of the penal colony underlying much of the narrative. Jacques’s ulterior motive of marrying Pauline is thwarted when, in what is ostensibly a marriage of convenience to avoid his advances, she becomes Arpin’s wife. Tensions between the couple surround Arpin’s work as a nickel miner, with Pauline’s comments on his appearance—“la barbe c’est pour les libérés” [beards are for former convicts] (2017, p. 23)— reflecting the clear social hierarchies evident in the colony almost thirty years after the disestablishment of the bagne. In conversation with a fellow miner (and, significantly, former bagnard ) Rameau, Arpin creates a parallel between his status as demobilized infantryman from World War 1 and the ex-convicts alongside whom he works: “Armée ou bagne, on a traversé l’enfer, c’est pareil… La France, elle voulait se débarrasser de nous… Mais […] on est encore là et on est dans le meme camp” [Army or penal colony, we have been through the same hell… France wanted to get rid of us. But we are still here and in the same situation] (2017, p. 38). Pauline decides to follow Arpin to the miners’ camp, a journey that requires her to cross Kanak territory. It is here that she learns that her husband has had a child with a Melanesian woman, a revelation that leads—in the midst of a powerful storm—to the narrative’s violent dénouement: Arpin and his Kanak concubine are killed in a landscape eerily reminiscent of the no-man’s-land of World War 1, while the settlers’ house is burnt to the ground. The book’s epilogue, set in spring 1939, shows Paulette and Florentin (now a couple) returning to Savoy together with Bianca and Arpin’s mixed-race daughter Camille. Despite the coming global conflict, the family appears to have established an idyllic existence, surrounded by the snow-covered mountains, that is diametrically opposed to the apocalyptic environment they had faced in New Caledonia. The shocked reaction of an elderly local man whom Camille addresses as “cousin” (Pastor, 2017, p. 117) reflects the issues of (re)integration the family has undoubtedly faced, but their idyll is linked to republican ideology and especially to the rhetoric of

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

191

social progress through education (evident as the girl discusses her high marks at school and associated ambition to become President of the Republic [2017, 119]). Given the post-war poverty and memories of conflict that had forced the protagonists to migrate, the album does not romanticize modern France. Instead, the album contrasts the country with the New Caledonia of the decades following the end of the penal colony. This is a territory in which systematic violence against the Kanak population exists alongside continued hostility towards former convicts (represented by the character Renaud). At the same time, the album portrays continued prejudice against the descendants of convicts (such as James Jacques himself ) and explores the ways in which the search for a sustainable labour force remained an ongoing challenge. Overall, La vallée du diable captures the complexity of a society in which the carceral past continues to shape the colonial present. La vallée du diable is a highly atmospheric book which portrays the fraught interpersonal and interethnic relationships that characterized New Caledonia in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the detailed research into material and visual culture on which it depends represents memory-traces with which the reader is invited to engage. As Florentin rushes to join Pauline at the miner’s camp, he passes a group of silent workers in conical hats who are sifting the extracted soil. Unremarked and unremarkable in the graphic history, these figures are, however, key members of the colony’s workforce following the end of the bagne. Such intercolonial displacements of people have often been absent from the work of memory in France itself, apart from among the communities to which they directly relate. Again, graphic history has played a key role in the task of mnemonic recovery, a tendency illustrated by the French-Vietnamese cartoonist Clément Baloup’s in his “Mémoires de Viet Kieu” series. The first three volumes provide accounts of people of Vietnamese descent or of those who grew up in Vietnam but subsequently moved overseas focus primarily on the impact of wars of independence between 1945 and 1975 and also on the formation of diasporic communities in North America and Taiwan, but two additional volumes—marked as “hors-série” [special issue]—take as their subject the marginalized histories of Vietnamese indentured labour. The first of these, Les lính tho.,, immigrés de force (2017), is based around the

192

C. Forsdick

enquiry by journalist Pierre Daum into the role of forced Vietnamese labour in the cultivation of rice in the Camargue during World War 2. Through an account of interviews and fieldwork, the album presents the process whereby these stories were uncovered. The second, Les engagés de Nouvelle-Calédonie (2020), explores a different facet of this history by presenting another enquiry—on this occasion conducted by Baloup himself, alongside the Australian academic Tess Do—into those indentured workers from Vietnam persuaded to travel to New Caledonia. Recruited for five years and exclusively in the service of French companies, they arrived from the early 1890s onwards in order to address labour shortages in the nickel mining industry as the colony rapidly sought to reinvent itself in the wake of the bagne. Baloup describes a journey with his grandfather to the North Province of Grande Terre where they uncover the stories of three different Vietnamese workers. While the narrative is firmly located in a period after the penal colony, the presence of the institution remains palpable: one of the first sites that Clément discovers is an off-coast prison-island used previously for groups of recalcitrant workers (2020, p. 6), a reflection of the continued use in the country of regimes of incarceration; the workers themselves are identified by the French by a number, used both to designate and address them (2020, p. 13); the brutality of the workers’ supervisor is also foregrounded, as is the systematic humiliation and violence to which they were subjected (with one character, Van or “le cuistot”, forced for instance to eat his rations from a shovel [2020, p. 31] before finally being shot during a labour dispute). Between 1891 and 1939, an average of over 3000 Vietnamese workers undertook the journey each year (2020, p. 63), but following labour reforms in the French colonies in 1946, those remaining in New Caledonia were given the choice of repatriation or settling in Melanesia. The book focuses in its conclusions on those who remained, exploring the racist sentiment they faced during the Vietnam War, the intra-communal tensions between those who were pro- or anti-Communist, and the progressive establishment— in the context of such broader challenges—of a Vietnamese diasporic community, notably in Nouméa. Central to this process is a sustained travail de mémoire, epitomized by the creation of a Vietnamese cultural centre in 1986 (2020, p. 57), the emergence of literary accounts of the

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

193

workers’ experience, notably in the writings of Jean Vanmai (Baloup, 2020, p. 58), and the inauguration of a memorial statue in 2013 (2020, p. 59). Baloup’s work is part of this broader construction of a Vietnamese diasporic memory, but Les engagés de Nouvelle-Calédonie is also to be read contrapuntally—as has been suggested above—in relation to texts such as Pastor’s La vallée du diable. Both Baloup and Pastor’s graphic histories, despite the significant differences in their content, focus and framing, contribute to what might be dubbed a decarceration of New Caledonian memory, moving beyond accounts of the bagne to assert, for the benefit of the readers beyond Melanesia (and notably in France), the complex other narratives, metropolitan and colonial, associated with the French presence in the Pacific. At the same time, however, far from evacuating memories of the penal colonial, these albums underline the persistent presence of the institution, both physical (in terms of convicts and their descendants) and more spectral (in terms of the social structures and attitudes that have persisted beyond it). Graphic narratives become in this way a key aspect of memory work, excavating often silenced memories of the past (including those of the bagne itself ), but performing on the page, in the juxtaposition of text and image, the ways in which those memories co-exist and interact in a shared present.

Conclusion Graphic fiction remains the form in which prominent interventions in New Caledonian historiography continue to emerge. 2021, the year of the third independence referendum on the islands (a vote won by a massive majority for those seeking continued dependency on France, primarily as a result of a boycott of the process by indigenous peoples in the context of COVID-19), saw the publication of La solution pacifique: L’art de la paix en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Mayko et al., 2021). This account of the violence in New Caledonia in the 1980s and of the efforts to transform the fracture of civil war into a shared future is rooted in observation of political figures of the time. The primary focus is on the Kanak independence movement and the increasing tension between

194

C. Forsdick

the Melanesian populations and the politicians and army officers representing France. While the album focuses on the locations of the civil unrest of the 1980s, the spectral presence of the bagne is nevertheless still apparent. A public meeting in January 1985, held in the bandstand on the Place des cocotiers (2021, 20), is a reminder of this substratum. The structure is one of a number in Nouméa—the cathedral is another, as is the tax office—built by convict labour, a lingering reminder in this context that penal transportation was not only central to the development of the colony but also persists, often hidden in plain sight, in the neo-colonial everyday.

Note 1. Although Papillon’s representation in visual culture is associated most notably in the two films devoted to him by Franklin J. Schaffner in 1973 and Michael Noer in 2017, his life forms the basis of a multimedia bande dessinée by Stéphane Sanseverino (Richard et al., 2016) in which the singer recounts the life of the bagnard through the sequence of songs accompanied by images in the album.

Works Cited Baloup, C. (2017). Les lính tho.,, immigrés de force. La Boîte à Bulles. Baloup, C. (2020). Les engagés de Nouvelle-Calédonie. La Boîte à Bulles. Barbançon, L.-J. (2020). Mémorial du bagne calédonien: Entre les chaînes et la terre (2 vols.). Au vent des îles. Blanco, S., & Perrin, L. (2011). Aux îles, point de salut. Caraïbeseditions. Blanco, S., & Perrin, L. (2013). Cayenne, matricule 51793. Blanco & Perrin. Bouquillard, J., & Clavé, F. (1984). L’île des pins. Dargaud. Bouyer, F. (1867). La Guyane française: Notes et souvenirs d’un voyage exécuté en 1862–1863. Hachette. Chamoiseau, P., & Hammadi, R. (1994). Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne. Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites.

8 Graphic Histories of New Caledonia

195

Forsdick, C. (2019). Bande dessinée and the penal imaginary: Graphic constructions of the carceral archipelago. European Comic Art, 12(2), 1–16. Galandon, L., & Anlor. (2011). Les innocents coupables: la fuite. Grand Angle. Galandon, L., & Anlor. (2012). Les innocents coupables: la trahison. Grand Angle. Galandon, L., & Anlor. (2013). Les innocents coupables: Liberté. Grand Angle. Godard, P., Loblanchès, E., & Sirac, S. (1982). Historial de la Nouvelle Calédonie en bandes dessinées (4 vols.). Nouméa Editions. Henry, V., & Henry, G. (2017). Jacques Damour. Sarbacane. Jolion, T. (2016). Vestiges d’empire. La Martinière. Mayko, Z. M., Grésy, J.-E., & Casalanguida, L. (2021). La solution pacifique: L’art de la paix en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Delcourt; Encrages. Michon, R., & Rouxel. L. (2017). Des graines sous la neige: Nathalie Lemel, communarde et visionnaire. Locus Solus. Pastor, A. (2015). Le sentier des reines. Casterman. Pastor, A. (2017). La vallée du diable. Casterman. Ricard, S., & Thomas, O. (2012). Biribi. Delcourt. Richard, C., Sanseverino, & Sylvain Dorange, S. (2016). Sanseverino est Papillon. La Boîte à Bulles. Piero Ruggeri, P., & Neri, F. (2018). Jos: Maudits soient-ils. Petit à Petit. Talbot, M., & Talbot, B. (2016). The red virgin and the vision of utopia. Jonathan Cape. Vehlman, F., & Sagot, E. (2013). Paco, les mains rouges 1: La Grande Terre. Dargaud. Vehlman, F., & Sagot, E. (2017). Paco, les mains rouges 2: Les îles. Dargaud.

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives in the Prison Museum: The Qingdao German Prison Museum Katharina Massing

Introduction This chapter analyses the different dimensions of heritage interpretation and narrative techniques employed to frame colonial histories at the German Prison Museum in Qingdao as perceived by the visitor. The prison is one of two sites of former incarceration, built by Germany after Qingdao became its colony in 1898 and one of the earliest colonial prisons in China. The prisons were an important part of the newly established German administrative structure in their attempt to build an authentic German enclave in China. Separation between German and Chinese areas was part of the city planning from the very beginning (Steinmetz, 2009). This extended to the prison system, with one prison housing mainly European prisoners and one prison built for Chinese K. Massing (B) History, Heritage and Global Cultures, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_9

197

198

K. Massing

prisoners. As such, the site represents racial segregation policies designed to control and manage the local and indigenous population often present within colonial justice systems, policies that are, in many cases, still felt today in the form of institutional racism (Mgadla, 2014; Steinmetz et al., 2017). While China was never formally colonised and colonial powers were mainly present in coastal areas, the era from the First Opium War (1839– 42) to the War of Resistance (1937–1945) is commonly described as semi-colonial (Zatsepine & Victoir, 2013; Mommsen & Osterhammel, 1986, pp. 296–297). A series of unequal treaties (1842–44, 1854, 1858, 1860), resulting from the Opium Wars, opened the country up to foreign influence and established the first treaty ports, eroding China’s sovereignty. They granted foreign powers control over treaty ports, concessions and leased territories; the right to set tariffs, extraterritoriality, coastal and river navigation rights and rights of garrisons. By 1911, there were two international settlements and 22 concessions (Wang, 2012, pp. 2–6). Colonial port cities are commonly associated with inequality, poverty and crime (Mah, 2014) and treaty ports were no exception. Multiple jurisdictions along with new economic opportunities made treaty ports and leased territories attractive to a wide number of people, not only businessmen and intellectuals, but also immigrants and refugees as well as criminals. In particular, Shanghai had the reputation of being a harbour for outlaws (Goodman and Goodman, 2012). In Qingdao, a colonial outpost run by the navy, the society consisted mainly of men. It was a temporary location for skilled workers such as engineers, soldiers, merchants and builders. As a result, prostitution including the forced prostitution of young women and children, was widespread (Coco, 2019), a fact that colonial authorities were keen to hide from German society (Mühlhahn, 2012). Before becoming a colony, Qingdao had also served as a base against pirates (Nield, 2015). It is therefore not surprising that both colonial prisons formed a vital part of the new colonial state (Steinmetz, 2009). Qingdao was first established under German colonial rule (1898– 1914), and later was occupied by Japan in 1914–1922 and 1938– 1945. It became a German colony in 1898, after the alleged killings

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

199

of two German missionaries. Germany had identified Jiaozhou Bay, where today’s Qingdao is located, as a desirable location for a colony due to its mild climate, the existence of coal and the possibility of a harbour. The incident provided the excuse needed to pressure China into granting Germany a 99-year lease over the territory. Germany’s occupation, however, lasted just under 17 years (Mühlhahn, 2013). At the time of the German occupation, the area was home to small fishing villages with a population of around 90,000. To establish a ‘model colony’, the existing villages were destroyed and replaced with a planned colonial city, which similarly to Hong Kong can be perceived as a full colony (Demgenski, 2019). German architects and construction companies erected most of the public buildings in the European centre, including the government building (completed in 1906), the governor’s mansion, a military hospital and the railway station (completed in 1901). The newly built city also included several churches and a brewery. The prison for Europeans and a second prison for Chinese (in Licun) were included in the urban master plan in 1899–1990. As a model colony Qingdao was built to represent technical advancement and proficiency, allowing the administration to invest large sums of money into the new city. Most building materials were shipped over from Germany (Mühlhahn, 2013). Qingdao architecture was designed in a unique German colonial style that adapted common German designs to local conditions with a focus on innovation and new materials. Colonial buildings in Qingdao often resembled a fortress, using rough granite or bricks, with balconies and glass porches adding a softer touch to the design (Mühlhahn, 2013). This style of architecture is also reflected in the German Prison. The German Prison Museum in Qingdao served as a site of incarceration until 1995. During the German occupation of Qingdao (1898– 1914) it held European prisoners. This changed later when Qingdao was occupied by Japan from 1914–1922 and 1938–1945 and during the Republic of China (1928–1937), when Chinese prisoners were incarcerated here. It was then used under Guomindang leadership, also known as the Nanjing Government (1945–1949), to house Japanese prisoner and traitors. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, it first served as a detention centre for Qingdao Municipal People’s court

200

K. Massing

until 1955; and after that for the Qingdao Public Security Bureau until 1995. This repurposing of colonial prisons and related sites by postcolonial regimes happens frequently (Anderson et al., 2020), a story often ignored or forgotten once these sites are turned into heritage. In Qingdao, the development of this former site of incarceration into a museum and heritage site is closely connected to the heritage strategy that the city set out as a host of the Olympic Sailing Regatta in 2008. In line with government plans, several heritage sites, including the beer museum and the prison museum, were developed for tourism. Renovations and research on the site began in late 2004, with local researchers visiting Koblenz National Archive, Freiburg Military Archive and Potsdam National Archive (Liu, 2006). The museum opened to the public on 30 April 2007. This chapter analyses how the German Prison Museum in Qingdao is framed and different dimensions of heritage are perceived through the eyes of the visitor, employing user generated data including comments, photographs and videos on trip.com (the Chinese version of Tripadvisor), Tripadvisor, Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) and YouTube. As I was unable to visit Qingdao due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach provided me with a different perspective on the site. Visitor data allowed me to experience the site myself and witness the interpretation of the site through videos and photography, while gaining a better understanding of the audience perspective. Visitor perceptions and the way they create meaning from museums space (Macdonald, 2006) are important, particularly, when it comes to dark and difficult heritage. Trofanenko (2010) shows that unintended learning can occur as part of an emotional response to death and suffering in particular at sites where education and memorialisation overlap. Prison museums can also create simplified narratives around colonialism and imprisonment that leave tourists with an incomplete understanding of the history of the site (Wilson et al., 2017). This chapter will thus demonstrate that using audience comments, photography and videos can be a valuable alternative to inperson visits and provide researchers with new insights in a time of restricted global travel and the need for sustainable research models.

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

201

Tourism research frequently uses social media and user generated content to analyse visitor experiences. It mainly employs quantitative analysis, investigating, for example, participatory culture (Mahmoudi Farahani et al., 2018) or the influence of social media on the visitor experience (Liu, 2020). Lü et al. (2022) use ctrip (now trip.com) reviews and visitor questionnaires to analyse the depth of dark experience in dark tourism at several sites including the German Prison Museum in Qingdao. The study analysed how the psychological experience of the site impacted on visitors’ visual outputs, without a detailed examination of the site. The use of user generated data in a more qualitative approach in heritage studies is less common (Flint & Jennings, 2022). Its application to frame the visitor perception of the site and experience the site almost uniquely via these offers an original methodological approach to the discussion of postcolonial sites. Furthermore, the representation and interpretation of German colonial heritage in China, in particular, the representation of German prison heritage is under-researched. While there is a growing body of the literature on prison heritage in Asia, the majority of research focuses on narratives around former Japanese sites of incarceration (Denton, 2014; Huang, 2017; Huang & Lee, 2019, 2020; Xu, 2020) or the influence of the colonial prison on the development of the modern prison in China (Dikötter, 2002; Dikötter & Brown, 2007). Understanding how the heritage of other colonial powers and legacies of colonial incarceration in China are represented contributes to a wider understanding of international postcolonial legacies and the dimensions of colonial heritage in the Chinese heritage discourse. Academic literature examining the German colonial period in Qingdao looks predominately at the history of the colony (Coco, 2019; Mühlhahn, 2013); policies and city planning under German colonial rule (Steinmetz, 2009) and the representation of the colonial period in China throughout history (Lü, 2017). Steinmetz (2007) discusses crime and punishment in their analysis on native policy and governance in the former German colonies of Southwest Africa, German Samoa and Qingdao, however, the prison system is only briefly analysed.

202

K. Massing

Several texts discuss the safeguarding and development of colonial heritage in contemporary Qingdao. Demgenski (2015, 2019) examines the safeguarding and representation of German colonial heritage with regard to Dabaodao, the former Chinese part of colonial Qingdao. Zang (2020) and Zang et al., (2020) analyse residents’ perception of the protection of colonial heritage, in specific relation to the Qingdao beer festival and Liu (2006) concentrates on aspects of urban planning. Literature concerned with representation of heritage in Qingdao often includes a comparison between the interpretation of German and Japanese colonial heritage (Demgenski, 2015, 2019; Zang, 2020; Liu, 2006; Wang & Bell, 2022). This chapter will examine the different histories that are being told at German Prison Museum in Qingdao and how these histories are perceived by visitors. It analyses how the transition from prison to museum links to Qingdao’s wider narrative as a former German colony and modern tourist destination. The chapter starts by examining dimensions of heritage, then discusses the methodology and finally analyses the different narratives displayed at the prison museum as perceived by the visitor.

Dimensions of Heritage Museums and heritage sites as expressions of contemporary needs, national identity and the construction of nation states have been widely discussed in museum and heritage discourse (Anico & Peralta, 2009; Graham et al., 2000; Logan, 2009). Former colonial prisons often respond to national narratives of remembrance leading to a selective representation of history (Huang, 2017). Looking at the different dimensions of history and heritage in how Qingdao German Prison frames itself as a postcolonial prison and is framed through the eyes of the visitors is relevant in two aspects. Firstly, in the context of China, representations of the past in museums are often discussed in terms of their strong political and ideological underpinning (Denton, 2014; Lu, 2014; Varutti, 2014). The importance

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

203

of contemporary politics in the framing of heritage in China is illustrated by the following quote from Hung Chang-tai: “A public museum in China is seldom about the past. It is about the current image of the party and how the party wants itself to be seen” (quoted in Johnson, 2011). Heritage is seen as a way for the Chinese state to legitimise political power and construct new narratives of shared national identity and modernity (Ludwig & Walton, 2020). Ludwig and Walton (2020) build their analysis of heritage discourse in China around ideas of how the Chinese state (re)frames, (re)claims, (re)invents and (re)presents the past. The lens of understanding heritage as means to present national identities on an international stage is particularly relevant for the German Prison Museum, given its development into a heritage site was part of Qingdao’s Olympic 2008 heritage strategy. Winter (2014) in analysing how non-Western countries employ cultural heritage as part of international diplomacy argues that China uses heritage to link contemporary national identity, foreign policy and notions of civilisation. China aims to highlight its rich cultural heritage to be perceived “a civilization that has influenced other countries and cultures” (Winter, 2014, p. 328) and through this, combat the sense of national humiliation stemming for China’s semi-colonial period in the nineteenth century (Wang, 2012). Secondly, the representation of prison museums worldwide and their contemporary role is often multifaceted. Schept and Masurek (2017) state that scholars of prison tourism must ask among other questions “who controls the narrative of the history of the site?” and “What history-and whose history-get told?”(p. 172). In preserved colonial prisons, state narratives often centre around heroism of the incarcerated and the overcoming of adversity (Strange & Kempa, 2003). In their analysis of former political prisons in Taiwan, Lin (2017) argues, at heritage sites with contentious history, one singular version of the site seems to be favoured. Former colonial prisons are very aware of the message they are displaying in the present. Sites in Vietnam addressing colonial incarceration, for example, such as the War Remnants Museum, Con Dao Island and Hoa Lo Museum tell stories of struggle, oppression and torture (Logan, 2009) experienced under French and American occupation. At the same time, they emphasise support from the international community during times of war and the positive relationship they have with

204

K. Massing

these countries today. The War Remnants Museum, for instance, has a gallery entitled “The World Supports Vietnam in Its Resistance to U.S. Aggression (1954–1975)”, which displays photographs and newspaper articles showing support from around the world during the American War, including support from Americans. Likewise, the Hoa Lo Museum emphasizes the support the Vietnamese nationalist struggle received from ordinary people in France and America (Logan, 2009). According to Schwenkel (2009, p. 146) “the increase in numbers of foreign tourists to Vietnamese museums has engendered certain changes to exhibits as museum officials refashion historical narratives with a view toward communicating with more diverse domestic and international audiences”. Huang (2017), analysing the representation of former Japanese colonial prisons in China, Taiwan and Korea, notes how these sites are often used for patriotic education purposes, chosen as spaces to remember and document war crimes. In China, while European aggression is criticised and called out at some of the remains of European colonialism, such as the Old Summer Palace (Lee, 2012), the focus on resistance and atrocities is much more explicit when it comes to heritage connected to the Japanese occupation of China. This is partly due to the still difficult relationship between Japan and China and partly due to the vital role the resistance against Japan plays in the founding story of the People’s Republic of China. Even though the majority of colonial prisons in China were built by European forces, prison tourism and heritage in China mainly offer an antiJapanese narrative (Huang, 2017). Examples of this include the Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison (LRJP) Museum (Huang, 2017; Huang & Lee, 2019), Unit 731 Museum (Denton, 2014; Xu, 2020), Taiyuan prison camp and the German Prison Museum in Qingdao. As another legacy that remains from China’s colonial period, European architecture is often remembered more generously. In order to manifest their colonial power and fulfil their colonial aspiration, imperial powers constructed not only prisons but houses, schools, hospitals, government offices and parks in the style of their home territory. Several of these colonial buildings are important heritage sites and tourism attractions today (Zatsepine & Victoir, 2013). Western architecture is a largely popular tourism attraction that tends to avoid discourse around China’s colonial

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

205

past. Cities such as Macau and Qingdao use their distinctive nonChinese urban landscape to attract domestic tourists. In the context of Western style architecture these cities often tend to blend out their colonial history and focus on ideas of cultural exchange (Demgenski, 2015; Wong, 2013). The German Prison Museum in Qingdao, playing both an important role during German and Japanese occupation combines these in a multi-layered framing of colonial history in China.

Methodology This chapter employs user generated content from the German Prison Museum in Qingdao to explore what researchers can learn about a museum through social media. Qualitative museum research using visitor generated data often is accompanied by critical visiting (Lindauer, 2006) of the site bringing in the viewpoint and impressions of the researcher themselves (see Turner & Peters, 2015). But how can we explore museums and heritage sites if we are unable to visit the site may it be due to travel restrictions, funding or questions of environmental sustainability? Can solely focusing on what visitors have taken away from the site provide us with a new angle unbiased by the researchers’ own impression of the site? What can we learn through witnessing narratives of what happened at the site through the eyes of others? It is now widely accepted that museum visits and visitor perception are not only influenced by the ‘physical context’ of the museum, but also by their personal and sociocultural context (Falk & Dierking, 1992). According to Walby and Piché (2011, p. 465) visitors “insert themselves into the narrative of punishment built up in the museum” and as such contribute to the way narratives are framed. Carter (2016, p. 1) defines user generated content as “visitor-authored stories about places”, that allow visitors to apply their personal and sociocultural context to re-frame official narratives and interpretation. Photographs often form part of that narrative (Flint & Jennings, 2022), which can both create distance between the visitor and the site and create new ways of seeing and engagement with the site. (Pedersen, 2017)

206

K. Massing

To understand, how visitors to the German Prison Museum in Qingdao framed the site I examined comments, photos and videos on tripadvisor, trip.com (the Chinese version of tripadvisor), douyin, weibo and Instagram and a YouTube livestream created on 16 Aug 2020 by an expat living in China. The sites were last reviewed in July 2022. Tripadvisor had only 18 reviews, with five reviews leaving a comment, the latest from 2017, all international tourists. The site is clearly less popular among international tourists. Trip.com, a Chinese travel site, at the time had 1310 reviews and 393 images of the site (https://www.trip.com/travel-guide/attraction/qingdao/germany-pri son-museum-site-91572/). Douyin contained 9 videos relating to the site, Weibo had 13 posts showing images and one video of the site and Instagram had 14 posts. Different social media platforms serve different purposes and therefore frame and share experiences in different ways. Douyin and Instagram are social media platforms aimed at providing a shared visual experience for family, friends and followers. The YouTube livestream, while publicly available was meant as a real-time experience for followers. Content on both platforms is therefore geared towards a specific audience. In contrast, trip.com is a review platform, where visitors can rate their experience from one to five stars and comments are as important as images. It is aimed at both travellers and residents. Relying on user generated data has limitations as the interpretation of the site is perceived through other people’s eyes with different intentions. The livestream, for example, showed a misinterpretation of some of the museum content and rather than focusing on the history, sought to bring out the haunted and scary aspect of the site. It also largely depends on what users find interesting, for example, the majority of images on trip.com are either of the prison building and outside surroundings or taken from inside the prison, not the museum exhibition. Most images from inside the prison are of the Japanese water torture and inquisitor room or the architecture, particularly the spiral staircase. Some of the videos on Douyin focus solely on the German architecture without going into the rest of the history of the prison. However, given that this was a relatively small site, livestream and images covered the majority of the

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

207

exhibition, giving me the opportunity to experience the site in its entirety through the eyes of others.

Experiencing Postcolonial Narratives at the German Prison Museum in Qingdao—Visitor Perceptions The German Prison Museum in Qingdao is a rather small museum and not perceived as one of Qingdao’s prime tourism sites. It is not listed as one of the ‘main attractions’ in major travel guides such as the Lonely Planet and Tripadvisor ranks it as #96 (Tripadvisor, June 2022) out of 306 things to do in Qingdao. Despite being developed as part of the 2008 Olympic heritage strategy of the city, it is not heavily marketed towards international tourists (a major part of the interpretation is in Chinese only) and it is also not seen as a main local heritage site. During the pandemic, there was no online offer, unlike in other museums in China. One reason for this might be that a critical examination on Qingdao’s colonial period is not particularly high on the city’s agenda, with German colonialism often interpreted as laying the foundations for the modern city (Wang & Bell, 2022) and ‘German heritage’ frequently presented as part of local history rather than world history and colonialism (Zang, 2020). The site consists of two parts, a newly constructed exhibition hall or museum, from now on referred to as ‘the museum’ and the original prison, referred to as ‘the prison’. The museum is chronologically organised showing Qingdao’s colonial history from the German occupation in 1897 to the victory of the Communist party in 1949. The museum provides its information in Chinese only. Important events in relation to the history of the prison and the city are displayed via photographs and documents. The exhibition is separated into documents relating to the organisation of the prison, the German occupation (1897–1914), the first Japanese occupation (1914–22), rule under the Republic of China (1911–1938), the second Japanese occupation (1938–1945), and the Nanjing government

208

K. Massing

when Qingdao was controlled by the Guomindang (1945–1949). The different time periods are colour coded. It displays the crimes of both German and Japanese occupiers as well as the failings under the Republic of China and the Nanjing government. Information on the prison is mainly of historical nature and focused on archival documents such as the pay slips of the prison staff and a list of the successive attorney generals of the Qingdao and Shandong courts. The extensive use of archival material in the form of photographs and documents is frequently deployed at dark heritage sites. The Topography of Terror in Berlin, for example, uses a mixture of photographs, quotations and documents to display perpetration. Photographic collages such as of mug shots of victims of the Nazi regime are employed to pull the focus away from the perpetrators and elicit empathy (Johnston-Weiss, 2019). Similarly, prison museums in Vietnam make extensive use of archival material. While archival material can be effective to illustrate historical events, it tends to privilege an official point of view. Photographs and documents can be difficult to understand without extensive explanation, which may be read partially by the visitor, who often only reads one-tenth of the text (Ambrose & Paine, 2018). In the museum part of the German Prison Museum in Qingdao visitors need to be able to read a good level of Chinese, otherwise it is difficult to follow the historic events and nuances and differentiate between the time periods. This is something the YouTube livestream clearly struggles with, in particular, when it comes to interpreting the photographs. There is an uncertainty as to what periods of history the photographs show and whether photographs show the incarcerated or perpetrators. This is partly because in some cases communist party members are shown through portrait photographs rather than through mugshots. The lack of English translation is one of the criticisms on Tripadvisor. The museum seems to use archival material to offer a relatively balanced framing of the colonial period. Documents from the German colonial period, for example, relate both to the imprisonment and suppression of the Chinese people and the development of the city under German occupation. Images of the suppression by the German colonial power include Chinese people in chains guarded by German soldiers, a

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

209

Chinese man being punished by employing a cangue (wooden collar), a punishment frequently used by the Germans (Steinmetz, 2007), Chinese people kneeling in front of German occupiers and a beheading. Pictures highlighting German contributions to the city show the history of the city including the opening of the harbour and the railway. However, it is important to note that this is a problematic distinction, a lot of the city’s celebrated infrastructure was built with forced labour (Wang & Bell, 2022). Social media offers little insight into the origin and presentation of these pictures, as photos taken inside the museum are limited and do not have a specific focus. Interestingly, similarly to some of the international visitors, for some Chinese visitors, the more nuanced narrative in the museum, in particular when it comes to the German colonial rule, seems to be lost. One of the videos on Douyin discusses some of the archival material found in the museum, including the fact that German’s brought dogs into Qingdao. The presenter reads out in a rather light-hearted way that these dogs often wore muzzles. The archival material here, presented in the video as an amusing anecdote, does not fully succeed in engaging the visitor with the problematic aspects of German colonial rule. The German police in Qingdao used dogs regularly to control and suppress the population and catch people who were perceived to have broken the rules (Lü, 2017). The actual prison part of the German Prison Museum is sparse but it displays a range of tools of confinement and torture, furniture, archival material and a few mannequins. While some of the narratives in the museum, such as the Japanese Cotton Mill strikes are continued, the narrative around German and Japanese occupation contrast starkly. Like many former prisons it is a complex space, consisting of several floors, with different parts of the building stemming from different time periods. Some parts of the prison were added during the Japanese occupation. The way the space was used also changed over time. Imagining the space through online images and videos is therefore challenging, and my attempts can be metaphorically compared to the artistic practice of collage-making “a concerted gathering of selected items which manifest themselves as a pattern or set, thereby reconciling their divergent origins within a collective discourse” (Cardinal, 2004, p. 71). While this might not provide a one hundred per cent accurate depiction of the prison

210

K. Massing

space, collage-making as a process of reflection can produce new connections or insights that might have otherwise been missed (Butler-Kisber, 2008). Following and combining the collection of videos and photographs the ground floor of the prison consists mainly of empty cells, such as prison cells for German soldiers and a cell containing archival material in German and Chinese as well as German prison door lock in display cabinets. There is little information and no English translation of the documents. The ground floor also contains the guard room from during the German period of the prison. The second floor displays the stories of two Chinese patriots who were imprisoned there during the Republic of China. It explores the fates of Li Weinong and Hu Xinzhi, who are mentioned in the museum, further. Li Weinong, a member of the communist party led the Qingdao worker’s strike of 1925 and Hu Xinzhi was the editor of the Qingdao Citizen newspaper during that time. Both of them were imprisoned and tortured by the warlord controlling the area and according to the main panel died as martyrs. Both are show as mannequins in their cell and Li Weinong’s life is exhibited in the cell next door. There is little information in English making it difficult to contextualise the importance of Li Weinong for a non-Chinese audience. The ‘YouTube’ livestreamer does not know much about him, but assumes he is a ‘Mandela-like figure’, drawing on his cultural knowledge of other celebrity prisoners in similar contexts. The third floor explores the fate of prisoners during the second phase of the Japanese occupation. Similarly to the Republic of China period, the story of a celebrity prisoner is singled out, in this case the writer Shu Qun. He wrote the anti-Japanese novel Child Without a Country. The use of celebrity prisoners is common in prison museums and is partly utilised to enhance the site’s authenticity (Ferguson & Madill, 2017); here it clearly links the site to the Communist struggle and highlights the role of the Communist party in freeing China from Imperialism and through that contributes to legitimising the Communist Party rule. History told through the experience of celebrity prisoners, however, marginalises the

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

211

experience of less famous prisoners (Ferguson & Madill, 2017) and in this case those that did not have a Communist party connection. Next the visitor is led down again to the second floor where the warden’s office was located during the time of the German occupation. This part also contains a room displaying the fingerprinting technology during the German occupation, including the fingerprint archive and the case files, with the text panel focusing on technological achievements. A spiral staircase leads visitors to the main attraction from the second Japanese occupation are the underwater prison and inquisitor chamber in the basement, which were built in 1938. According to the panel, in the underwater prison prisoners were hung up by their arms with their feet stood in water. While mannequins are used to show the German prison guards and the Chinese celebrity prisoners, the underwater prison and basement mainly contain objects, such as chains and tools of torture. Unlike some of the prisons in Vietnam, such as Con Dao, which used mannequins and photographs to illustrate the suffering of the prisoners, the prison in Qingdao leaves such scenes to the visitor’s imagination. Here, the atmosphere of the building speaks for itself and visitors on trip.com regularly recounted the scary and haunted atmosphere of the basement. This is also echoed in some of the videos on Douyin and YouTube, which mention the dampness and coldness of the basement. Lü et al. (2022) conclude that images taken in the basement, particularly of the inquisitor chamber, are noticeably darker than images of other parts of the prison. Displaying objects such as torture instruments in prison museum places them firmly in the past indicating a less punitive present (Walby & Piché, 2011). Visitors to the German Prison Museum certainly see a stark contrast between past and present, with several reviews commenting that they are glad to live in more prosperous times. This clearly also evokes patriotic feelings for many of the Chinese visitors, with several reviewers wishing to remember the Chinese martyrs contributing to (the creation of ) today’s society. The prison frames the German and Japanese history of the site through very different lenses. The time of the German occupation centres around the architecture of the building, reminiscent of a German Castle and administrative processes. The ‘beautiful’ German architecture

212

K. Massing

is something that gets picked up by several Chinese visitors, in particular on Douyin, where one video comments that they never expected that Germany would built such a beautiful prison with such delicate features. Images on Instagram very much focus on the outside of the building and the spiral staircase and several videos on Douyin point out German architectural features of the prison. In contrast to that, interpretation of the use of the prison during Japanese occupation centres around an antiJapanese narrative, focusing on the mistreatment and torture of prisoner and the heroes of Chinese resistance.

Discussion Cardinal (2004) compares the practice of collecting to the practice of collage-making, seeing both as a social document, linking artwork/collection, place and time. Putting visitors’ videos, images and comments together into one ‘collage’ of the German Prison in Qingdao, can therefore be seen as a testimony of how the site was perceived by different visitors at a certain point in time. Drawing together different platforms, rather than just concentrating on one let me construct a fuller picture of the site. Bringing in different points of view allowed me a perspective on different aspects of the prison and a focus on narratives that might have been overlooked had I predominantly relied on my own experience and interpretation of the site. In addition, the Qingdao German Prison Museum could be interpreted as a collage combining scraps of history. Framing the prison as a collage would require us to ask “what sort of combination, and exactly which scraps? Where did they come from, and what signifying purpose are they now being asked to serve?” (Cardinal, 2004, p. 71) supporting the analysis of how different colonial narratives are framed. One of the ‘scraps’ absent from the collage are the European prisoners, who visitors only mention marginally. During the time of the German occupation the prison held European prisoners, mainly soldiers and sailors whose stories are notably absent from the museum. Huang (2017) has discussed the “processes of selectively forgetting and remembering” (p. 657) with regard to decommissioned colonial prisons in East Asia. In

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

213

this case, while the beginnings of the prison are mentioned, displaying the fates of the European prisoner does not fit within the national narrative, even though their story might be able to support narratives around the workings of the German colonial state. It is therefore not surprising that within the prison itself the German occupation is mainly present through administration and architecture. Within Qingdao the German colonial period is also remembered and framed in a largely positive light. As mentioned before, German architecture and heritage are valued for their strong brand identity and often reframed as part of Qingdao’s identity history (Zang, 2020). German colonial structures are seen as part of the development from a small fishing village into a modern town (Zang, 2020), a narrative that can also be found in the museum in the images showing the opening of the harbour and the railway. While the negative aspects of the German occupation period are often glossed over in Qingdao’s heritage narrative the museum itself does provide evidence of German aggression. Before a paradigm shift towards a discourse around modernisation occurred in the 1980s, the occupation of Qingdao by the Germans was often described as an act of bandits by contemporary Chinese historians (Lü, 2017). In particular, the early years of German colonial rule were characterised by segregation motivated by racism. The original inhabitants of the fishing village were disposed of their land and forced to relocate. The judicial system was precarious for Chinese residents with German and Chinese law being applied, making them vulnerable to sanctions for a large number of crimes while European citizens could only be punished for offences under German law. Punishments were a mixture of German and local practices with some forms of punishment and procedures such as the practice of the accused kneeling in front of the judge in chains and the use of the cangue being retained in Qingdao even after their employment was ended in China. There are also reports of torture from Chinese prisoners, even though it was officially forbidden (Steinmetz, 2007). Unlike other sites in Qingdao the site does address German aggression and racism towards Chinese residents, albeit not at the forefront of the narrative, by showing images of common punishments during the time. This shows that German heritage is not wholly seen as uncontroversial and might be a first step towards a more nuanced and critical interrogation of the past. The importance of

214

K. Massing

remembering acts of German aggression as part of Qingdao’s history has been pointed out by several local historians, including historian Lu Hai (Zang, 2020). However, this critical interrogation of German colonialism is not necessarily picked up on by visitors. The framing of the Japanese occupation period is more straightforward and fits neatly into the master narrative of China’s ‘humiliation’ through foreign aggression. The presence of Japan in Qingdao is interpreted as a military campaign and as economic exploitation of the territory. As with other prisons in China, Japanese atrocities and the torture and inhumane treatment of Chinese prisoners is emphasised through the underwater prison. It is similarly framed to other prison museums in China, such as Unit 731, in that it aims to present an authentic site, that relies on the historical atmosphere rather than other means of interpretation (Denton, 2014). However, unlike Lushun prison (Huang, 2017) and Unit 731 Museum, it is sparse and does not include detailed accounts and testimony of torture. This might be because it is a newer heritage site that until recently was still used as a holding facility. Similar to the Russo-Japanese prison in Lushun (Huang, 2017), prisoners are portrayed as heroes. Shu Qun mentioned by name and portrayed in the form of a mannequin was both a communist party-member and anti-Japanese resistance fighter. This framing of a lighter approach to German colonial heritage and a darker approach to parts of the Japanese colonial heritage is also reflected in the ‘collage’ of the user generated data.

Conclusion The German Prison in Qingdao encapsulates the complex colonial history and heritage of the city, a city that makes effective use of its ‘exotic’ heritage to create a unique tourism identity. The exhibition and prison clearly contribute to the national master narrative of both Qingdao as a city and China as a nation. At the same time, exhibition and prison do paint a nuanced picture of the colonial time, not completely subscribing to the narrative of the German occupiers as the modernisers and Japanese occupiers as oppressors. One of the reasons

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

215

the site might be a bit freer in the interpretation is that there are so many stories to tell. Instead of focusing on one narrative like the Lushun prison or Unit 731 museum, it tries to encapsulate the whole of the history of the prison pre-1949. This leaves less space to push one master narrative, but allows for a brief framing on how different occupiers and governments made use of the prison. While the master narrative underlining ideas of national humiliation, sacrifices and heroism of the Chinese people and particularly communist party members is still there, it in theory allows the visitor to discover different aspects of the narrative painting a more complex picture overall. In practice, a more nuanced understanding and framing of the site seems to be more difficult to achieve. Without analysing visitor engagement with social media, it might be easy to conclude that Chinese visitors mainly go to the prison museum for patriotic education, engaging with different aspects of colonial rule offered in the museum. While this is certainly true for some of the visitors, others seem to go for an encounter with ‘the other’, in this case German architecture. While comments on trip.com are more serious, Douyin and Instagram offer a lighter interpretation. Narratives around the oppression of Chinese people during the German occupation are seldom picked up on any of the platforms, maybe because it is a less familiar narrative and therefore easy to overlook or misinterpret. It also seems easier for visitors to relate to the narratives presented at the actual site of incarceration rather than the more complex, document-heavy museum. As with many museums, finding the right balance between emotional engagement and conveying information to the visitor would be crucial.

References Ambrose, T., & Paine, C. (2018). Museum basics: The international handbook. Routledge. Anderson, C., Ifill, M., Adams, E., & Moss, K. (2020). Guyana’s prisons: Colonial histories of post-colonial challenges. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 59, 335–349. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12382

216

K. Massing

Anico, M., & Peralta, E. (2009). Introduction. In M. Anico, & E. Peralta (Eds.), Heritage and identity: Engagement and demission in the contemporary world (1st ed., pp. 1–12). Taylor & Francis Group. Butler-Kisber, L. (2008). Collage as inquiry. In J. G. Knowles, & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research (1st ed., pp. 265–276). Sage. Cardinal, R. (2004). Collecting and collage-making: The case of Kurt Schwitters. In R. Cardinal (Ed.), Cultures of collecting (1st ed., pp. 68–96). Reaktion Books, Limited. Carter, P. L. (2016). Where are the enslaved?: TripAdvisor and the narrative landscapes of southern plantation Museums. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 11(3), 235–249. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2015.1100625 Coco, O. (2019). German imperialism in China: The leasehold of Kiaochow Bay (1897–1914). The Chinese Historical Review, 26 (2), 156–174. https:// doi.org/10.1080/1547402X.2020.1750231 Demgenski, P. (2015). Seeking a future for the past: Negotiating inner city redevelopment and heritage in Qingdao, China [Doctoral Dissertation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong]. CUHK Digital Repository. https://repository. lib.cuhk.edu.hk/en/islandora/object/cuhk%3A1291962/metadata Demgenski, P. (2019). Dabaodao: The planning, development, and transformation of a Chinese (German) neighbourhood. Planning Perspectives, 34 (2), 311–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2017.1389656 Denton, K. (2014). Exhibiting the past: Historical memory and the politics of museums in postsocialist China. University of Hawaii Press. Dikötter, F. (2002). Crime, punishment and the prison in modern China. Hong Kong University Press. Dikötter, F., & Brown, I. (2007). Cultures of confinement: A history of the prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Cornell University Press. Falk, J., & Dierking, L. (1992). The Museum experience. Whalesback Books. Ferguson, M., & Madill, D. (2017). From shame to fame: “Celebrity” prisoners and Canadian prison museums. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (1st ed., pp.417– 434). Routledge. Flint, A., & Jennings, B. (2022). The role of cultural heritage in visitor narratives of peatlands: Analysis of online user-generated reviews from three peatland sites in England. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 28(2), 163–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2021.1941198

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

217

Goodman, B., & Goodman, D. (2012). Introduction. Colonialism and China. In B. Goodman, & D. Goodman (Eds.), Twentieth century colonialism and China. Localities, the everyday, and the world (1st ed., pp. 1–21). Routledge. Graham, B., Ashworth, G. J., & Tunbridge, J. E. (2000). A Geography of heritage: Power, culture and economy. Arnold. Huang, S. (2017). Remembering and representing imprisonment in postcolonial cities: Decommissioned prisons in East Asia. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (1st ed., pp.651–672). Routledge. Huang, S., & Lee, H. (2019). Difficult heritage diplomacy? Re-articulating places of pain and shame as world heritage in northeast Asia. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25 (2), 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/135 27258.2018.1475410 Huang, S., & Lee, H. (2020). Heritage, memory, and punishment. Remembering colonial prisons in East Asia. Routledge. Johnson, I. (2011, April 3). At China’s new museum, history toes party line. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/world/asia/04m useum.html Johnston-Weiss, E. (2019). In the eye of the beholder: Gaze and distance through photographic collage in the Topography of Terror and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. In J. Echternkamp, & S. Jaeger (Eds.), Views of violence: Representing the second world war in German and European Museums and memorials (1st ed., pp. 92–108). Berghahn Books. Lee, H. (2012). The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan: Or, how to enjoy a national wound. In M. Matten (Ed.), Places of memory in modern China: History, politics, and identity (1st ed., pp.1 93–232). Brill. Lin, H. (2017). Taiwan’s former political prisons: From incarceration to curation. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (1st ed., pp. 217–240). Routledge. Lindauer, M. (2006). The critical museum visitor. In J. Marstine (Ed.), New Museum theory and practice (1st ed., pp. 203–223). Blackwell. Liu, C. (2006). The contemporary development of Qingdao’s urban space. The perspective of civil society’s participation in Chinese Urban Planning [Doctoral Dissertation, Bauhaus Universität Weimar]. https://e-pub.uni-weimar.de/ opus4/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/855/file/Dissertation_Liu_pdfa.pdf Liu, Y. (2020). Evaluating visitor experience of digital interpretation and presentation technologies at cultural heritage sites: A case study of the old town, Zuoying. Built Heritage, 4 (14). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-02000016-4

218

K. Massing

Logan, W. (2009). Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi. Changing attitudes to a Vietnamese place of pain and shame. In W. Logan & K. Reeves (Eds.), Places of Pain and Shame. Dealing with Difficult Heritage (1st ed., pp. 182–197). Routledge. Lu, T. (2014). Museums in China: Power, politics and identities. Routledge. Lü, X., Luo, H., Xu, S., Sun, J., Lu, R., & Hu, Y. (2022). Dark tourism spectrum: Visual expression of dark experience. Tourism Management, 93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2022.104580 Lü, Y. (2017). Colonial Qingdao through Chinese eyes. In K. Mühlhahn (Ed.), The cultural legacy of German colonial rule (1st ed., pp. 127–141). De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Ludwig, C., & Walton, L. (2020). Introduction (Un)Authorised heritage discourse and practice in China. In C. Ludwig, L. Walton, & Y. Wang (Eds.), The heritage turn in China: The reinvention, dissemination and consumption of heritage (1st ed., pp. 15–38). Amsterdam University Press. Macdonald, S. (2006). Expanding museum studies: an introduction and other editorial commentary. In S. Macdonald (Ed.), A companion to Museum studies (1st ed., pp. 1–12). Blackwell. Mah, A. (2014). Port cities and global legacies: Urban identity, waterfront work, and radicalism. Palgrave Macmillan. Mahmoudi, L., Motamed, B., & Ghadirinia, M. (2018). Investigating heritage sites through the lens of social media. Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 42(2), 199–211. https://doi.org/10.3846/jau.2018.7057 Mgadla, P. T. (2014). Racial discrimination in colonial Botswana: 1946–1965. South African Historical Journal, 66 (3), 486–503. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02582473.2014.900646 Mommsen, W. J., & Osterhammel, J. (1986). Imperialism and after: Continuities and discontinuities. Allen and Unwin. Mühlhahn, K. (2012). Negotiating the nation. German colonialism and Chinese nationalism in Qingdao, 1897–1914. In B. Goodman, & D. Goodman (Eds.), Twentieth century colonialism and China. Localities, the everyday, and the world (1st ed., pp. 37–56). Routledge. Mühlhahn, K. (2013). Mapping colonial space: The planning and building of Qingdao by German colonial authorities, 1897–1914. In L. Victoir, & V. Zatsepine (Eds.), Harbin to Hanoi colonial built environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940 (1st ed., pp. 103–128). Hong Kong University Press. Nield, R. (2015). China’s foreign places: The foreign presence in China in the treaty port era, 1840–1943. Hong Kong University Press.

9 Framing Postcolonial Narratives

219

Pedersen, C. (2017). Screening tourist encounters: Penal spectatorship and the visual cultures of Auschwitz. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (1st ed., pp. 131– 151). Routledge. Schept, J., & Mazurek, J. (2017). Layers of violence: Coal mining, Convict Leasing, and Carceral Tourism in Central Appalachia. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (1st ed., pp. 171–190). Routledge. Schwenkel, C. (2009). The American war in contemporary Vietnam: Transnational remembrance and representation. Indiana University Press. Steinmetz, G. (2007). The devil’s handwriting: Precoloniality and the German colonial state in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. University of Chicago Press. Steinmetz, G. (2009, January 16–17). Qingdao as a colony: From apartheid to civilizational exchange [Workshop presentation]. Johns Hopkins Workshops in Comparative History of Science and Technology, “Science, Technology and Modernity: Colonial Cities in Asia, 1890–1940,” Baltimore, United States. Steinmetz, K. F., Schaefer, B. P., & Henderson, H. (2017). Wicked overseers: American policing and colonialism. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 3(1), 68–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649216665639 Strange, C., & Kempa, M. (2003). Shades of dark tourism Alcatraz and Robben Island. Annals of Tourism Research, 30, 386–405. Trofanenko, B. (2010). The educational promise of public history museum exhibits. Theory & Research in Social Education, 38(2), 270–288. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2010.10473425 Turner, J., & Peters, K. (2015). Unlocking carceral atmospheres: Designing visual/material encounters at the prison museum. Visual Communication, 14 (3), 309–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357215579599 Varutti, M. (2014). Museums in China: The politics of representation after Mao. The Boydell Press. Walby, K., & Piché, J. (2011). The polysemy of punishment: Dark tourism and Ontario’s penal history museums. Punishment & Society, 13(4), 451–472. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474511414784 Wang, P., & Bell, D. (2022). Qingdao: The city of ideals. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 25 (5), 667–682.https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13698230.2021.1881741. Wang, Z. (2012). Never forget national humiliation: Historical memory in Chinese politics and foreign relations. Columbia University Press.

220

K. Massing

Wilson, J.Z., Hodgkinson, S., Piché, J., & Walby, K. (2017). Introduction: Prison tourism in context. In J. Z. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, J. Piché, & K. Walby (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of prison tourism (1st ed., pp.1–10). Routledge. Winter, T. (2014). Heritage conservation futures in an age of shifting global power. Journal of Social Archaeology, 14 (3), 319–339. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1469605314532749 Wong, C. (2013). The sanitization of colonial history: Authenticity, heritage interpretation and the case of Macau’s tour guides. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 21(6), 915–931. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2013.790390 Xu, J. (2020). The old/new Unit 731 Museum. A place of memory and oblivion. In J. Micieli-Voutsinas & A. M. Person (Eds.), Affective architectures: More-than-representational geographies of heritage (1st ed., pp.40–55). Routledge. Zang, X. (2020). Heritage conservation in Chinese colonial port cities [Doctoral Dissertation, Utrecht University]. Utrecht University Repository. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/381362/1-xiaolinza ngdissertation.pdf?sequence=1 Zang, X., van Gorp, B., & Renes, H. (2020). Beer as cultural lubricant: Brewing Tsingtao, regenerating Qingdao. In N. Wise, & T. Jimura (Eds.), Tourism, cultural heritage and urban regeneration changing spaces in historical places (1st ed., pp. 39–55). Springer. Zatsepine, V., & Victoir, L. (2013). Introduction. In L. Victoir & V. Zatsepine (Eds.), Harbin to Hanoi colonial built environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940 (1st ed., pp. 1–16). Hong Kong University Press.

10 Framing the Tiger Cages: Contested Symbols of Postcolonial Conflicts in the USA and Vietnam Maryse Tennant

Tiger Cages Lingering memories of Vietnam’s decolonization—painful and often conflicting—have been described through a spectral metaphor as haunting both that country and the United States of America (USA) (Isaacs, 1997; Kwon, 2008). Much has been written about these conflicts and their cultural legacy, especially since international travel to Vietnam increased from the 1990s (Alneng, 2002). Laderman (2009, pp. 8–9) argues war-related tourist attractions have become ‘contact zones’ where popular Western narratives collide with those presented by the Vietnamese. This chapter explores one example of this—the ‘notorious tiger cages’—which can be visited on Con Dao Island, now ‘one of Vietnam’s star attractions’ (Stewart et al., 2018, p. 676). M. Tennant (B) Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_10

221

222

M. Tennant

In 1970, these ‘French tiger cages’ became infamous following exposure of widespread mistreatment of political prisoners there by the American-backed Republic of Vietnam (RVN). Photographs first published in Life (1970) magazine came to form part of the ‘iconic currency’ (Young, 2000, p. 54) of war in Vietnam for Americans, acting as prominent symbols in anti-war campaigns. For the Vietnamese, these tiger cages are sacred historical sites which, unlike many war-related museums in Vietnam (Schwenkel, 2009, p. 94), are much visited by domestic tourists (Dang, 2021; Viet, 2019). They have not, though, been considered in detail in terms of their symbolism within the USA, or their presentation as heritage in Vietnam. Infamous though they became, these tiger cages are not the only ones to play a symbolic role in debates about war in Vietnam. Two other examples—different kinds of penal space—are preserved as heritage. The ‘American tiger cages’, also on Con Dao, were built to replace those exposed in 1970. ‘Bamboo tiger cages’, too, are found on a second prison island in southern Vietnam—Phu Quoc. While visually familiar to American audiences, their association with the RVN may seem contrary to expectations. Primarily in the USA they came to emblemize American suffering, associated with the plight of their own incarcerated troops. Understanding the symbolism of the tiger cages, then, and how the Vietnamese manage this for international audiences, is both complex and consequential. That tiger cages came to be iconic symbols of the captivity and suffering of prisoners held by both sides of the conflict in Vietnam is acknowledged but rarely scrutinized. Franklin’s work (2005) is an exception, recognizing the tiger cages as one example of the reversal of familiar war images in Hollywood films. There is, then, no detailed consideration of the how these different kinds of tiger cage have been imagined, re-imagined and even re-produced, both during their use and after, or the impact of this on heritage interpretation in Vietnam. This chapter provides such an exploration, considering the tiger cages as spaces and symbols, but also as heritage. It demonstrates how they functioned as contact zones in American debates long before their heritagization. Space and its reproduction were important to this, but the tiger cages became increasingly distorted as they were re-imagined in the USA. The chapter

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

223

then considers interpretation at the museums now preserving them and how their contested notoriety in American consciousness is managed. Generally Western understandings of the tiger cages are peripheral, with interpretation remaining strongly centred on Vietnamese experiences. Subtly, however, the tiger cages are used both to connect with international audiences and to challenge dominant American conceptions. Distinctions between the narratives of the two museums containing original tiger cages, however, reflect continuing fractures within Vietnamese perspectives following cultural shifts there in recent decades.

Remembering Between 1945 and 1975 Vietnam experienced particularly violent conflicts associated with a convergence of decolonization and the Cold War (Kwon, 2013). Commonly two historical constructs frame this, informing selective memory traditions in the USA and Vietnam (Schwenkel, 2009).1 The ‘Vietnam War’ for Americans becomes the ‘American War’ in Vietnam, the first a noble battle against communism and the second a sacred conflict for national independence (Bradley & Young, 2008). Recent historical accounts, though, emphasize how complex, diverse and intersecting local conflicts intertwined with geopolitical rivalries, meaning ‘there were many Vietnam wars’ (Bradley, 2009, p. 2). Each country selectively remembers only some of these. Official Vietnamese accounts centre on decolonization. The two distinct wars identified in Western perspectives are drawn together through an elision of French colonialism and American imperialism as a thirty year struggle for national independence ending with total victory in 1975 (Schwenkel, 2009). Other elements of the many wars Bradley (2009, p. 2) refers to are erased or downplayed, especially internal conflicts, either through civil war or revolutionary struggle. War is presented as glorious and heroic, with national characteristics of endurance and self-sacrifice key to eventual triumph (Tai, 2001a, p. 4). While communism features strongly, this is not the bipolar, transnational conflict common in Western perspectives. The war was fought against imperialism, not for communism, the relationship between this

224

M. Tennant

and nationalism harmonized by presenting communism as the vehicle through which independence was achieved (Pelley, 2002; Vu, 2007, pp. 196–199). For Americans, a cold war is transposed on a civil war. Vietnam’s decolonization between 1946 and 1954 is separated from later conflict, despite the USA paying almost eighty per cent of French costs by the end (Goscha, 2017, p. 272). War between 1955 and 1975 is constructed as ‘a tragic but well-intentioned mistake’ to preserve the freedom— understood as anti-communism—of the Vietnamese (Laderman, 2009, pp. 116–121). In this account, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) becomes a puppet of Moscow and Beijing who, assisted by the National Liberation Front (NLF), ‘invade’ southern Vietnam prompting an ideologically driven civil war (Bradley & Young, 2008). American imperialism is ignored and the Cold War, as bipolar geopolitical conflict, takes centre stage, often functioning to defend the USA (Bradley & Young, 2008; Laderman, 2009). Key voices are excluded within both accounts. American trauma is ‘almost exclusively’ the concern in the USA, the Vietnamese and their country largely an imagined ‘sideshow’ (Hixson, 2013, p. 49). In Vietnam, those perceived to support the RVN are most silenced (Tai, 2001b). Profoundly unequal global power relations, though, must also be considered to understand these perspectives (Schwenkel, 2009, p. 206). Neither construction fully encapsulates the conflicts or their legacy. They have, however, contributed to national identity and state legitimacy in both countries, sustaining cultural narratives which frame the war’s meaning. These are not universally accepted, however, making memories sensitive and contested, as the metaphors of ghosts and shadows mentioned earlier imply. Foreign interventions associated with colonialism, imperialism and geopolitical rivalries overlay complex internal divisions (Kwon, 2013) and, while these do ‘not neatly divide with the geography’ (Nguyen, 2016, p. 8), the civil nature of conflict is widely recognized outside Vietnam (Tai, 2001b). Since the 1980s an ‘upsurge of commemoration’ within Vietnam has enabled more diverse remembrance of the country’s conflicts (Tai, 2001a, p. 1). Economic reforms known as doi moi replaced a socialist economy

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

225

with a capitalist market system, permitting some ‘limited liberalization’ (Schwenkel, 2009, p. 4). Since then tourism has become ‘a major economic resource’ (Alneng, 2002, p. 462). Increasing international visitors render war-related heritage places where the two historical constructs described collide. The proliferation of alternative memories, however, has also undermined the state’s memorializing project, weakening the ‘nationalist scaffolding of Vietnamese history’ (Bradley & Young, 2008, p. 11). Economic and cultural shifts contribute to ‘museumization’, with expansion of heritage, increased international presence and weakening state control leading to some ‘recuration of exhibits’ (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 146–163). Resulting tensions have sometimes left museums unsure how to construct narratives (Sutherland, 2005). Powerful nationalist myths have often been detected at Vietnamese heritage sites (Giebel, 2001; Gillen, 2014; Henderson, 2000; Logan, 2009). History is frequently used to serve nationalist purposes, and some highlight the hypocrisy of holding Vietnamese representations to higher standards given selective remembrance in the USA (Laderman, 2009; Logan, 2009). Indeed, Schwenkel (2009, p. 21) argues Vietnam has shown greater ‘diversification of memory’ since the 1990s. Many excellent accounts of Vietnamese war-related heritage exist but little is known of the tiger cages. Perhaps the most studied site—The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City—contains replicas of two types of tiger cage which are usually referenced (Gillen, 2014; Laderman, 2009; Schwenkel, 2009). Assessments of interpretation vary but often its nuanced capacity to challenge the selectivity of American perspectives is highlighted. Nguyen (2017) considers it a ‘postcolonial museum’, presenting war as a consequence of colonialism and allowing postcolonial self-representation to international audiences. Hoa Lo is the most researched former prison (Laderman, 2009; Logan, 2003, 2009; Schwenkel, 2009; Sutherland, 2005). Known to Americans as the Hanoi Hilton, infamous for detaining American prisoners of war (POWs), it functions differently as a contact zone to sites in southern Vietnam (Logan, 2009; Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 176–198). Con Dao has recently received attention (Ringer, 2002; Hayward & Tran, 2014; Nguyen, 2016, pp. 172–174; Viet, 2019; Fuggle, 2021a, b; Dang, 2021) but its interpretation remains unstudied. Phu Quoc’s museum is

226

M. Tennant

almost entirely neglected, receiving only passing reference (Hoan, 2015, p. 509; Maclean, 2018, p. 157). This chapter, then, offers an original and significant contribution by exploring a neglected aspect of the legacy of wars in Vietnam with a focus on transnational interconnections.

Spaces Three distinct penal spaces are identified as tiger cages, perhaps inspired by Vietnamese poetry which described confinement through metaphors of caged animals (Zinoman, 2001a, p. 26). These are located on two prison islands situated off the southern coast of Vietnam and both, as penal colonies, were sites of exile. Con Dao was Indochina’s first, and largest, colonial prison continuously used from 1862 to 1975 by both the French and the RVN (Zinoman, 2001b). It developed into a sprawling prison complex, with multiple sites constructed by both France and the USA. Two compounds contain cells referred to as tiger cages, distinguished by the nationality of their builders. It is the French tiger cages, exposed in 1970, which became infamous, while the American cells replaced them. The bamboo tiger cages, which have no nationalized identification, are situated on Phu Quoc. Larger than Con Dao, this island was not so consumed by imprisonment, becoming a place of detention intermittently and in different forms. There was a French penal colony, smaller than Con Dao’s and whose location is unknown, which closed in 1929 (Zinoman, 2001b, pp. 55–56). The tiger cage site, though, formed part of the largest POW camp in southern Vietnam run by the RVN with American support. This was extensive, with at least ten compounds, its huts pre-fabricated in the USA (House of Representatives, 1973a, p. 22). An older prison existed here, apparently developed by the French after 1945, then rebuilt by the RVN.2 The museum, though, gives minimal recognition of this, fixing mainly on the six years the site held POWs (1967–1973), thus discounting prior carceral uses and omitting their continuation afterwards, both in the final two years of war (Amnesty International, 1973, p. 7) and after reunification (Vo, 2004, p. 119).

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

227

The ‘types’ of tiger cage are different spaces but performed a similar carceral function. The French cells are striking and unusual (see Fig. 10.1). Differing from conventional Western penal architecture, they reverse its spatial arrangements by elevating guards above prisoners, enabling, but not causing, the mistreatment inflicted there. Each block contains two rows of concrete cells on the lower floor, positioned back-to-back, with doors opening externally. Metal bars cover the cells, while a tiled roof sits a storey above, allowing a walkway for guards to patrol. Although distinctive, their design is not unique. Similar examples, although not called tiger cages, were found on French Guiana (Toth, 2006, pp. 45–46), and even, briefly, in England (Forsythe, 1991, p. 65). In 1971, the USA replaced the French cells with the American tiger cages, which more closely resemble traditional Western prison design (New York Times, 1971). ‘Cages’ in name only, they consist of singlestorey concrete blocks with two rows of cells opening inwards on a narrow central corridor (see Fig. 10.2). Small, high windows, let in

Fig. 10.1

The French Tiger Cages upper walkway, Con Dao. Photo by the author

228

M. Tennant

little illumination—the ceiling a thin mesh directly under a metal roof. Smaller than the cells they replaced, and less comfortable, they are hot, dark and cramped. For the Americans, these were new ‘isolation cells’, but for the Vietnamese, who continued to be tortured there, they remained ‘tiger cages’ (House of Representatives, 1973a, p. 28). It was a shared function, then, that united them. Both provided cellular confinement in a system mostly holding prisoners communally,3 intended to isolate problematic inmates in more punitive conditions (House of Representatives, 1974, p. 859). Taussig (2004, p. 273) suggests all prisons are islands ‘where society extrudes and isolates its evil’. The tiger cages were an island within the prison itself, used when the exile of the penal colony alone was insufficient. Bamboo tiger cages are another distinctive space which, unlike Con Dao’s examples, could only be experienced as harmful. Actually resembling cages, these small box-like structures were made of wood and barbed wire (see Fig. 10.3). Within them captives were exposed to the elements, unable to stand or easily move. Phu Quoc had no cells so impromptu forms of punitive confinement were devised, of which the tiger cages were one. Used to temporarily detain inmates as additional punishment, they performed a similar function to those on Con Dao, acting as a prison within a prison to exert control. It is this function that has led tiger cages to be invoked in discussions of contemporary penal controversies (Kurshan, 2013; Schrader, 2020).

Symbols Life (1970) magazine’s dramatic photographs provided striking imagery for long-standing concerns about political detention, making Con Dao’s prison conditions the ‘most infamous’ in southern Vietnam (Amnesty International, 1973, p. 1). Modern prisons render their captives invisible and Life’s photojournalism visualized mistreatment, capturing public imagination and fuelling anti-war sentiments. There was also a dramatic story, replete with secrecy and subterfuge, as the delegation, guided by drawings from a former prisoner, diverted to demand entry through a ‘hidden door’ concealed by growing vegetables. This narrative, recounted

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

Fig. 10.2 author

229

The American Tiger Cages inner corridor, Con Dao. Photo by the

in a separate editorial note in Life (Graves, 1970), was circulated elsewhere (Emerson, 1970a) and continues to be retold (Fridell, 2008, pp. 72–73). The tiger cage controversy remained in the public imagination (Emerson, 1970b; Fox, 1973; New York Times, 1971; Vien, 1974). Campaigners opposing war fastened on this imagery, holding vigils and fasts, particularly over the summer of 1974, where activists were chained

230

M. Tennant

Fig. 10.3 author

Looking down on the bamboo Tiger Cages, Phu Quoc. Photo by the

in replica tiger cages (Cornell, 1974; Norman, 1974). War in Vietnam was divisive, generating claims and counter-claims about these penal spaces. The distinctive architecture of the French tiger cages contributed to their symbolism. Life (1970, pp. 26–27) magazine gave little physical description of them, focusing instead on mistreatment, but commenting that ‘few could stand’ due to inmates ‘being constantly shackled’. Misconceptions developed, however, most commonly that they were underground (Fox, 1973). Some also claimed they were too small to stand in, showing clear confusion with Phu Quoc’s bamboo boxes (Hassler, 1970, p. 24). Many reports were, in fact, accurate, referring, for example, to ‘small stone compartments’ (Emerson, 1970a, 1970b; New York Times, 1970). Counter-claims based on space, though, preoccupied those arguing the tiger cages were misrepresented or distorted (Borman, 1970; House of Representatives, 1973a, p. 61; Clarke, 1979; Lewy, 1978, pp. 296–298).

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

231

Confusion between the French tiger cages and the bamboo examples on Phu Quoc are evident in their reproduction. Replicas displayed at anti-war vigils furthered misconceptions which continue to be repeated (Kurshan, 2013). Demonstrators claimed their models were ‘life-size’ and ‘authentic’, but photographs show they were smaller—too small, indeed, to stand in—resembling, in some ways, bamboo tiger cages (see photos in Elmer, 2005, pp. 149, 152; Cornell, 1974). An elision of these two kinds of penal space occurred as they became symbolic within American consciousness, meaning the tiger cages were distorted as they were reproduced, whether deliberately or not. Space became important to their symbolism because they provided a visualization for otherwise invisible abuses. Distortion as they were re-imagined, though, allowed deflection of criticism through a construction of space as the problem. It was ‘the policy’ not the cells that were ‘terrible’, as one imprisoned student argued (New York Times, 1974). Detractors, though, refused to see them as ‘far more than mere physical entities’, thus denying ‘the system of historically unique, brutal repression’ they represented (House of Representatives, 1973a, p. 22). Phu Quoc’s bamboo tiger cages were known of during the war, when they were described as ‘two feet high “chicken cages”’ (House of Representatives, 1973a, p. 22). This kind of tiger cage, or examples like it, figured most prominently, though, on the other side of debates. They developed a controversial symbolism, particularly after the conflict had finished, although they were also used to deflect criticism during the war (House of Representatives, 1973b, pp. 402–404). When claims about space could not facilitate outright denial, a reversal of the tiger cages’ imagery to focus on American suffering enabled ‘condemnation of the condemners’ to evade culpability (Cohen, 2000, p. 61). The conflation of statistics which prompted the missing in action (MIA)/POW issue started in 1969. It created ‘an almost impenetrable fog of confusion’, implying every MIA might be a POW (Franklin, 2013, pp. 260–265). As part of this, bamboo tiger cages were associated with the confinement of American POWs, becoming a symbol of captivity indicative of American suffering and forming part of a strategy which prolonged war and weakened anti-war movements. They

232

M. Tennant

also, later, absolved the USA of accountability, justifying economic sanctions and delaying normalization of relations between the countries (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 176–198; Franklin, 2013). Emerging alongside concerns about the treatment of political prisoners by the RVN, they became an ‘American obsession’ through regular reiteration in Hollywood films (Hixson, 2013, p. 47), fostering ‘dehumanising discourses’ (Schwenkel, 2009, p. 179) which centred on racialized notions of ‘innate Vietnamese cruelty’ (Laderman, 2009, p. 96). This symbolism, then, had palpable and profound consequences for Vietnam. This counter-narrative also prompted reproductions, with ‘vigils of honour’ involving replica tiger cages held long after the war’s conclusion, and as recently as 2015 (Divittorio, 2015; Finn, 1985; New York Times, 1985; Perez, 1990). Even further distanced from ‘reality’ in Vietnam, the tiger cages now confined ‘imaginary beings’ in a ‘myth of imprisonment’ (Franklin, 2013, pp. 274–275), since no credible evidence exists to support claims of continued American detention (Hixson, 2013, pp. 47– 48). While once there may have been originals to replicate, these no longer existed. The treatment of incarcerated non-Americans in Vietnam, however, continued to be concerning (MacLean, 2018; Vo, 2004). In the USA, the tiger cages became a synecdoche symbolizing systematic torture within RVN prisons and were imagined, re-imagined and re-produced in complex and contested ways. As simulacra mobilized in debates about the war, they moved further from the ‘reality’ they represented, first becoming a perversion of this and finally, after the war had ended, a pretence (Baudrillard, 1994). All three ‘types’, then, featured in American consciousness during and after the war as they were envisioned in various ways to support and oppose the conflict. Now, improved transport routes to both islands have significantly increased domestic and international visitors (Vietnam Tourism, 2019; Tran & Xuan, 2021), making the tiger cages ‘contact zones’ in the way Laderman (2009, pp. 8–9) describes.

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

233

Heritage Officially recognized in 1979, Con Dao’s heritage has received fresh investment, with a new purpose-built museum opened in 2013 (Vietnam News, 2013). Phu Quoc’s development occurred more recently. Acknowledged as a historic monument in 1993, progress stalled, but by 2015 a small attraction existed (Leffman, 2015, p. 164). Both sites, then, have benefitted from the ‘museumization’ occurring since the 1990s (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 146–163). Con Dao’s tiger cages are preserved alongside other former prison compounds. Many have small exhibitions but a separate museum also covers the island’s prison history. Phu Quoc’s smaller museum contains an exhibition and one recreated compound. Interpretation at both consists of a mixture of photographs, text and artefacts, while life-size mannequins are often displayed in the actual prison buildings, a common sight at Vietnamese penal heritage (Nguyen, 2016, p. 173). The museums respond differently to the tiger cages’ contested symbolism. Both remain firmly centred on Vietnamese experiences but Con Dao draws on the international notoriety of its cells, whereas Phu Quoc does not, explicitly at least. Linguistic translation of materials is extensive, although slightly less consistent at Con Dao. Cultural translation is less evident and, as Logan, (2009, pp. 188–189) found at Hoa Lo, the lack of ‘historical, political or cultural context setting’ may confuse non-Vietnamese visitors. Con Dao’s museum presents its heritage as evidence of the ‘crimes’ of colonialism and imperialism, retaining a discourse now softened at many sites but still evident at Hoa Lo (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 162, 194).4 At Phu Quoc, there is no mention of crime, but the relentless focus on torture speaks for itself, rendering labels unnecessary. Unusually, though, imperialism and colonialism rarely feature, which individualizes responsibility, situating it with the ‘barbarous’ and ‘cruel’ enemy, rather than wider political forces. Perpetration at Phu Quoc is consistently attributed to the ‘American Puppet Government’, although often this slips to the ‘American-enemy’, or just ‘enemy’. An unequivocal attribution of blame pitches the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in a violent, heroic, battle, with the USA unambiguously identified as responsible. This is, what Nguyen (2016, pp. 54–55)

234

M. Tennant

refers to as the ‘crudest version of the ethics of remembering one’s own’, with clear, indisputable lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In contrast, variety emerges in descriptions of perpetrators on Con Dao. ‘French colonialism’ and ‘American imperialism’ are both merged and distinct. Foreign responsibility is emphasized, but a variety of phrases also identify the RVN. On at least one occasion this exact title is used, unusual given official denial of their legitimacy (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 71–72). Often a ‘puppet state’ they are not, as at Phu Quoc, always this. The phrase ‘Sai Gon government’ removes American complicity, but associates the regime with a city, not a country; one now erased.5 Both museums, then, minimize internal conflict and Vietnamese responsibility, but at Phu Quoc the RVN and the USA are assimilated to such a degree the former almost disappear. Con Dao, however, permits some ambiguity in attributing blame. Time works differently within the museums’ narratives. Con Dao’s long and continuous penal history is reflected through an extensive, linear chronology. This is similar to other heritage sites (Logan, 2009; Sutherland, 2005) but differs from the thematic narrative at the War Remnants Museum (Gillen, 2014). At Phu Quoc the constricted time frame of six years presents a short but brutal snapshot of violent conflict, centred on themes of torture and resistance. The narratives’ content also differs. Both share common elements, also found more widely, but important, if subtle, differences in constructing the relationship between communism and nationalism can be discerned. Con Dao’s message, presented as a movement from darkness to light, is the traditional one of official state narratives, showing triumphant progression to reunification in the face of foreign aggression. The nationalized identification of the two tiger cages sites—as French and American—assists the substitution of colonialism with imperialism. Prison is a place of hardship, but also resistance, with the notion of ‘prison-asschool’, in particular, abounding. Drawing extensively on tropes within revolutionary nationalist literature (Zinoman, 2001a), the ‘indomitable spirit’ of prisoners, particularly but not solely Communists, secures victory. At the museum lighting effects visually move visitors from the darkest of pasts to a climax in bright rooms (Tennant, 2018). Light begins to

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

235

increase around the 1930s, when the Indochinese Communist Party was founded (Goscha, 2017, p. 150), subtly suggesting they illuminated the way to independence. Detailed descriptions of communist education classes highlight ideology, but politics does not overshadow the nation. The Party protects ‘the Communist ideal’, but also ‘national independence’. This story of reunification reaches its apex through a ceremonial and celebratory focus on liberation. The shift from stoic determination in the face of darkness to a bold presentation, firmly in the light, is victorious, but triumph belongs to the people—the nation—under the stewardship of the Communist Party. This conforms to official narratives which harmonize internal divisions by presenting communism as secondary to nationalism (Vu, 2007, pp. 196–199). Themes dominate Phu Quoc’s narrative, chiefly torture and resistance. Combat is fundamental, the word ‘fight’ recurring repeatedly. Resistance, always orchestrated by the Communist Party, offsets the humiliation of torture, but is also violent, with hunger strikes and extreme acts of selfharm described and depicted. The prison is constructed as a war zone, with little attention to conditions or regime. Just one reference to the prison as ‘a revolutionary school’ means battles and brutality overshadow education, minimizing a central feature of interpretation at other prison museums (Logan, 2009). Tortures re-enacted in dioramas are objectively verified by photographs of the dead and maimed. Images of body parts recovered from mass graves, or dead prisoners gunned down in escape attempts, hang alongside others revealing the disabling injuries of survivors. Despite the tortured bodies, heroism, not sadness, prevails. One caption, for example, describes prisoners ‘bravely’ disembowelling themselves ‘for the fight’. Deformities and beatings are shown at Con Dao but other aspects water them down. Abject visions overshadow at Phu Quoc, although generally Vietnamese museums avoid direct depictions of the dead. The style of this imagery also contrasts with traditional photographic customs, instead reflecting Western practices through reliance on graphic representations of trauma and death (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 59–61). This even extends to the unusual exhibition of a bone fragment impaled with a nail, which raises ethical dilemmas that conflict with cultural beliefs (Lincoln & Lincoln, 2015). Such an approach is, perhaps, adopted for

236

M. Tennant

international audiences—a form of hot interpretation designed to shock (Uzzell, 1989). Vietnamese experiences remain paramount, though, with exhibits of inmates’ everyday belongings beside implements of torture. Such forms of identification can make suffering more readily accessible (Williams, 2007, p. 88) and this is a rare example where the blunt depiction of violence feels humanized. While war dominates, this is not quite the usual battle of official narratives. Prisoners are ‘Communists’ more often than they are ‘Vietnamese’, and the nation receives almost no mention. Minimizing French colonialism assists this, disrupting the usual fusion with imperialism, although national unity is preserved. Victory is attributed to the heroism of ‘courageous, wise and unyielding’ soldiers, but this is not total victory, in part because the narrative ends in 1973, excluding reunification which came in 1975. Leaving the museum through a reconstructed escape tunnel, liberation becomes release from incarceration not foreign domination, making departure the point where ambiguity surfaces most at Phu Quoc. Interpretation adapts rather than directly challenging state narratives, though, as Giebel (2001) found at a quite different Vietnamese heritage site. Con Dao acknowledges its tiger cages’ symbolism. The museum collects Vietnamese experiences of these—photographs of their use and accounts from inmates. The actual site, however, retells the dramatic story of their exposure through photographs and text, foregrounding American actors. On English-language guided tours, this is verbally related as visitors enter the compound, following an identical route, with the combined struggle ‘inside the country and abroad’ celebrated. Their notoriety acts as a reference for international audiences but also creates a shared history, uniting the Vietnamese with others who opposed the war. This grants Americans a dual role, as both supporters and denouncers of a brutal regime, and similar tactics are evident in exhibitions on anti-war campaigns elsewhere (Schwenkel, 2009, p. 158). This narrative does not extend to the American tiger cages, which contain no dioramas and little text. Preserved, but empty, these buildings are simply spaces. Only an entrance sign offers context, identifying this ‘special camp’ of ‘American-style tiger cages’. The theme is absence, which perhaps reflects uncertainty about interpreting American-built

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

237

sites for international audiences. Minimalism, as Williams (2007, p. 95) observes, can be ‘a refuge from overtly political ideas about responsibility and blame’. Possibly, though, the site is intended more for domestic visitors. Our guide did not accompany us to these compounds and any tourists encountered were from Vietnam. At an adjacent compound there is a shrine and untranslated information boards. Such a strategy may function to manage tensions arising when sites are used for both local commemoration and tourist novelty (Williams, 2007, p. 78). This separation also happens elsewhere in Vietnam (Schwenkel, 2009, p. 91). At Phu Quoc the tiger cages are incidental. One among many tortures depicted; their role as symbols of American suffering ignored. Indeed, they are presented as ‘barbarous inventions’ of the Americans. The unusually provocative narrative relayed through hot interpretation, however, forms a defiant response to debates about POWs, a subject which remains deeply sensitive in Vietnam (Schwenkel, 2009, pp. 186– 187). This further inversion of the tiger cages’ symbolism counters racialized constructions of savage Vietnamese brutality by presenting Americans, instead, as innately cruel. While there are hints of a Cold War interpretation, this is a Vietnamese-centred version, concentrated on revolutionary struggle. The battle is not anticolonial—fought for Communism not the nation. It is against the Americans, but not imperialism or anti-communism, leaving ‘the enemy’ a nationality bereft of ideological motives. Communism has only evil to compete with, therefore, in this revolutionary reading which evades complex geopolitics, remaining silent about key transnational players often invoked in Western Cold War discourses. Subtle touches make clear the site is aware of wider debates about POWs. Other museums explicitly engage with these, especially Hoa Lo, where Americans were detained (Logan, 2009; Schwenkel, 2009). Phu Quoc mainly relates its own story, focused on Vietnamese suffering. Similar messages to those found elsewhere, though, are lightly conveyed. Two adjacent photographs send a visual message reinforcing the DRV’s humanity to POWs. They show lines of men returned by the opposing regimes. Those released by the RVN support themselves with crutches, their faces pained, while those returned to them are smiling and walk unaided, carrying provisions. Similarly, a board on the Geneva

238

M. Tennant

Convention briefly explains the DRV’s refusal to sign this, challenging conceptions which highlight the superiority of Western civilization by suggesting the treaty offered protections insufficient by Vietnamese standards. Phu Quoc’s prisoners are Vietnamese and patriotic as well as Communists, but war is not about ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’, as it is at Con Dao. The museum seemingly ignores its tiger cages’ contested symbolism but the blunt and abject tone, unusual at a site developed since doi moi, may reflect a defiant counter-narrative to common Western perceptions. While its hot interpretation may stem from this, its diminution of the nation and reunification cannot so easily be explained. Local influences, then, may be at play, the privileging of communism a reaction to the fracturing of meanings surrounding the wars. As Tai (2001a, p, 3) observes, doi moi involved ‘implicitly setting aside a socialist vision of the future’, thus undermining older revolutionary traditions that gave solace ‘not only to the state but also to important segments of the population’.

Conclusion The tiger cages have a complex and diverse legacy which this chapter has explored. These spaces share an interconnected history as contact zones through which interpretations of conflicts in Vietnam have been contested. This continues now through their re-imagination as heritage. They were also, however, sites of state violence and, while the focus here is how they have been imagined and re-imagined, it is not intended to deny the material harm of that violence, or to take a position in contested claims of victimhood and responsibility. As symbols of captivity the tiger cages were mobilized in arguments both for and against military intervention by the USA, something recognized but rarely explicated. Space was important to this symbolism but an elision of the different types produced distortions as they were re-produced for Americans. This enabled counter-claims about space to negate their symbolism, facilitating denial. Even greater distortion ensued within a counter-narrative where tiger cages symbolized American suffering, enabling further denial through a ‘condemnation of the condemners’ (Cohen, 2000, p. 61). In

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

239

the war’s ‘iconic currency’, then, they were contested symbols which eventually became mythologized (Young, 2000, p. 54). It is this complex symbolism that meets Vietnamese perspectives now they are touristic contact zones. As heritage the tiger cages are framed through Vietnamese experiences. These are not ‘postcolonial museums’ in Nguyen’s (2017) definition, although Con Dao comes closest to this. Their narratives remain firmly centred on Vietnamese perspectives, though, making them forms of postcolonial self-representation, although the silencing of RVN perspectives renders this partial and exclusionary. The postcolonial frame, as Kwon (2013, pp. 87–88) reminds us, often renders the colonized ‘unrealistically homogenous’. Generally both museums discount the role of the tiger cages in American consciousness, although at Con Dao this notoriety helps create a shared history. Phu Quoc rejects the bamboo tiger cages’ contested symbolism, but its overall narrative powerfully challenges notions of ‘innate Vietnamese cruelty’ which pervade American perceptions (Laderman, 2009, p. 96). The reversal through which the tiger cages came to represent American suffering is again inverted to position them as barbarous and bereft of benevolent motivations. These two museums testify to the diversity of representations evident within Vietnam. They incorporate cultural changes since doi moi to differing degrees, although both are influenced by them. At Phu Quoc there is only the inevitable sadness of horror, the tone mainly violent and victorious. Alternative perspectives and the suffering of others are precluded. At Con Dao heroism is suffused with sorrow, in a narrative with some space for reflection and hints of ambiguity. Conceptions of national unity, the most central element in Vietnamese historiography, are preserved at both sites (Tai, 1994, p. 1), but subtly different views of the Vietnamese nation, especially the relationship between communism and nationalism, are noticeable. Con Dao’s narrative centres on the nation and political forces like colonialism, bringing it closer to Nguyen’s (2017) ‘postcolonial museum’. Phu Quoc, in contrast, foregrounds the revolution and its communist ideology, privileging this over the nation in ways that refuse the usual harmonization within official narratives. This may be a further inversion, this time of cultural shifts which challenge the place of the revolution in Vietnam’s historiography. A reminder that

240

M. Tennant

‘wartime political bifurcation’ was a reality in the lives of the Vietnamese, and remains so (Kwon, 2013, p. 88). The tiger cages, then, now reflect discord about the war’s legacy within Vietnam. This chapter highlights diversity in Vietnamese heritage interpretation, challenging arguments this reflects monolithic state-dominated narratives (Gillen, 2014; Henderson, 2000), and supporting accounts that highlight complexity and nuance (Bradley & Young, 2008; Laderman & Martini, 2013; Schwenkel, 2009; Tai, 2001c). Significantly, it adds to these by drawing attention to a site, developed since doi moi, which presents war’s meaning unambiguously, affirming the revolution more than the nation in a cultural context where this is losing its predominance. Postcolonial heritage in Vietnam has been identified as part of a dialogue with older colonial narratives (Pelley, 2002) and contemporary Western perspectives (Laderman, 2009; Schwenkel, 2009), but also, as Giebel (2001) argues, with the Vietnamese state. This final aspect has been less thoroughly considered but warrants attention if work on heritage is to fully incorporate the diversity of viewpoints. While Tai (2001a, p. 3) acknowledges a sense of loss may result from the fragmentation of official memories, examples of how this is expressed are rarely studied. Different framings of the tiger cages reflect dissonant views of the nation and its history within Vietnam, just as their contested symbolism does in the USA, making them part of the ghostly shadows often referred to as lingering in the consciousness of both countries (Isaacs, 1997; Kwon, 2008).

Notes 1. For a concise summary of these see Bradley & Young (2008). More detailed accounts can be found for America in Laderman (2009) and for Vietnam in Pelley (2002). 2. This is not explained in any detail at Phu Quoc Prison Museum but was covered in a temporary exhibition at a café on Con Dao visited in April 2019 and entitled ‘Con Dao Prison—Phu Quoc Prison—The Hells on Earth’.

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

241

3. All other prison compounds on Con Dao contain large rooms for many prisoners, although some also have a few cells. The French and American tiger cages are the only compounds which solely consist of cell-like structures. 4. Unattributed quotations in this section are taken from textual interpretation present at the sites during visits in 2018 and 2019. 5. Saigon was re-named Ho Chi Minh City in 1977 (Goscha, 2017, p. 418).

References Alneng, V. (2002). ‘What the fuck is a Vietnam?’ Touristic phantasms and the popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (War). Critique of Anthropology, 22(4), 461–489. Amnesty International. (1973). Political prisoners in South Vietnam. Amnesty International. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Trans. by S. F. Glasser. University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981). Borman, F. (1970, October 3). Reports to congress on 14 nation tour. Commander’s Digest, 8(27), 4–6. Bradley, M. (2009). Vietnam at war. Oxford University Press. Bradley, M. P., & Young, M. B. (2008). Introduction. In M. P. Bradley & M. B. Young (Eds.), Making sense of the Vietnam wars (pp. 4–16). Oxford University Press. Clarke, P. C. (1979). The truth about the ‘tiger cages.’ The American Legion, 106 (2), 16–17. Cohen, S. (2000). States of denial . Polity Press. Cornell, T. (1974). The view from the tiger cage. Fellowship, 40 (7), 10. Dang, T. K. P. (2021). Tourism imaginaries and the selective perception of visitors: Postcolonial heritage in Con Dao Islands, Vietnam. Island Studies Journal , 16 (1), 249–270. Divittorio, M. (2015, November 11). Cage outside Port Vue American Legion meant to raise awareness of POWs/MIA. Tribune Live. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://archive.triblive.com/news/cage-outside-port-vue-ame rican-legion-meant-to-raise-awareness-of-pows-mia/ Elmer, J. (2005). Felon for peace. Vanderbilt University Press.

242

M. Tennant

Emerson, G. (1970a, July 7). Americans find brutality in South Vietnamese jail. New York Times (p. 3). Emerson, G. (1970b, July 19). Tailor relives ordeal at Con Son. New York Times (p. 14). Finn, T. (1985, November 10). Vietnam vet fasts in ‘tiger cage’ to draw attention to MIAs. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.upi.com/Archives/ 1985/11/10/Vietnam-vet-fasts-in-tiger-cage-To-draw-attention-to-MIAs/ 9856500446800/ Forsythe, W. J. (1991). Penal discipline, reformatory projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895 –1939. University of Exeter Press. Fox, S. (1973, March 3). 4 South Vietnamese describe torture in prison ‘tiger cage’. New York Times (p. 7). Fridell, R. (2008). Prisoners of war. Marshall Cavendish. Fuggle, S. (2021a). Geopolitics of the colonial prison island: The case of Poulo Condor (Con Dao). Island Studies Journal, 16 (2), 215–234. Fuggle, S. (2021b). From green hell to grey heritage: Ecologies of colour in the penal colony’. Interventions. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2021. 1892507 Franklin, H. B. (2005, May 14). ‘Vietnam’ in the new American century. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.hbrucefranklin.com/articles/ vietnam-in-the-new-american-century/ Franklin, H. B. (2013). Missing in action in the twenty-first century. In S. Laderman & E. A. Martini (Eds.), Four decades on (pp. 259–296). Duke University Press. Giebel, C. (2001). Museum-Shrine: Revolution and its tutelary spirit in the village of My Hoa Hung. In H. H. Tai (Ed.), The country of memory (pp. 77– 108). University of California Press. Gillen, J. (2014). Tourism and nation building at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104 (6), 1307–1321. Goscha, C. (2017). The Penguin history of modern Vietnam. Penguin. Graves, R. (1970, July 17). How they unearthed the tiger cages. Life, 69 (3), 3. Hassler, A. (1970). Saigon, USA. New York. Hayward, P., & Tran, G. T. H. (2014). At the edge: Heritage and tourism development in Vietnam’s Con Dao archipelago. Journal of Marine and Island Cultures, 3, 113–134. Henderson, J. C. (2000). War as a tourist attraction: The case of Vietnam. International Journal of Tourism Research, 2, 269–280.

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

243

Hixson, W. L. (2013). Viet Nam and ‘Vietnam’ in American history and memory. In S. Laderman & E. A. Martini (Eds.), Four decades on (pp. 44– 57). Duke University Press. Hoan, N. C. (2015). Tourism destination products management – case studies of Phu Quoc Island. Universal Journal of Management, 3(12), 509–513. House of Representatives (1973a, September 13). Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Washington. House of Representatives. (1973b, May 1). Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Washington. House of Representatives (1974, May 1). Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Washington. Isaacs, A. R. (1997). Vietnam shadows: The war, its ghosts and its legacy. Johns Hopkins University Press. Kwon, H. (2008). Ghosts of war in Vietnam. Cambridge University Press. Kwon, H. (2013). Cold War in a Vietnamese community. In S. Laderman & E. A. Martini (Eds.), Four Decades on (pp. 84–102). Duke University Press. Kurshan, N. (2013). From tiger cages to control units. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/01/from-tiger-cagesto-control-units/. Laderman, S. (2009). Tours of Vietnam. Duke University Press. Laderman, S., & Martini, E. A. (2013). Introduction. In S. Laderman & E. A. Martini (Eds.), Four decades on (pp. 1–15). Duke University Press. Leffman, D. (Ed.) (2015) The rough guide to Vietnam (8th Ed). Rough Guides Limited. Lewy, G. (1978). America in Vietnam. Oxford University Press. Life (1970, July 17). The tiger cages on Con Son. 69(3), 26–29. Lincoln, M., & Lincoln, B. (2015). Toward a critical hauntology: Bare afterlife and the ghosts of Ba Chuc. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57 (1), 191–220. Logan, W. (2003). Hoa Lo: A Vietnamese approach to preserving places of pain and injustice. Historic Environment, 17 (1), 27–31. Logan, W. (2009). Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi: Changing attitudes to a Vietnamese place of pain and shame. In W. Logan & K. Reeves (Eds.), Places of pain and shame: Dealing with ‘difficult heritage (pp. 182–197). Routledge. MacLean, K. (2018). New visibilities: Challenging torture and impunity in Vietnam. In T. Destrooper & S. E. Merry (Eds.), Human rights transformation in practice (pp. 157–176). University of Pennsylvania Press. New York Times (1970, July 15). 500 from Con Son flown to Saigon (p. 1).

244

M. Tennant

New York Times. (1971, February 21). Tiger Cage Camp to get New Cells (p. 8). New York Times. (1974, August 20). Con Son: Tiger cages to buffalo pens (p. 14). New York Times. (1985, March 1). Vietnam war veterans at yet another bivouac (p. 16). Nguyen, K. H. (2017). A postcolonial museum of war: Curating war and colonialism at Vietnam’s War Remnants Museum. Interventions, 19 (3), 301–321. Nguyen, V. T. (2016). Nothing ever dies: Vietnam and the memory of war. Harvard University Press. Norman, L. (1974, September 11). Caged, like Vietnamese, for us all. New York Times (p. 45). Pelley, P. M. (2002). Postcolonial Vietnam: New histories of the national past. Duke University Press. Perez, M. A. (1990, June 25) Tiger cage keeps MIA cause alive, Los Angeles Times. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.latimes.com/archives/ la-xpm-1990-06-25-me-595-story.html Ringer, G. (2002). Convicts and conservation: Can Dao National Park, Vietnam. In R. Harris, T. Griffin, & P. Williams (Eds.), Sustainable tourism: A global perspective (pp. 221–237). Butterworth. Schrader, S. (2020). ‘Tiger cages’ in Vietnam: How the call for U.S. prison abolition is a global issue. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www. ucpress.edu/blog/51234/tiger-cages-in-vietnam-how-the-call-for-u-s-prisonabolition-is-a-global-issue/ Schwenkel, C. (2009). The American War in contemporary Vietnam. Indiana University Press. Stewart, I., Atkinson, B., Bush, A., Eimer, D., Ray, N. & Tang, P. (2018). Vietnam (14th Ed.). Lonely Planet Publications. Sutherland, C. (2005). Repression and resistance? French colonialism as seen through Vietnamese museums. Museum and Society, 3(3), 153–166. Tai, H. H. (1994, January). Hallowed ground or haunted house? The war in Vietnamese history and tourism. Contemporary Issues, 3. Tai, H. H. (2001a). Introduction. In H. H. Tai (Ed.), The country of memory (pp. 1–17). University of California Press. Tai, H. H. (2001b). Afterword. In H. H. Tai (Ed.), The country of memory (pp. 227–230). University of California Press. Tai, H. H. (2001c). (Ed.). The country of memory. University of California Press.

10 Framing the Tiger Cages

245

Taussig, M. (2004). My cocaine museum. University of Chicago Press. Tennant, M. (2018). From darkness to light: Portrait pictures in the Bao Tang Con Dao Museum. In S. Fuggle, C. Forsdick, & K. Massing (Eds.), A poetics of space: Images of Con Dao (pp. 25–28). Pavement Books. Toth, S. (2006). Beyond Papillion: The French overseas penal colonies, 1854– 1952. University of Nebraska Press. Tran, A. H., & Xuan, H. N. (2021). Green tourism-sustainable tourism development in Phu Quoc Island District. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, 8(1), 21–24. Uzzell, D. L. (1989). The hot interpretation of war and conflict. In D. L. Uzzell (Ed.), Heritage interpretation (pp. 33–47). Belhaven Press. Vien, N. K. (1974). With survivors from Saigon’s jails. Crime and Social Justice, 2, 48–53. Viet, B. N. (2019). The influence of destination image components on tourist satisfaction and loyalty: A case study in Con Dao Islands, Vietnam. African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure, 8(4), 1–14. Vietnam News. (2013). Con Dao Museum inaugurated. Vietnam News. Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://vietnamnews.vn/life-style/244624/ con-dao-museum-inaugurated.html Vietnam Tourism. (2019). Viet Nam’s largest twin body speedboat launched from Soc Trang to Con Dao. Vietnam Tourism. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://vietnamtourism.gov.vn/english/index.php/items/14061 Vo, N. M. (2004). The bamboo gulag: Political imprisonment in communist Vietnam. McFarland & Co. Vu, T. (2007). Political studies and debates on Vietnamese nationalism. Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2(2), 175–230. Williams, P. (2007). Memorial museums: The global rush to commemorate atrocities. Berg. Young, J. (2000). At memory’s edge: After images of the holocaust in contemporary art and architecture. Yale University Press. Zinoman, P. (2001a). Reading revolutionary prison memoirs. In H. H. Tai (Ed.), The country of memory (pp. 21–45). University of California Press. Zinoman, P. (2001b). A history of imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940. University of California Press.

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps: Sara Gómez’s 1960s Documentary Trilogy and the Racialized Legacy of Cuban Penal Deportation Susan Martin-Márquez

Sara Gómez’s 1969 documentary Treasure Island (Isla del Tesoro) includes a dramatic recurring visual motif: the image of iron bars being severed from the windows of Cuba’s Model Prison (Presidio Modelo) and falling to the ground below. Through this repetitive trope, accompanied by discordant music, Gómez’s documentary foregrounds the 1967 decommissioning of the infamous prison, which had been built in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. The facility was located on the Isle of Pines, a smaller island just south of the western half of Cuba’s main territory, which had functioned since the early nineteenth century as a site of deportation, incarceration and forced labour. The circular structures of the Presidio Modelo were inspired in the famous Panopticon prison in Illinois, the Stateville Correctional Centre, and its architect envisioned a facility that would reflect the latest developments in penal reform, fostering the rehabilitation of inmates. However, S. Martin-Márquez (B) Spanish and Cinema Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, US e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_11

247

248

S. Martin-Márquez

the first director of the prison did not share that ethos; instead, he instituted horrific policies of torture and murder, characterizing his charges as ‘toothpicks’ to be used and discarded (Hartman, 2019, pp. 186– 188, 195). The abuses continued into the later dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, when the prison would house its most famous internee, Fidel Castro, from 1953 to 1955 (albeit in the more comfortable hospital pavilion). After Castro and his co-conspirators were released, they immediately returned to political activism, successfully staging the revolution that would oust Batista. However, with his triumph in January of 1959, Fidel Castro did not shut down the notorious Model Prison. Instead, it continued to function for over seven more years, now as a site of imprisonment and torture for thousands of Cubans who were deemed by Castro to be enemies of his newly installed regime.1 The acclaimed Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez’s representation of this history in Treasure Island is nothing if not misleading. Suppressing the revolutionary government’s abuse of political prisoners, Gómez emphatically exalts Fidel Castro as the figure responsible for destroying violent penal practices; she elides years of inconvenient truths by cutting directly from footage of Castro himself leaving the Model Prison in 1955, to the images of bars being removed from the windows of the facility after it was shuttered in the summer of 1967. Yet Gómez, like many other colleagues working within the Cuban Institute for Cinematic Art and Industry (ICAIC), the official state filmmaking entity that had been founded immediately after the victory of 1959, was compelled to walk a fine line. She clearly shared the philosophy of revolution as process, and believed that film was an ideal medium, both for celebrating the accomplishments of the new government and for foregrounding the many goals that had yet to be achieved. Even though ICAIC’s filmmakers enjoyed relatively more freedom of expression than other artists, writers and journalists, an overly critical exposé of revolutionary Cuba’s stillunmet challenges risked raising the ire of the authorities (Chanan, 2004, pp. 361–363). And indeed, the only other Afro-Cuban among ICAIC’s directorial ranks in the 1960s, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, had himself been arrested in 1965 and relegated to the Isle of Pines, and was later subjected to electroshock therapy as a result of his perceived nonconformity.2 While Gómez would not experience such dramatic punishment, a

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

249

number of her films suffered more or less direct forms of censorship.3 It is thus tempting to view her ideological sleight of hand in Treasure Island as strategic: the whitewashing of the Model Prison’s recent history in that film might compensate for what I will argue here is her less accommodating perspective regarding the mistreatment of Afro-Cubans in her two other films documenting the transformation of penal practices on the Isle of Pines.4 Treasure Island is one of a trilogy of documentaries that Gómez shot on Cuba’s smaller island at the end of the 1960s, together with On the Other Island (En la otra isla; 1968) and An Island for Miguel (Una isla para Miguel ; 1968). Notwithstanding the impactful Model Prison imagery in Treasure Island , the main focus of the three films is the new, seemingly more benevolent regime of ‘re-education’ through labour that Castro had established. Throughout all of Cuba, the revolutionary government had expropriated privately owned lands, which were converted into ‘People’s Farms’ (Granjas del Pueblo), worked by hundreds of thousands of wage earners (Guerra, 2012, p. 175). Not all who toiled on those farms did so voluntarily, however, and indeed the word ‘farm’ (granja) would become synonymous with ‘prison’ in Cuba,5 as agricultural centres, including on the Isle of Pines, were incorporated into an expanding network of corrective sites. In this way, the revolutionary government instituted remarkably similar practices to those of the Spanish colonial regime in the nineteenth century, when the Isle of Pines was initially drawn into the repressive geography of the archipelago. In prior centuries, the sparsely populated island had been a haven for pirates; early in the 1800s, Spanish authorities sought not simply to clear the space of international outlaws, but to convert it into a punitive work camp for Cubans, whose labour, they hoped, would contribute to colonial advancement. Purported criminals, vagrants or the politically ‘inconvenient’ were sent to the island; over the decades, as abolitionism intensified, and the independence wars broke out, the three categories were conflated, and unsanctioned behaviours were also racialized. 6 Similarly, Castro’s regime would blur the boundaries between criminality, vagrancy and ideological ‘deviancy,’ often deploying extrajudicial means

250

S. Martin-Márquez

to consign those deemed to be troublemakers—especially if not exclusively Afro-Cubans—to forced labour sites (Hynson, 2020, Chap. 4, esp. pp. 224–226). While scholars such as Rachel Hynson, Abel Sierra Madero, Manuel Zayas and Andy Alfonso have undertaken the difficult task of documenting the most notorious as well as more covert labour camps on Cuba’s main island,7 the precise nature and status of the much more heterogeneous facilities for youths on the Isle of Pines are far less understood. A handful of press reports from the period provide fragmentary information with a clear political slant, such as the 1968 special issue of the magazine Cuba devoted to ‘The Youngest Island on Earth’ (González Bermejo, 1968; see also Bravet, 1967); more recent Cuban journalism has featured nostalgic interviews with former camp inmates (for example, ‘De cómo’; also see McManus, 2000, pp. 105–109). These sources confirm that in 1966, when Hurricane Alma devastated the Isle of Pines, 1,500 male and 500 female members of the ‘Luis Ramírez López’ youth corps travelled there to assist in the clean-up and reconstruction. The government had already begun major development projects on the island, and a 1961 article published in the splashy illustrated agrarian reform magazine INRA—in an issue that also featured youth re-education initiatives—proclaimed that at last the previously neglected Isle of Pines had been incorporated into ‘the Cuban map’ (López Pellón, 1961). But the hurricane offered an additional, ‘natural’ opportunity to begin afresh: to build a ‘new’ society on the Isle of Pines from the ground up. This was in accordance with Che Guevara’s conceptualization of the ‘New Man’ and the regime’s bid to inculcate revolutionary values in children and teenagers, a process that sometimes began with separating them from their families.8 And indeed, the youth corps proved so effective that the government decided to mobilize thousands of additional young people to aid in the reconstruction of the island, which began to be dubbed the ‘Isle of Youth’ (Isla de la Juventud ), first informally, and later officially, when Fidel Castro approved the change in 1978. Reportedly, it was young Cubans themselves who lobbied for the new name (‘De

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

251

cómo’), aspiring not simply to place the smaller island ‘on the map,’ but to convert it into the vanguard of a revolutionary archipelago. The arrival of young workers coincided with—or perhaps even made more feasible—the closure of the Model Prison: the labour power of Cuban youths would replace the forced labour of the political prisoners, who were transferred to other carceral sites, including granjas or de facto concentration camps, elsewhere. The hegemonic discourse of the regime underlined the ideological advantages of that substitution, notwithstanding some practical concerns: ‘the prisoners had experience, the prisoners had skills. But, could one think about establishing a new society with prisoners? With counterrevolutionaries?’ (González Bermejo, 1968, p. 23). What remains unclear, however, is precisely how the young Cubans who were expected to create that new society ended up on the Isle of Pines. In their own and in journalists’ characterizations of the process, there are vague references to the youths responding to a ‘call,’ or to being ‘selected’ or ‘recruited’ for the cause. For example, the Havana office worker-turned Isle of Pines cowboy Pepe explained that ‘the Party called me [‘me llamó’] and told me of the need for me to go do agriculture’ (González Bermejo, 1968, pp. 27, 22; see also Bravet, 1967, p. 8; ‘De cómo’). As with the broader notion of ‘voluntary work’ or ‘extra hours’—omnipresent phrases used to describe the unremunerated overtime labour that Cubans ostensibly performed of their own free will in ardent support of the revolution, but that might be compelled through peer pressure or fear of retaliation9 —it is not certain that transfers of Cuban youths to the Isle of Pines were wholly voluntary. The ambiguity is well exemplified by the case of fifteen-year-old Manuela, who is featured in the 1968 special issue of Cuba magazine (González Bermejo, 1968, p. 35) and also by Gómez (as discussed below). Manuela describes herself as the daughter of a Cuban man who had been recruited by the CIA, presumably for counterrevolutionary operations, and who was then captured and sentenced to confinement in the Cabaña fortress in Havana. Did teenage rebelliousness, or the urge to escape traditional gendered strictures, prompt her to opt for a stint on the Isle of Pines? Was she simply motivated by her desire for a more stimulating life, as

252

S. Martin-Márquez

she was keen to emphasize to Cuba magazine? Or, was Manuela specifically targeted by the regime for removal from a politically unsuitable family environment? In other instances, as I detail later, those deemed to be juvenile delinquents, or ‘pre-delinquents,’ were simply transported to the island so that they might be pressed into service—and, ideally, reformed. Together with the limited number of journalistic pieces, Sara Gómez’s documentary trilogy offers an invaluable window onto the Isle of Pines’ youth camp practices. The three films incorporate (and often share) footage filmed at a number of different sites on the island, including the ‘Freedom Farm’ (‘Granja Libertad ’), where the staff and administrators themselves might be in their late teens or twenties, and the ‘Steel Youth’ (‘Juventud de Acero’) horticultural grafting camp for women and girls; they show a broad range of young Cubans, in many cases foregrounding their educational and professional goals, hopeful attitudes and enthusiasm for the revolution. Yet Gómez’s documentaries also diverge from the more propagandistic press accounts and reveal that the Castro government continued the long-running practice of embarking presumed ‘undesirables’ for the Isle of Pines. As I shall highlight, Gómez’s films ironically ‘play’ with the carceral legacy of that island, even as they expose and critique the ongoing marginalization and criminalization of Blackness in Cuba.

Panoptical Filmmaking? Gómez’s Documentary Self-Consciousness Cinema specialists have traditionally described Gómez as a less-showy filmmaker, one whose works hew closer to documentary ‘authenticity.’ While they quite justifiably praise her masterful interviewing skills, which enable her to wrest remarkable revelations from her subjects, their characterizations have often missed the subtle and sardonic humour of her films, and the increasingly deconstructive nature of her turn to cinematic self-reflexivity. Recently, however, scholars have begun to devote more attention to the formal qualities of her films; Yissel Arce Padrón, for example, foregrounds the critical power of Gómez’s ‘unorthodox’

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

253

aesthetic strategies (2017, p. 65).10 I will expand upon that perspective, focusing especially on the film On the Other Island , which features interviews with both inmates and staff on the ‘Freedom Farm’ and at other re-education and work sites for youths. Gómez’s filmic experimentalism is essential to her nuanced critique of revolutionary practices in her Isle of Pines trilogy. The opening title screen of On the Other Island characterizes the work as a ‘documental encuesta,’ a key buzzword for 1960s filmmakers. The Spanish phrase, literally translated as ‘survey’ or ‘inquiry’ documentary, encompasses a range of practices grouped under the English moniker ‘participatory documentary,’ or the French term cinéma-vérité, made possible by the advent of ever more portable cameras and audio recording devices. Filmmakers working in this vein often appeared in frame asking probing questions and interacting with their subjects. In this way, they might adopt the stance of the ‘militant intellectual filmmaker,’ who sought to intervene in, and not simply record, material reality (Núñez, 2019, pp. 48–49, 52–54). With the participatory mode, documentarians also endeavoured to reveal the filmmaking process to audiences, and technical devices—from cameras to sound recording equipment and even clappers—were often exposed. This practice, it was believed, produced a more ‘truthful’ representation of reality than forms of filmmaking in which the means of production remained studiously hidden from view (Winston, 1993, pp. 50–53). And indeed, in accordance with the claims of the title screen, Sara Gómez herself appears throughout On the Other Island ; even when she is not in sight, we often hear her off-screen voice pointedly engaging with those onscreen. Although we never see a film camera, we do see a reel-to-reel tape recorder, as well as numerous images of clappers, which notably frame out the subjects’ eyes as they gaze directly at the film crew, or at the camera/viewer [Fig. 11.1]. This filmic self-consciousness reaches an apex in the penultimate segment of the documentary. Here, the inmates Manuela (the daughter of the alleged CIA recruit, mentioned above) and Ada reveal their discrepancies with the disciplinary style of the former director of the girls’ camp, and express their appreciation for the new director, Cacha, who treats them more like equals.11 This section is introduced by another title screen, which appears to reproduce details from the film’s technical

254

S. Martin-Márquez

Fig. 11.1 The film clapper frames Manuela’s challenging gaze. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana: ICAIC

script. The screen lists the film footage that has been gathered and that will be edited together in this sequence, and it also indicates how that footage has been produced: Next we present a sequence constructed in the following manner: a) Manuela and Ada were interviewed. b) Cacha listens to the conversations. c) With a hidden camera, we film Cacha commenting on the interviews. We thus learn that the filmmakers have played the interviews with the two girls for Cacha, and that she has reacted to them. The technique of encouraging spectators to actively engage with audio-visual texts is part and parcel of the Cuban (and larger Latin American) revolutionary reception praxis; the logical next stage of that process—i.e., filming audience discussions of films—is something that Gómez would take on in a subsequent documentary.12 What is most surprising here, however, is the apparent revelation (in bullet point ‘c’) that Cacha was filmed without her knowledge, via hidden camera. Here Gómez seems to stray into another major variant of 1960s documentary, ‘direct cinema,’ often referred to

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

255

as the ‘fly on the wall’ mode, where filmmakers sought to minimize or even eliminate the impact that the presence of cameras, microphones and other equipment and film crew members would have on their subjects (Winston, 1993, pp. 42–45). But this ‘hidden camera’ technique, of course, is also evocative of modes of surveillance commonly associated with revolutionary Cuba. These included the ‘all-seeing eye’ of the neighbourhood watch, or CDR (Committee for the Defence of the Revolution [Fig. 11.2]), or, in the context of the Isle of Pines, recalling in particular the panoptical structure of the Presidio Modelo, in which inmates were subjected to a continuous yet hidden and punitive gaze from guards in the central observation tower, which, as Michel Foucault has famously explained, they would then internalize (1995, pp. 200–203).

Fig. 11.2 Cuban stamp featuring the watchful eye imagery of the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. “X Aniversario de los CDR.” Original photograph by Karen Horton: https://www.flickr.com/photos/karenhorton/4463837284. Licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/leg alcode

256

S. Martin-Márquez

In her purportedly ‘hidden camera’ conversation with Gómez, Cacha articulates iconoclastic views, including a preference for rebellious and questioning rather than obedient internees, and a permissive perspective on sexuality: she insists on facilitating encounters between teenage boys and girls, encouraging them to go dancing and to the beach together, and notes of one young woman who became pregnant that she refused to bring her before the disciplinary board. Cacha’s attitudes do not align with the norms, including the sexual mores, that the revolutionary regime sought to impose on citizens and especially women in the 1960s, according to some scholars.13 Our initial impression might be that with her documentary camera Sara Gómez has ‘captured’ the young new administrator speaking more frankly than she otherwise might have. Yet even a cursory examination of this section of the film reveals that Cacha has not in fact been cachada, or caught unawares, by Gómez. The long-shot segments might have been recorded with a hidden camera, but the well-focused closer shots that predominate throughout some of the most ‘revealing’ portions of the interview—including her two-shots with Gómez and most especially the tightly framed close-ups of Cacha alone—could not possibly have been filmed using that technique, and indeed at one point we see Cacha with a clapper, so she is clearly aware that the camera is rolling. The title screen of this section thus functions to parody assumptions regarding documentary authenticity, even as it plays with the notion of panoptical surveillance and control of revolutionary attitudes.

Performing Racial Truths The many self-reflexive, theatrical and performative moments of On the Other Island function to signal the ‘naturalness’—and thus ‘truthfulness’—of other sections of the film. It is important to emphasize that I am not arguing that those other sections are somehow more authentic, but rather that they are pointedly constructed as such by Gómez. The careful juxtaposition of clearly staged passages and seemingly more spontaneous snippets of ‘reality’ lends gravitas to the latter.

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

257

Some of the interview segments of the film depart from the ‘[wo]man on the street’ quality of the documental encuesta or participatory cinema, especially at the beginning. For example, the first subject, the AfroCuban teenager María, clearly struggles with what appear to be scripted narrative segments, in which she recounts, in situ, the regimented tasks of a typical day, including morning agricultural labour, afternoon hairdressing lessons and primary schoolwork—and here the 17-year-old notes that she is working towards attaining a sixth-grade education— and evening cultural sessions, when she dances the twist while singing a popular love song accompanied by two boys playing drums. At the end of the last of her narratives—where María’s delivery has been most poised—she walks offscreen, asking ‘¿Ya?’ (which might be translated as ‘is that it?’ or ‘are we done now?’), as if seeking Sara Gómez’s approval of her performance. The film’s next segment is even more notably performative: it features Fajardo, the camp’s resident cultural worker and theatre specialist, engaging in a bombastic monologue, in which he conspicuously deploys techniques of ‘direct address,’ breaking the ‘fourth wall’ by bantering with us, the film’s audience, and looking directly into the camera. These moments contrast significantly with other passages of the documentary in which Sara Gómez herself appears onscreen, adopting informal poses, and engaging in conversations with her subjects that seem especially ‘real.’ For example, the interview with the ex-seminarian Lázaro takes place in an open-air cattle shed. Lázaro reclines in a small feeding trough, his legs draped over the edge, smoking, and Sara is seated on the ground nearby, resting an elbow on her bent knee. Their surprisingly casual positioning augments the impact of their dramatic exchange, which centres in large part on Lázaro’s rejection of the Christian doctrine of ‘turning the other cheek,’ after the 1961 assassination of the literacy worker Manuel Ascunce prompted him to shift his views on the necessity of political violence. The added force of the seemingly more spontaneous dialogues is evident in the single most commented-upon section of the film, which features the classically trained Afro-Cuban singer Rafael. The interview begins in the relatively ‘public’ space of a camp dining hall, and Rafael is clearly reticent to reveal precisely why he felt compelled to leave his

258

S. Martin-Márquez

prestigious position as a tenor in the national opera (Conjunto Lírico Nacional ), first for a job in the Tropicana Cabaret in Havana, and then for agricultural work at the ‘Freedom Farm.’ In the next portion of the interview, the two of them are alone together outside, in a somewhat unusual two-shot, with the camera situated at the end of a bench on which they face each other in profile; Rafael is in the foreground and Gómez is behind, smoking a cigarette [Fig. 11.3]. It is in this more intimate context that, haltingly and in response to Gómez’s persistent questioning, Rafael reveals that he left the opera because of racism: the White women singers did not want to perform with a Black man. In her astute analysis of this moment, Arce Padrón notes that there is a resonant audio-visual juxtaposition, as we hear the off-screen voices of children singing—recalling the hymns of the revolutionary Pioneers youth organization—and that we can discern the singers invoking the ‘dreamy’ life of the encampment. I would add that precisely at this juncture there is a crescendo of noise, as the soundtrack also includes off-screen children’s shouting, other bits of conversation, and the rumble of truck and motorbike engines, which all but drown out Rafael’s narrative. Together with Rafael’s notable hesitation to affirm that his treatment relates to race, the sound design here literalizes the notion that in revolutionary Cuba it is all but impossible for discussions of racism to be voiced or heard. At the same time, Rafael asserts that on this ‘other island’—the Isle of Pines—mentalities regarding race are quite different than on the Cuban mainland. This appears confirmed at the end of the later segment with the ex-seminarian Lázaro, who mentions his relationship with Gladys. Cutaways to photos of her and filmed snippets of them together when she visits the island reveal that, while Lázaro is White (and was once literally and metaphorically associated with whiteness/purity, as evidenced by the intercalated image of him in a snowy cassock), Gladys is an Afro-Cuban woman.14 Yet their relationship is ‘un(re)marked’ within the context of the film and, it would appear, of the camps.

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

259

Fig. 11.3 Sara Gómez prompts Rafael to reveal his experience of racism. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana: ICAIC

‘Bad Seeds’? Cultivating Racial Justice The claim that new attitudes towards race are being cultivated on the Isle of Pines is figured at the end of On the Other Island , as the film’s final moving images frame in close-up two pairs of hands—one Black, one White—pulling weeds from around young plants [Fig. 11.4]. While this last snippet of film presents an idealized view of Black and White Cubans working alongside one another, the agricultural imagery also suggests in eminently symbolic fashion that the Isle of Pines juvenile work camps foster the healthy growth of young plants through the eradication of ‘bad seeds.’ The metaphor resonates with Fidel Castro’s condemnation of Cuban vagrants and deviants as ‘twisted trees’ (qtd. in Luke, 2018, pp. 33, 50). Yet Gómez’s film in fact ironizes over the very notion of ‘bad seeds’ or ‘twisted trees’ that seems to subtend revolutionary re-education practices. That notion is first questioned, in ludic fashion, at the beginning of the second segment, which opens with a fight among a group of

260

S. Martin-Márquez

boys that is soon revealed to be, not a genuine altercation, but a theatrical performance under the direction of the camp’s drama teacher, Fajardo. We find Gomez’s most sustained dismantling of the ‘bad seed’ stereotype in the segment introduced with the tongue-in-cheek title ‘The Fury of the Vikings.’ In the lone voiceover narration of the film, Gómez explains that the camps have received an influx of boys from Cuba’s urban centres, who because of their ‘appearance and violence’ have been dubbed the ‘Vikings.’ These boys are also featured in several contemporaneous press accounts, where they are classified as ‘delinquents’ or ‘pre-delinquents’ (González Bermejo, 1968, pp. 74–76; Pérez Betancourt, 1969). Both the Cuba magazine piece and the official Communist Party newspaper Granma’s article underscore the criminal tendencies of the youths, asserting that they vandalized the ferry that transported them to the Isle of Pines, breaking seats and scratching walls, and that once on the island they ‘armed’ themselves with shovels and stones—the choice of verb is telling—and continued to wreak havoc. It is not insignificant that they are described as ‘semi-savage,’ and that many are said to be ‘ñáñigos’—members of the Abakuá secret society for men with

Fig. 11.4 Working side-by-side, young Black and White Cubans eradicate weeds. Sara Gómez, 1968a. On the Other Island. Havana: ICAIC

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

261

roots in West Africa. In the prior century, Spanish colonial authorities had deployed the ñáñigo moniker to brand Afro-Cubans as vagrants and ‘savage’ criminals, and deport them en masse to the Isle of Pines and overseas; from the late 1960s on, revolutionary policy would also condemn and proscribe Black religious practices, outlawing parents’ teaching of santería to their children (Helg, 1995, pp. 29–30, 82–83; Guerra, 2012, pp. 260–262).15 The negative press characterizations of the ‘Vikings’ also facilitate the representation of the boys’ experience on the Isle of Pines as radically transformative. Only through the firm intervention of Cuba’s revolutionary government, mandating agricultural work and military discipline as well as remedial education, will these boys become, not simply ‘true men’ or ‘men of the future,’ but ‘exemplary workers,’ well-versed in the new ideals of comportment. Gómez’s treatment of these youths is quite different. In the brief section devoted to them in On the Other Island , she illustrates her narration with close-up portraits of the boys, singly or in small groups, and while quite a few appear sombre and some exhibit defiant expressions, what is perhaps most notable is just how many of them are Afro-Cubans. Through her ironic representation of these ‘Black Vikings,’ Gómez presents a subtle critique of the criminalization of race. The end of this section shows the students in class; they are seated, have ‘armed’ themselves with pencil and paper, and are mostly attentive to their teacher, a young Afro-Cuban woman. Once again Gómez juxtaposes sound and image, in a humorous yet pointed manner, as we hear non-diegetic opera music, with a male chorus singing the refrain ‘Viking! Viking!’ It is particularly notable, given her poignant interview with Rafael, discussed above, that Gómez has chosen to deploy male operatic voices to underscore the far-from-resolved challenges of racism in revolutionary Cuba. Gómez delves further into the boys’ character, circumstances and camp experiences in the remaining documentary of her trilogy, An Island for Miguel , centred on the ‘Vikings’ residing on the ‘Antonio Briones Montoto’ citrus farm. With the playful title of the first subsection of this film—’The Ten Days that Shook Gerona’ (the capital city of the Isle of Pines)—Gómez again casts doubt on the boys’ level of criminality. Here, three young camp leaders, including two Afro-Cubans,

262

S. Martin-Márquez

recount their first impressions of the group after they ‘invaded’ the island, smiling and occasionally laughing as they detail their behaviours, which include escaping the camp to swim in the river or sneak into the movies; they jokingly refer to one boy—presumably the title character, the Afro-Cuban Miguel—as a ‘devil,’ recalling that he was prone to throwing rocks. The counsellors emphasize the success of their strategy of befriending and gaining the trust of the boys; their exchange highlights the transformative value of human connection, rather than ideological indoctrination. The latter methodology, however, moves to the fore in the following section of the film, when another leader, in a stilted ‘talking head’ style interview, explains camp discipline, as periodic cutaways show images of the boys toiling in the fields—where they are required to spend four and a half hours every day—as well as studying, eating, playing sports and chess, and roughhousing. This portion of the film is capped by footage from a ‘tribunal’ in which the fourteen-year-old Miguel is called to task for throwing rocks at birds. At the end of the film, Miguel is shown in a two-shot, partly shielding his face from the camera while seated on a stone staircase next to César [Fig. 11.5]. The (not inconsequently) White César has just been presented as an exemplary camp inmate, and now he describes himself as a mentor who will surely reform his friend Miguel, so that he might become a militant ‘just like’ him. But the sudden appearance at the beginning of this scene of a film clapper—common in On the Other Island but only shown, twice, in the closing images of this documentary—calls into question the ‘authenticity’ of the moment. Pointing to the resonant self-consciousness of this ending, Joshua Malitsky underlines Gómez’s ‘resistance to definitive conclusions,’ exemplified throughout the film via her non-hierarchical juxtaposition of official militant discourse and images of the boys’ vitality and rebellious spirit (2021, pp. 236–237). Moreover, for Jorge Luis Sánchez González, the clapper distances viewers from the triumphalist claim that marginalized Cubans are now being categorically re-educated, seamlessly converted into ‘young new communists’ (2010, p. 182). While elsewhere the Isle of Pines trilogy supplies minimal information regarding the inmates’ previous situation and the precise means through which they have arrived at the camps, in this film Gómez pointedly

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

263

Fig. 11.5 The ‘exemplary’ White internee César encourages Afro-Cuban Miguel to become ‘just like’ him. Sara Gómez, 1968b. An Island for Miguel. Havana: ICAIC

seeks out Miguel’s backstory. A young counsellor reveals that he is in fact Miguel’s brother-in-law, and that he decided to bring the boy to the Isle of Pines given the family’s difficult living conditions—with nine people sharing a tiny space—and because Miguel was spending more time on the street than at school or work. At this point, Gómez’s film immediately cuts to a portrayal of Miguel’s family in Havana, notably countering the press reports from the period, discussed above. Those articles cast blame for wayward youth, not only on Abakuá practices, but also on the children’s parents—accused of criminality and abandonment—singling out the mothers as self-centred and neglectful, and labelling them ‘prostitutes’ (González Bermejo, 1968, p. 75; Pérez Betancourt, 1969). Gómez begins this segment of her documentary by shifting narrative authority, precisely, to Miguel’s mother, who confirms in her interview with the filmmaker that she has fifteen children; that Miguel does not obey her; and but that she hopes he will make something of himself on the Isle of Pines. In addition to shots of some of the youngest children, we see

264

S. Martin-Márquez

Miguel’s mother washing clothing by hand, and a teenage sister in a spotless white blouse and pleated skirt, carefully arranging her hair before a mirror. The camera then pans around the cramped but tidy interior of the family home—partly built from cast-off corrugated metal and raw wood planks—focusing on items of clothing hanging from pegs on the bedroom walls, and on an altar with Catholic icons set up on a shelf neatly draped in newspaper. Another shot reveals that a second altar holds Afro-Cuban devotional objects (García Yero, 2017, p. 192). These images recall the ending of Gómez’s Guanabacoa: Chronicle of My Family, where the camera pans to register the religious syncretism of the altaradorned kitchen of the filmmaker’s ‘favourite aunt’ Berta, who, as Gómez herself indicates in voiceover narration, does not comply with the revolutionary mandate that Afro-Cubans work to ‘overcome’ (superar ) their race.16 Significantly, Miguel’s father is completely absent from all of this footage; he only appears doubly framed within a shot of a family photograph hanging on the wall, a difficult to discern ‘patriarch’ surrounded by his wife and their numerous children. One of his daughters, seated before the two altars with a baby sibling in her lap, describes her father as a ‘majadero’—commonly used in Cuba to describe disobedient children— and also reveals that he responded to Miguel’s escapades by beating him. By cutting away to these contemporaneous images from the main island, Gómez’s film bursts the idealized bubble of the Isle of Pines camps, exposing the ongoing challenges for impoverished Afro-Cuban families, while pushing back against the victim-blaming that continued to condemn Black women in particular.

Conclusion Gómez’s films in many ways harmonize with Cuban discourse of the late 1960s that sought to re-situate the Isle of Pines, representing it not as a peripheral ‘other island’ but rather as central to the creation of a new, revolutionary society. Much of that discourse emphasized the essential role of Cuban youth in remaking the island, a role that would be officially recognized in 1978 when Fidel Castro changed the name of the territory to the Isle of Youth. But as I have emphasized, Gómez’s films also diverge

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

265

Fig. 11.6 Raúl Martínez’s cover illustration for Cuba magazine, ‘The Youngest Island in the World,’ May 1968

significantly from the party line, exemplified by the 1968 special issue of Cuba magazine, among other official outlets. While the articles inside include long-running stereotypes regarding Afro-Cuban criminality, the publication is literally ‘papered over’ with utopic images of the nation’s diversity: the celebrated graphic designer Raúl Martínez’s front and back covers feature brightly coloured pop art depictions of smiling young Cubans of African, Asian and European heritage [Fig. 11.6]. That same year, by contrast, Sara Gómez takes another carefully formulated artistic tack: through her far less idealized black and white film images, which expose the ongoing legacy of racialized marginalization, she insists that revolutionary Cuba must still grapple with issues of Black and White.17

Notes 1. In its first two reports on human rights abuses in post-revolutionary Cuba (1967, 1970), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

266

2.

3. 4.

5.

S. Martin-Márquez

included many accounts of physical and psychological torture there. The Cuban poet Armando Valladares’ Against All Hope (2001), the best known of the testimonials published by political prisoners confined to the Presidio Modelo during the 1960s, also details appalling conditions and treatment, and the implementation of forced labour. Articulating official governmental claims, Alfredo Muñoz-Unsain and Norberto Fuentes assert that although counterrevolutionaries were confined in the Model Prison, ’the triumphant Revolution immediately decreed the absolute prohibition of any mistreatment of prisoners’ (1968, p. 69). According to interviews conducted with Guillén Landrián before his death in 2003, and subsequently with his widow Gretel Alfonso, the filmmaker was accused of ideological deviancy (diversionismo ideológico) in 1965 and sentenced to two years on the Isle of Pines, where he was forced to work on a chicken farm. The experience reportedly triggered Guillén Landrián’s mental illness, and he set fire to the farm. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, he was transferred to a Havana psychiatric hospital, where he received electroshock treatments; later, he was arrested and imprisoned on multiple occasions before leaving Cuba for Miami in 1989 (Alfonso, 2019, pp. 26–27; Herrera, 2013, p. 13; Zayas, 2019, p. 77; Zayas, 2003). Although they were censored for many years, and some have been lost, Guillén Landrián’s films are now highly esteemed by filmmakers and scholars. Given Sara Gómez’s friendship with Guillén Landrián, the latter’s relegation to the Isle of Pines in the mid-1960s may have inspired, at least in part, the films she shot there at the end of that decade. Many scholars, such as Benson (2018) and Ebrahim (2007), have discussed the censorship of Gómez’s films. For incisive analyses of the situation of Afro-Cubans in postrevolutionary Cuba, see for example Benson (2016) and Sawyer (2006); for a carefully historicized discussion of Sara Gómez’s Black activism and her profound exploration of Afro-Cuban/women’s concerns in her films, see Benson (2018). Gómez’s engagement with major Black theorists of the time is evident in the epigraph from Frantz Fanon in An Island for Miguel , a film I study below. In the script for the final film that Sara Gómez made before her untimely death from asthma in 1974, One Way or Another (De cierta manera), Sara Goméz included two characters, Humberto and La Mejicana, who use the term granja as a synonym for ’prison,’ in explicit reference to punishment for vagrancy or petty crimes (Gómez & González, 2018,

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

267

pp. 84, 45); Humberto’s use of the term is included twice in the finished film. The second Inter-American Commission Report on Human Rights devoted to Cuba (1970) also details the emergence of punitive forced labour granjas for men and women, characterized by brutality. Valladares explains that on the Isle of Pines in the mid-1960s three granjas (a term he calls ’euphemistic’) were created to transition political prisoners out of the Model Prison and into forced labour camps (2001, pp. 245–246, 274); this may have been why Nicolás Guillén Landrián was consigned to work on a chicken farm on the island. I analyse nineteenth-century deportation and penal practices on the Isle of Pines in my book manuscript, Jail-Breaking the Carceral Atlantic: Cuban Rebellion and Political Deportation in the Late Spanish Empire. Most of this scholarship zeroes in on the UMAPs, or ’Military Units to Aid Production,’ forced labour camps in Camagüey to which gay men and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among many others, were consigned from 1965–68; testimonials from inmates and family members have also focused on these camps. Recently, Hynson (2020) has expanded the lens to consider other sites from this period, but not the Isle of Pines facilities. Research in this area is significantly hampered by the fact that relevant Cuban archives are inaccessible to scholars (Macle Cruz, 2019). For more on the ‘New Man’ ideology of revolutionary education and the separation of children from parents, see Anita Casavantes Bradford, 2014, esp. pp. 99–107, 118–120, 184–189. ’Voluntary work’ could range from neighbourhood clean-up in Havana on a Sunday to months-long tours of duty harvesting sugarcane or coffee beans in remote regions. Yusimí Rodríguez (2009) draws on her own experience to reveal the coercive nature of much of that labour, and notes that Sara Gómez’s 1973 documentary On Extra Hours and Voluntary Work (Sobre horas extras y trabajo voluntario) exposed additional problems, such as the gendered burden and unproductive nature of some overtime work. Efrén Córdova details precisely how the Cuban government managed to muddy the distinction between ’volunteer’ and forced labour (2001, pp. 210–254). Representative of long-running attitudes is Michael Chanan’s assertion that for Gómez ‘the style and idiom of the film are subordinate to its purpose’; he describes On the Other Island , whose meticulous composition I analyse here, as ’a loose collection of individual portraits’ (2004, pp. 344, 342). Importantly, Jorge Luis Sánchez González protests reductive views of Gómez’s work, noting the ’feigned formal carelessness’

268

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

S. Martin-Márquez

of her irreverent artistry (2010, pp. 176–177). Several scholarly essays and interviews with Gómez’s collaborators in the ground-breaking new volume edited by Susan Lord and María Caridad Cumaná (2021) also foreground Gómez’s iconoclastic management of form; I will refer to Malitsky’s piece in particular below. In addition to Manuela, Cacha (a.k.a. Nieves Ruiz) is featured in the 1968 special issue of Cuba (González Bermejo, 1968). The brief magazine interviews largely coincide in content with the interviews in Gómez’s film, and specify that the two are among 200 girls and young women who work as horticultural grafters in the ‘Steel Youth’ encampment. Cepero (2018, pp. 973–976) analyses Luc Chessex’s photographic representation of Cacha in Cuba. Most famously, the 1968 Argentine film Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos) included intertitles calling for the projector to be turned off and for an intermediary to initiate a discussion. Sara Gómez takes the next step in her 1972 My Contribution (Mi aporte), focused on Cuban women’s work outside the home; the film seems to close with a title carding reading ‘The End,’ but then includes an additional section titled ‘Report on a Film Debate,’ showing women audience members discussing portions of the film we have just seen. In her discussion of the revolutionary government’s promotion of ’sexual austerity,’ Lillian Guerra cites Sara Gómez’s own ’bold’ critique of some of the state’s modes of defining the parameters of women’s liberation, and also singles out Cacha’s ‘stunning’ comments in this film (2012, pp. 244–245, 267). This is the then-journalism student Gladys Egües, who will reappear in Gómez’s My Contribution (1972). It’s important to acknowledge that Gómez’s One Way or Another controversially condemns Abakuá practices. Yet that film also includes a positive representation of santería. Gómez’s sophisticated intersectional critique is focused, not on the legacy of African culture, but rather on the misogyny of Abakuá. See Benson (2018, pp. 140–142) for a discussion of this extraordinary ending to Guanabacoa. The kernel for this article was the last section of my Framing the Penal Colony Conference presentation, devoted to Sara Gómez. I developed that section further in a conference paper I gave at the Congreso Internacional de Literatura y Estudios Hispánicos, June 24–26, 2021 [held virtually], which forms the basis for this essay.

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

269

References Alfonso, A. (2021). Staying with the archive? The matter of, with and after Cuba’s UMAP. Caribbean Studies Association Annual Conference. May 31June 4 [held virtually]. Alfonso, G. (2019). Regresar a la Habana con Guillén Landrián: Entrevista a Gretel Alfonso. In J. Ramos and D. Robbins (Eds.), Guillén Landrián o el desconcierto fílmico (pp. 21–34). Almenara. Arce Padrón, Y. (2017). Voces (des)centradas del audiovisual en Cuba: Rutas críticas desde el pensamiento poscolonial caribeño. Versión: Estudios de comunicación y política, 38, 61–71. Benson, D. (2016). Antiracism in Cuba: The unfinished revolution. University of North Carolina Press. Benson, D. (2018). Sara Gómez: Afrocubana (Afro-Cuban Women’s) activism after 1961. Cuban Studies, 46 , 134–58. [Reprinted in Lord and Cumaná, 2021, pp. 182–206] Bravet, R.L. (1967). La Isla de la Juventud. Bohemia, March 3, 4–11. Casavantes, A. (2014). The Revolution is for the children: The politics of childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959–1962. University of North Carolina Press. Cepero, I. (2018). Luc Chessex, Robert Frank, and the representation of labour in the magazine Cuba Internacional , 1968–71. Art History, 41(5), 958–997. Chanan, M. (2004). Cuban cinema. University of Minnesota Press. Córdova, E. (2001). El trabajo forzoso en Cuba: Un recorrido amargo de la historia. Universal. De cómo la Isla de Pinos cambió su nombre por Isla de la Juventud: Dos jóvenes, entre los miles que de Oriente a Occidente del país trajeron su alegría y esfuerzo al territorio para transformarlo en Isla de la Juventud, cuentan sus recuerdos a JR. Juventud Rebelde, August 2, 2007. http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/cuba/2007-08-02/de-como-la-isla-depinos-cambio-su-nombre-por-isla-de-la-juventud. Accessed 21 June 2021. Ebrahim, H. (2007). Sarita and the revolution: Race and cuban cinema. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 82, 107–118. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish. Vintage. García Yero, O. (2017). Sara Gómez: Un cine diferente. ICAIC. González Bermejo, [E.]. (1968). La isla más joven del mundo. Cuba, 7(73) (May). [The dozens of subsections in this issue that are unsigned were presumably written or supervised by González Bermejo].

270

S. Martin-Márquez

Gómez, S. (1974) [production] /1977 [posthumous release]. De cierta manera. Havana: ICAIC. Gómez, S. (1973). Sobre horas extras y trabajo voluntario. ICAIC. Gómez, S. (1972). Mi aporte. ICAIC. Gómez, S. (1969). Isla del tesoro. ICAIC. Gómez, S. (1968a). En la otra isla. ICAIC. Gómez, S. (1968b). Una isla para Miguel. ICAIC. Gómez, S. (1966). Guanabacoa: Crónica de mi familia. ICAIC. Gómez, Sara and Tomás González. (2018). De cierta manera [guión]. Ed. by A. Arango and V. Fowler Calzada. Prologue by D. Luis Reyes. ICAIC. [English translation in Lord and Cumaná, 2021, pp. 90–140] Guerra, L. (2012). Visions of power in Cuba: Revolution, redemption, and resistance, 1959–1971. University of North Carolina Press. Hartman, J. H. (2019). Dictator’s dreamscape: How architecture and vision built Machado’s Cuba and invented modern Havana. University of Pittsburgh Press. Helg, A. (1995). Our rightful share: The Afro-Cuban struggle for equality, 1886– 1912. University of North Carolina Press. Herrera, J. M. L. (2013). Nicolás Guillén Landrián en 3-D. Brouwer & Brouwer. Hynson, R. (2020). Laboring for the state: Women, family and work in revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. Cambridge University Press. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. (1967). Informe sobre la situación de los derechos humanos en Cuba. http://www.cidh.org/countryrep/ Cuba67sp/ indice.htm. Accessed 16 June 2021. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. (1970). Segundo informe sobre la situación de los presos políticos y sus familias en Cuba. http://www.cidh.org/ countryrep/ Cuba70sp/indice.htm. Accessed 16 June 2021. López Pellón, N. (1961). Isla de Pinos ahora sí está en el mapa de Cuba. INRA, 2(6) (June), 70–74. Lord, S. and M. Caridad Cumaná. (2021). The cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing revolution. Indiana University Press. Luke, A. (2018). Youth and the Cuban revolution: Youth culture and politics in 1960s Cuba. Lexington Books. Macle, J. (2019). Writing the revolution’s history out of closed archives? Cuban archival laws and access to information. In M. J. Bustamante & J. L. Lambe (Eds.), The revolution from within: Cuba, 1959–1980 (pp. 47–63). Duke University Press. Malitsky, J. (2021). Information and education: Sara Gómez and nonfiction film culture of the 1960s. In S. Lord and M. Caridad Cumaná (Eds.),

11 Screening (Out) the Isle of Pines Youth Work Camps

271

The cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing revolution (pp. 225–39). Indiana University Press. McManus, J. (2000). Cuba’s island of dreams: Voices from the Isle of Pines and youth. University Press of Florida. Muñoz-Unsain, [A.] and N. Fuentes. (1968). Aquel presidio viejo y gris. Cuba, 7 (73) (May), 67–69. Núñez, F. (2019). Esse obscuro objeto incômodo: O ‘cinema direto’ nas reflexões cubanas (e latino-americanas) sobre documentário. Doc Online: Revista Digital de Cinema Documentário, September. Special Issue: Revolucão Cubana e Documentário: 60 Anos: 40–60. http://ojs.labcom-ifp. ubi.pt/index.php/doc/issue/view/SI%202019. Accessed 6 January 2021. Pérez Betancourt, R. (1969). Muchachos que pertenecen al pasado y que ahora son el futuro. Granma, 5, 25–26. Rodríguez, Y. (2009). Doing voluntary work... Voluntarily. Havana Times, December 4. https://havanatimes.org/opinion/doing-voluntary-work…vol untarily/. Accessed 16 August 2021. Sánchez González, J. L. (2010). Romper la tensión del arco: Movimiento cubano de cine documental . ICAIC. Sawyer, M. (2006). Racial politics in post-revolutionary Cuba. Cambridge University Press. Sierra Madero, A. (2016). El trabajo os hará hombres: Masculinización nacional, trabajo forzado y control social en Cuba durante los años sesenta. Cuban Studies, 44, 309–349. Valladares, A. (2001). Against all hope: A memoir of life in Castro’s gulag. Encounter Books. Winston, B. (1993). The documentary film as scientific inscription. In M. Renov (Ed.), Theorizing documentary (pp. 37–57). Routledge. Zayas, M. (2019). Cine, archivo, y poder: Entrevista a Manuel Zayas (with Julio Ramos). In J. Ramos & D. Robbins (Eds.), Guillén Landrián o el desconcierto fílmico (pp. 71–82). Almenara. Zayas, M. (2003). Café con leche. EICTV. Zayas, M. La prensa oficial y las UMAP [dossier]. La isla del nunca jamás. https://manuelzayas.wordpress.com/la-prensa-oficial-y-las-umap/. Accessed 23 June 2021.

Part IV Creative Encounters in and beyond the Penal Colony

12 Listening with Our Feet: Decolonial and Feminist Arts-Based Methodologies in Addressing Australian Incarceration Policies on Nauru and Manus Islands Kate McMillan

This chapter considers the creative practice of listening as disruptive and empathic—a way of innovatively including narratives that have been systemically silenced using an embodied empathic, auditory engagement that I call ‘listening with our feet’. It focuses on two projects that respond to the incarceration of refugees on Manus and Nauru islands, off the northern coast of Australia as part of the Australian Government mandatory offshore detention regime. I argue that the incarceration of these people follows a trajectory of island incarceration, beginning with European invasion in 1788 which used the continent as a vast carceral island. This can also be seen within the framework of the extractive colonialism which has defined the fate of so many pacific nations, including Nauru, when the mineral phosphate, crucial for global agriculture, was discovered (Teaiwa, 2015). Conversations in this chapter will respond to the conditions of incarceration, both presently and historically, and examine K. McMillan (B) King’s College, London, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_12

275

276

K. McMillan

the ways these practices have been silenced and embedded as a normative practice of state surveillance and control. I argue that this can be understood as a mechanism of colonialism, and will consider how the arts-based method of ‘listening with our feet’, can actively disrupt narratives which have been minimised through a process that Sullivan and Tuana (2007) describe as an ‘epistemology of ignorance’. The first artwork I explore is called ‘how are you today?’ by the Manus Recording Project Collective which was produced for the exhibition ‘Eavesdropping’ (2018) curated by Joel Stern and James Parker. The work was a collaboration between to six artists/detainees on Manus Island and three people in Melbourne and involved 84 daily recordings from the Manus Island Detention Centre for the duration of the exhibition. The second project is an Opera written by composer Cat Hope called ‘Speechless’ (2019), a response to the Human Rights Commission Report ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration detention’ (2014). Both creative works have used sound and listening in the production and presentation to critically examine Australia’s offshore detention policies used to incarcerate people seeking asylum. ‘Listening with our feet’ was first developed to name the way that I construct site-based creative works in a chapter called ‘Listening as Practice: Methodologies in Settler Societies’ (McMillan, 2019). I was attempting to draw a line around my own method of listening, with the intention of sharing this with other artists and scholars for whom this might resonate. As such, I refer to my own creative practice, and my ongoing collaborative partnership with Cat Hope throughout this chapter. In writing about this methodological approach, I have been less interested in the creative outputs of listening practices, and more focused on the creative methods of production that use ‘listening’. Distinguishing itself from the important musical traditions of ‘deep listening’ (Oliveros, 2005), ‘listening with your feet’ more explicitly links listening to place. I argue that oppression always happens somewhere, and that by connecting listening to geography (Duffy & Waitt, 2013), we are also able to include non-human ecologies, as well as the sociological and political layers that characterise nation-states. I argue that this is a particularly important approach in colonised landscapes such as Australia,

12 Listening with Our Feet

277

where the relationship between first nation peoples and country has been systematically silenced in a process that Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015, p. xi) calls the ‘possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’. ‘Listening with your feet’ was originally articulated to make space for ‘quiet voices’. However, through research for this chapter, it has expanded to include the ways listening can be disruptive, even anarchic, particularly as a mode of resistance against oppressive state apparatus, and increasingly private corporations. This shift in my thinking was possible through rich conversations with Joel Stern about ‘Eavesdropping’ who reminded me that not everyone wants to be heard, and subjects should always insist on a right to be silent (Stern, J. personal communication 5th July, 2021).

Island Prisons The British invasion of the continent we now call Australia, enabled the establishment of an inescapable carceral island, unprecedented in ambition. The circumstances under which this occurred facilitated unspeakable violence against First Nation peoples, as land became subsumed for the fledgling penal colony. Colonial frontier massacres and the introduction of disease and alcohol are thought to have killed over 90% of the original population of 1–1.5 million people by the 1900s (Miller et al., 2012). The process of aggressive land acquisition continues to this day, with first nation communities in constant battle to assert connection to country and protect the environment from, amongst other things, extractive mining practices (Laudine, 1991). The extensive mechanisms of colonial invasion used against Indigenous communities have measurable impacts today for First Nation peoples (Milroy & Bandler, 2021). Today’s landscape is marred (but notably, rarely marked or memorialised), by the brutal frontier wars from 1788–1939. Gibson (2002, p. 1) describes the Australian landscape as a ‘gigantic crime scene’ and a ‘horror story blazing across two centuries’. The sense that unbeknownst to us, anything could have happened anywhere, was formative to me as a young artist in Australia.

278

K. McMillan

British convicts were condemned under The Transportation Act (1717: 4 George 1 c.11), originally designed to transport prisoners to slaving islands and the Americas. The Act was later instrumentalised for the British invasion in 1788 and subsequent demarcation of Australia as a penal colony. Convicts were often the victims of the British political and judicial elite who demonised the poor, the working classes and the Irish. Initially, many of the convictions were ‘crimes of survival’ (Rufo, 2019), such as food theft and petty crime (although later, and in places such as Western Australia it was often the more serious offences that resulted in transportation). As convicts received their ‘ticket of leave’ on the completion of their sentences, their ascendance up the class system was lubricated by ensuring Aboriginal peoples were firmly positioned at the very bottom of society. The social dynamic of the colony was particular—the majority of citizens were ex-convicts, or the descendants of them; until the early nineteenth century, 85% of the European population were male (Reid, 2007); and Aboriginal peoples were not considered fully human (Buchan, 2001). The lowly status of much of the population subsequently resulted in tightly governed legal and social systems, that were highly policed to maintain control. Racist attitudes towards First Nation peoples persisted and continue to persist. The 1967 Referendum, almost 200 years after invasion, asked white people if Aboriginal people should become citizens. The Australian people overwhelmingly voted yes. However, voter responses were highly regionalised. In my home state of Western Australia, the ‘Yes’ vote was the lowest in the country at 80.95%, and some regions such as the Murchison recorded a ‘No’ vote of 42.6% (Western Australian Museum). But racism did not just frame attitudes towards First Nation peoples. Public sentiment towards all non-whites shaped social engineering and public policy well into the twentieth century. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, also known as the White Australia policy, ensured that people of non-European descent could not immigrate to Australia (National Archives of Australia). As early as 1850, there were also local laws restricting entrance of Chinese immigrants. Many of these policies were not dismantled until the 1970s. It is against this historical background of racial vilification and incarceration that the use of Manus and Nauru islands as detention centres for

12 Listening with Our Feet

279

people seeking asylum was established. The infrastructure, language and politics of incarceration are firmly cemented and systemically embedded in modern Australia. The perceived threat that Australian borders must be protected at all costs has been in place from its first inception as a colony, and reinforced through policies of discrimination against non-white people, and First Nation people ever since. More recently, Australia has been able to lock down its borders in response to COVID19, with the majority support of citizens (Lewis, 2020), including to Australian citizens marooned elsewhere. Social control, which would be unacceptable in other modern democracies, is considered a price worth paying. It has become increasingly hard to ‘listen’ to disruptive or nonconformist voices who may question Australian government policy. The limited, and conservative media environment in Australia has oftentimes functioned as the communications arm of the government, significantly limiting wider public discussion. Publicly funded broadcasting has come under attack with new policies aimed at limiting access and narrowing reportage guidelines. In 2019, Australian Federal Police raided the home of journalist Annika Smethurst, and the Sydney office of the ABC over her reportage on plans to expand government security powers leaked via a confidential memo (Ananian-Welsh, 2020). In response to this and other raids on journalists, the New York Times claimed in its headline ‘Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy’ (Cave, 2019). A restricted media environment has included blocking access to, and coverage of incarceration conditions in Australia’s offshore detention facilities. The role of secrecy and silence has been instrumental in the successful island detention of those seeking asylum in Australia. It has ensured that the public have limited access, and therefore empathy with the thousands of people—including children—who have experienced offshore detention. Mandatory detention practices for asylum seekers entering Australia began in 1994, when the 1992 Migration Reform Act was implemented. Originally introduced under the Keating government, it has since been altered by subsequent governments. As part of the ongoing adaption of the Act, John Howard’s government passed legislation called the ‘Pacific

280

K. McMillan

Solution’ in 2001 (Australian Parliament House). The terrifyingly named government policy excised hundreds of small Australian islands from its migration zone, meaning that any asylum seeker arriving on one, was not considered to have ‘arrived’ in Australia, and could not therefore seek asylum in Australia. The policy was enacted in response to what became known as ‘the Tampa Incident’ whereby a Norwegian tanker, called the MV Tampa, was refused entry into Australian waters as it was carrying 433 Afghan refugees it had rescued from a sinking ship (Inder, 2010). The rhetoric surrounding this incident sought to conflate asylum seekers with illegal migrants. Terms such as ‘queue jumpers’ were used by the government and media, implying that refugees were largely potential terrorists and criminals who threatened Australia’s sovereignty and safety. There is no maximum time that people can be held, and as of 2020 the average time of detention was 533 days (Australian Border Force, 2020). Many asylum seekers have spent almost a decade in detention, including children. Images of the people trying to reach Australia have become part of a highly contentious debate lasting decades. What can be seen, and what cannot be seen, has subsequently shaped the national debate. This chapter considers what practices of listening can tell us about the experiences of refugees who have been incarcerated in Australia. Perhaps more than these individual experiences, it asks how do artists use listening to defy systemic silencing? What are the particular challenges and ‘workarounds’ that artists employ to eavesdrop or amplify what is being removed from public debate?

How Do Artists Listen? My interest in listening as a decolonial tool arises from these sociopolitical histories of Australia. It is also shaped by my experience as a woman, growing up in a stubbornly patriarchal culture—of not being heard, and then later, noticing who else was not being heard. It arises from dis-ease of growing up in a beautiful, loved landscape, which is also stained by a violence that remains largely unspoken. These experiences

12 Listening with Our Feet

281

shaped my choice to become an artist, which in Australia, is to mark yourself as ‘other’. In my creative work, I have been able to tune into what I call the ‘sunny disquiet of colonial life’ (McMillan, 2019, p. 19), and deliberately look and listen to the things most people prefer to avoid. Artists are highly attuned to the visual, and the auditory is often overlooked, or secondary. However, part of honing in on visual nuances— either in their work, or the space that it is being presented in—occurs through a visual listening. How does this work feel right now, in this place? What else is happening around it and how does that change or shift the work? What other meanings are at play? What has happened here before? What hasn’t happened here, and why? The making of work is thus an iterative process that seeks to understand the conversations between all these elements. Artists are a litmus test for small changes, using a constant feedback loop to adapt and direct the production of meaning in their creative work. Sometimes when something cannot be seen, it can be heard. The first clue might arrive as a soft sound. It might enter our bodies as a low-frequency vibration that makes us uneasy. Our ears do not have eyelids—they are always open. Reynolds and Reason (2012) talk about the experience of making and viewing art as a kinaesthetic empathy which is understood as being a sensorially informed embodied knowledge (Ibid, p. 195). This form of knowing suggests limitations to accepted discursive research methods and the importance of conceptualising the experiential effects of place. In my own work, as with many artists that work site-specifically, the aural plays a more conscious role in reading place. As I have written elsewhere, the qualities of sound are. leaky, sub-audible at times, reverberating through the body—(they) mock the one-dimensionality and limitations of the image. Despite the colonial project, the aural songs of pre-colonial times persist. Once you’ve made time to listen, it is hard to shake off a sound—once it’s found its way into you. There is a magic in that. (McMillan, 2019, p. 193)

282

K. McMillan

Importantly, the process of actively listening to people and places draws our attention to what is quiet. But what is quiet can also be understood as foundational—the sonic mesh beneath our feet.

Listening Feels a Lot like Learning Since 2009, I have been collaborating with sound artist and composer, Cat Hope. This has manifested in soundscapes for my films, performances and installations. It was during the production of the work ‘Islands of Incarceration’ for the 2010 Sydney Biennale, that I first started to think about listening as a practice. Cat and I had travelled to the Ludlow Tuart Forest, south of Perth in Western Australia. We intended to take images and capture sound from the site of the Wonnerup Massacre in which up to 1000 Wardandi Noonghar people were murdered over a period of five years, largely in retaliation for the spearing of a white landowner who had enslaved a thirteen-year-old Aboriginal girl. Over the course of three days, we sat in the forest and listened. My strongest memories of that place, and in fact the entire production and presentation of the work, is of the sounds of the forest. Hope (personal communication 21st July, 2021) notes that ‘listening does not just capture sound…there was something in that forest that my body could hear – listening is not only about your ears’. As Duffy and Waitt (2013, p. 122) argue in their research using ‘sound diaries’, ‘listening is a practice that helps forge places through bodies’. As such, we use all our body to listen—sound vibrates through place and flesh. The body becomes a form of echo chamber (Nancy, 2007)—the listener in this context is embodied in a process where the distinctions between place and person are less clear. We are awash with place—‘sonic geographical knowledge is conceived as offering insights into a different mode of becoming and being-in-the-world’ (Duffy & Wait, 2013, p. 121). Listening is very different to hearing. To listen is not to be passive— but to find stillness and focus. It is very close to learning. What Hope and I were often focused on doing is thinking about how this approach can help us to not only listen to the sounds in the landscape, but to what has been actively quietened in the canon. Knowing that you must work

12 Listening with Our Feet

283

hard to hear and learn some things is fundamental in a landscape like Australia, which Gibson (2002) argues is a giant historical crime scene. Hope and I wondered what we might be able to hear when we focus on listening to a place that began its European life as a brutal prison continent. Hope took the sounds recorded from the forest where the massacres took place, and drew out the low-frequency noises. We pushed this through speakers situated underneath the floorboards of the timber drying shed. The sound was barely perceptible. Viewers reported a noise like distant thunder which they sometimes connected to the work, or not. Mostly, people felt a dis-ease as they walked through what was an otherwise visually beautiful installation. The vibrations ever so subtly moved through the floor and the bodies of the viewers, ultimately framing the ‘feeling’ of the work, even when the sound was not consciously registered. (Fig. 12.1)

Fig. 12.1 McMillan, K (2010) Islands of Incarceration, Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound produced in collaboration with Cat Hope

284

K. McMillan

This work was formative for Hope. Her compositions have subsequently developed and responded to a number of works which deal directly with detention, imprisonment and social justice issues in particular, Their Lives Are Stripped of Meaning (2018) for voice, trumpet and electronics; Signals Directorate (2014) for instruments and electronics; and Cruel and Usual (2011) for string quartet and electronics. However, her first Opera ‘Speechless’ (2018) was perhaps Hope’s most explicitly activist work. Hope used the ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention’, Human Rights Commission Report (2014), authored by Gillian Triggs as a starting point for the Opera. The report aimed to give voice to the 800 children who were detained at the time it was published (Triggs, 2014). Cat drew from interviews with the children recorded in the 324-page document, as well as drawings they made in response to their detention experience. This was then abstracted into sounds (rather than a traditional libretto), using animated notation to produce a 70-min opera for four soloists, a bass orchestra and a community choir. Even in the initial stages of ‘Speechless’ (and indeed other works), collections of sounds and notation often swirl around in her head. The process of sitting down and pulling this all together into a linear notation brings a sense of order to things, and again creates another layer of translation and abstraction (Hope, C., personal communication 21st July, 2021). Throughout this process a form of kinaesthetic empathy is occurring where what Hope calls ‘sound messages’ (Ibid) are in dialogue with her ideas. This then takes on another dimension during rehearsals when the work undergoes another layer of adaption as it is re-interpreted once again by the musicians and singers. This complex process of iterative listening in the making of ‘Speechless’ provided Hope with a framework for avoiding a didactic rendition of the issues which led to the report. Abstraction was therefore key in the development of all aspects of the production. Hope’s aim was for ‘the audience to hear through their skin, not their ears’; that what they would hear would not be music, but sound messages which would enter their body and stick (Hope, C., personal communication 21st July, 2021). Divided into three Acts, we are not introduced to the soloists until the 2nd act. The music traditions which the four performers draw from

12 Listening with Our Feet

285

are all very different. Karina Utomo (pictured) has a background in metal; Caitlin Cassidy, cabaret; Judith Dodsworth comes from a classical/operatic tradition and Sage Pbbbbt arises from free improvisation traditions. The challenges of working with singers from different musical backgrounds enabled Hope to hold the singers in a state of discomfort. Whilst not explicitly stated in the programme guide, each of the singers had their own experience of feeling outside society. One singer was a migrant, another had parents who were refugees and another whose trans identity meant that they also felt disconnected from their own body growing up (Hope, C., personal communication 21st July, 2021). Hope intended that there be ‘something in the grain of their voice which would be a telling’—that we would understand a shared anguish through the way the ‘sound message’ vibrated in the bodies of the audience. In ‘Speechless’, it is impossible to detect any discernible language—the soloists often use often high pitch, animalistic and unexpected sounds. It is at times reminiscent of a Dantesque hell—we feel pain and anguish in their voices, and subsequently in our own bodies. At other times, there is a quiet Beckett-like absurdity expressed through gestures such as popping sounds from flicking against the cheeks. Notably, there is no discernible rhythm or traditional pulse to the score, reflecting the unpredictable and unending circumstances of those detained (Wyatt & Hope, 2020). In describing the sonic qualities of the soloists and the choir, McMillan (2019) writes that ‘deconstructed sentences and words which enter into abstraction—are, by contrast, clear and crisp and sit most often above the instrumental body, occasionally diving into, and resurfacing from, the texture’. This perfectly describes the sensation of an embodied movement through the work, guided by the unexpected direction of the sound. One reviewer wrote that Speechless ‘communicated with their listeners in a more bodily fashion. The notes from the bass orchestra–consisting of low winds, brass, strings, electronics and percussion–could be felt reverberating through the feet of the audience, settling uncomfortably in the stomach….. This clash between bodily and mechanical elements served to remind audiences of the inter-relatedness of the two; the horrors of our time might be systemic and seemingly untouchable, but they are essentially man-made. (Biemmi, L, 2019, p. 2) (Fig. 12.2)

286

K. McMillan

Fig. 12.2 Karina Utomo performing in Cat Hope’s ‘Speechless’. Image by Toni Wilkinson

Listening as a Disruptive Practice It is clear that Hope’s approach in ‘Speechless’ was an attempt to disrupt the closed and singular channels of official communication emanating from the Australian Government about mandatory detention of refugees. Hope describes her dismay on realising that despite Gillian Triggs authority as President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, her report and advocacy fell on deaf ears. Previously, Hope had been witness to (and written a number of compositions in response) the systemic misogyny afforded the former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. For Hope, endemic sexism and racism silenced the important voices of women in leadership, and enabled a culture that disembodied the humanness of those seeking asylum. Hope’s ‘Speechless’ was about creating a place in the cultural sector to voice her anguish. Yet, some people do not wish to be heard for fear of persecution and/or repercussions from oppressive state apparatus. It is precisely in this space that the writing and curation of Joel Stern and James Parker is situated.

12 Listening with Our Feet

287

‘how are you today?’ was a work that was part of larger project called ‘Eavesdropping’, which included workshops, a book, performances and an exhibition which was first shown at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne in 2018, touring to the City Gallery Wellington/Te Whare Toi in 2019. The title of the project was inspired by the word from the late middle ages, ‘evesdroppere’, meaning to listen at night and snoop on ones neighbours—literally to loiter under the eaves of another’s home (Stern& Parker, 2020, p. 7). Already, the curators had made explicit the nature of listening to which they attended; listening as a disruptive, illegal activity. how are you today? was an artwork within the exhibition produced by six of the men detained on Manus Island—Samad Abdul, Behrouz Boochani Abdul Aziz Muhamat, Farhad Bandesh, Kazem Kazemi and Shamindan Kanapathi, and their collaborators based in Melbourne— Michael Green, André Dao and Jon Tjhia. Together these nine people formed the Manus Recording Project Collective. Each day for the fourteen weeks of the show, one of the men on Manus made a sound recording and sent it ‘onshore’ for swift upload to the gallery. By the exhibition’s end, there were eighty-four recordings in total, each ten minutes long. The result is an archive of fourteen hours—too large and diverse to synthesise, yet only a tiny fraction of the men’s indefinite internment. (Stern & Parker, 2020, p. 2)

What is extraordinary about this project is that counter to the wishes of the Australian Government, it was possible to hear these men speak and to hear the background noise of their lives in detention. We hear them laughing, crying, reading and conversing—but also the familiar gestures of daily life such as cooking and eating. We hear where they are—the distant sounds of the pacific, the birds and so on. Through the auditory, we are able to build a complex picture in our mind of their lives—the soundscape of carceral island detention. As listeners we do precisely what the government does not want—we hear them, we know them and we feel empathy for their plight. We might also ask them; how are you today?

288

K. McMillan

But there is also discomfort in listening to this work—as Stern and Parker note, the audience in the exhibition becomes implicated—we shift from ‘eavesdroppers into earwitnesses’ (Ibid p. 9). Given the ethical and legal challenges in conceiving and presenting the work, was there then a moral obligation on behalf of the listener? What do we do with this new knowledge, this acquired empathy? The work is transformed from an intellectual act, into a question of participation. Yet it resists the spectacle so often associated with the artistic retelling of trauma. Instead, the fourteen-hour oscillation between the banal and the profound requires an engagement that refuses the neatly encapsulated package of high drama we have become accustomed to through our addiction to headline news. The work disrupts what Andrew Brooks (2020) calls the ‘white sonic field’. Brooks argues that ‘the settler-colonial context of Australia (is) a racially saturated sonic field…. the sonic field is structured by white perception which determines in advance what can and can’t be heard within the white imaginary’ (Ibid). The sonic field around the incarceration of people seeking asylum has largely been limited to the conservative right’s call to ‘stop the boats’. This monotinised, reduced and highly emotive slogan of the Liberal Party has filled our ears for the two decades since the Tampa Incident. For Brooks, these ‘order words’ do more than just reflect government opposition to those seeking asylum, they are a command to uphold the colonial order (Ibid). ‘how are you today?’ disrupts this sonic field—the daily encounter with the soundscapes of Manus island detention leaks into our bodies and lives there long after the broadcast is over.

Lessons in How (not) to Be Heard The title from this section is taken from a 2020 symposium initiated by Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture), Sean Dockray (Artist) and James Parker (Legal Scholar) called ‘Machine Listening’. Day two, inspired by Hito Steyerl 2013 work ‘How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational Movie’, explored the ideas around ‘listening back’—a direct

12 Listening with Our Feet

289

challenge to corporate and state listening who, they argue, invest in keeping war and capital invisible—and silent. The issues explored during ‘Lessons in how (not) to be heard’ remind us that sometimes we need to be heard—but at other times we desperately need to not be heard. Most importantly, the symposium underlined that ‘the political challenge is not (or not just) how to become invisible, but how to ensure that certain state practices and injustices do not remain so’ (Machine Listening, 2020). This tension between the artist staging a platform for systemically overlooked voices; a structural system intent on silence; and the ethical challenges of endangering those whose experiences can be used against them is crucial to the ethical challenges of ‘listening’. Asylum seekers rarely arrive with anything other than their bodies and their stories. What they say, who hears it and who does not takes on heightened importance. Yet it has been their very words which have been harnessed to undermine their claims for asylum. Language analysis software, such as LADO (Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin), has been developed by governments around the world to question the national or cultural origin of those seeking asylum. This clumsy software, often interpreted by non-experts, fails to account for the complexity of speech, including how people’s speech is often socialised via families, not just where they are from. Additionally, asylum seekers often take years to safely claim asylum, accumulating local dialects as they move. In Britain in 2014, 100s of Somali’s were wrongfully returned to Tanzania and Kenya as a consequence of voice recognition systems (Schmid & Patrick, 2015). For the 15 million stateless people estimated worldwide, the tensions between what and how they are listened to has life-changing implications (Institute on Statelessness & Inclusion, 2020). The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which Australia is a signatory, has come under constant attack by successive governments. In 2017, The UN Refugee Agency, which is a guardian of the convention, deemed Australia to be in breach of the convention because of its offshore detention policies, ‘The Australian Government’s announced change in legal status and withdrawal of support to refugees and asylum-seekers is a blatant attempt to coerce the most vulnerable to return to Papua New

290

K. McMillan

Guinea, Nauru, or their countries of origin’ (The UN Refugee Agency). Australia’s constant attempts to thwart intentional law, manipulate and change national policy and silence the media, have helped to facilitate an environment which undermines asylum claims at every level. The six men seeking asylum who worked on ‘how are you today?’ found themselves not only stateless, but they also had the very nature of their statelessness denied by the Australian Government who continued to maintain ‘they could return home at any time’ (Refugee Council of Australia, 2021). This approach which Tuana and Sullivan (2007) call an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ denies the denial of their existence as refugees. Charles Mills (1997) argues this practice—what he calls ‘The Racial Contract’—is a tacit agreement amongst Europeans and settler colonialists to assert and promote white supremacy by minimising and marginalising non-white oppression and histories. It is a key ingredient in what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls ‘the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty’ (2015). It takes a lot of labour to continually maintain the artificial borders of settler-colonial societies, including denying the circumstances of those detained on Manus Island. UNHRC estimate it costs 15 times as much to house asylum seekers in detention, than to re-house in the community while their claims are verified (The UN Refugee Agency, 2017). This bureaucratic, absurdist and expensive labour also became part of the process of exhibiting ‘how are you today?’ at the Ian Potter Museum—an exhibition space overseen by the University of Melbourne. At every stage, the decision-making was scrutinised by museum staff and the university’s legal team. Arguments arose over the wording of the didactic panels which would have traditionally noted where the artist ‘lived and worked’. For the curators, to state that the men on Manus Island ‘lived and worked’ there would have been ridiculously inaccurate. The curators argued that the men should be listed as ‘detained on Manus Island’. But the museum staff were unwilling to be held responsible for what might be perceived as politically sensitive wording. Government intervention into university governance, funding and curriculum in Australia is not without precedent (Galloway, 2021). But it wasn’t until the curators identified a ruling by the Papa New Guinean Supreme

12 Listening with Our Feet

291

Court that stated the inhabitants were transferred and detained forcefully (Parker & Stern, 2020, p. 18), that the museum was able to defer responsibility and agree to the curators’ request. Notably, they did not encounter any of these issues when the work later toured to New Zealand/Aotearoa in 2019 to the City Gallery Wellington/Te Whare Toi (Stern, J. personal communication 5th July, 2021). The sensitivity around issues such as wording are a crucial part of maintaining the falsity of possession. The question of authority, possession and ownership is at stake. Australia continues to rigorously assert who can and cannot enter, since that is fundamental to the founding myth of terra nullius and the British claim to land—as MoretonRobinson notes ‘you cannot exclude unless you assume you already own’ (Ibid, p. xxiv). For Aboriginal peoples who were considered voiceless by the state until 1967, and refugees whose status as refugees is not even acknowledged, being listened to or not being listened to becomes a question of authority. Arguably being heard is then crucial, despite the risks. Stern and Parker claim that ‘how are you today?’ demonstrates this need to foreground both the ‘cochlear’ and ‘non-cochlear’ dimensions: the dialogue between what is and isn’t ‘heard’ (2020, p. 4)—to highlight what is being silenced, and the systems being mechanised to make that happen.

Listening with Our Feet But what of the non-human voices which are also being ignored? Arguably, what we should be listening to the most intently is the planet. The term ‘listening with our feet’ brings together the kinds of activist practices described in the previous sections which explore human injustice, alongside an environmentally aware framework of listening. Island nations in the global south like Australia are at the cliff edge of finite and precarious resources, and the delicate inter-dependence of human and non-human ecologies. The geographical boundaries that make islands safe—and perfect carceral locations—also make them vulnerable. Much of the localised environmental degradation that has occurred in Australia

292

K. McMillan

is a consequence of supplanting European farming methods and industrialisation processes. ‘Listening with our feet’ acknowledges a global practice of ‘deep listening’, that is not about inventing new practices, but simply about hearing and giving space to existing knowledge—it expressly emanates from the kind of listening that artists’ undertake. This is particularly pertinent in relation to colonised islands in the pacific which, amongst other activities including nuclear testing well into the 1970s, have been impacted by European extractive mining practices. In 1886, Nauru was annexed by Germany under the Anglo-German Declaration and became part of Germany’s New Guinea protectorate. When a German prospector discovered phosphate in 1900, it changed the fate of the island, possibly forever. Throughout the twentieth century, it fell under the control of various European powers, largely orchestrated by Britain and Australia, and would not become independent again until 1966. The Australian government reached an out of court settlement as a result of the gross environmental destruction undertaken during phosphate mining. The once beautiful island covered in tropical rainforest, that had sustained Polynesian communities for 3000 years, is now an environmental wasteland (Feary, 2008). The use of Nauru as a carceral island is the most recent chapter in colonial negligence, that has instrumentalised the land for profit. This brutal approach to the environment which reduces it to a vestige for financial exploitation has been mirrored across the Australian continent. It has only been in very recent decades that settler colonialists are beginning to understand the complex farming systems that have operated across the breadth of the continent prior to invasion. Gammage (2011) describes Australia as ‘the biggest estate on earth’, largely owing to a highly developed practice of firestick farming that kept each local ecology in perfect balance. This can be exampled in the language that richly describes the relationship between the landscape and fire. In Perth/Booro, where I grew up, people said. boykt, ground clothed with vegetation which has not yet been burned, narrik unburned ground, but ready for burning. Land of which the vegetation is abundant and dry, fit to be set on fire, yanbart, ground where vegetation has been burnt, nappal, burned ground; ground over which

12 Listening with Our Feet

293

fire has passed … free from all scrub and grass, and kundyl, young grass springing up after the country has been burned … the seed of any plant’. None of these words have an English equivalent, none describe random fire. (Ibid, p. 185)

What becomes evident in Gammage’s research is a widespread practice of Indigenous ‘listening’, that ensured that the kinds of wildfires, drought and salination we see today after two centuries of Europeans farming and clearing practices, never occurred prior to 1788. It is not only First Nation cultures which have been listening to the land. Otto Scharmer (2016) uses the term ‘generative listening’, inspired by his father biodynamic farming practices in Germany. Scharmer’s father understood that what was invisible—the condition of the soil underneath the top layer—was fundamental to what could grow. Scharmer has taken this learning to describe generative listening—a form of listening which seeks what is invisible, within ourselves, in others and in nature (Ibid, p. 12). He argues that the sub-soil—the things that we need to work hard to see and hear—are the grounding conditions for all social fields (Ibid, p. 8). Indigenous researcher Judy Atkinson (2001) talks about deep listening as a form of reciprocity between the storyteller and the listener. In the Ngangikurungkurr language from the Northern Territory, deep listening is called ‘Dadirri’. This respectful, learning based listening has been fundamental to the intergenerational learning of 60,000-year traditions where no one has had to rely on written text. Listening in this context is a form of memory work, where deep listening is fundamental to not only the retention of information, but the connectedness of knowledge. Ron Murray is a Wamba Wamba (Western Victoria and parts of Southern NSW) storyteller, musician and artist. He describes deep listening as; For Aboriginal People, Deep Listening Comes Naturally It’s About Walking on the Land Softly, Quietly And Listening to the Stories Around the Campfire Listening to the Elders Listening to the Teachers Respect for Elders and Respect for All People

294

K. McMillan

And Giving Everyone the Time We’ve Got to Listen to the Wind in the Trees Listen to the Birds It’s the Feeling of a Gift A Gift Always Comes Back

(Murray, R. https://thelivingcircle21.com.au/deep-listening-in-pra ctice/). In this way, Murray describes a practice of listening which is about being in the world. It is quiet, and gentle and extended to nature and people. In colonial landscapes which have experienced ongoing intergenerational trauma, this process of listening is also deeply linked to healing. For theorist Karen Till (Till et al., 2018), ‘deep listening’ is fundamental in her research on wounded cities. She argues for a ‘a place-based ethics of care’ which involves connecting, empathy and hearing pain (p. 2). She asks us to reassess the geographical mapping of places which have undergone conflict. In discussing the residue of this history in Berlin, she describes a ‘landscape of incarceration and violence’ (p. 3) that can be healed through care and listening. This approach is applicable in thinking about spatial justice in Australia. Gibson (2008) explains that. in an aftermath-culture such as Australia….a great deal of the vital evidence is either missing or non-textual and the evidence that we do have is often partial, broken or obscured by denials. Which means that conventional historiographical protocols often come up short when we try to get the fullest possible comprehension of the past that has whelped our present. (p. 3)

Listening helps us to connect the remains of history back together, as well as hear the at times inaudible rumble of violence and silencing.

12 Listening with Our Feet

295

Conclusions It is in this space that the imaginative, empathic listening undertaken by artists can fill the gaps created by systemic silencing. As Hope (personal communication 21st July, 2021) notes ‘listening is not only about your ears’, but about the vibrations of being in place. When we reflected about the experience of being in the Ludlow Tuart Forest for the preparatory research for ‘Islands of Incarceration’, we realised that listening did not just capture the sound—listening enabled us to engage with ‘generative listening’ (Scharmer, 2016), with the iterative, empathic listening required for ‘spatial justice’ (Till, 2018). For Hope and I, it was also an acknowledgement of the advanced Indigenous listening and learning systems that have kept ecologies in balance for 60,000 years. In Australia, where the writing of history and the narration of presentday challenges are so often dictated by and filtered through the lens of state and corporate interests, changing whom and what is listened to is crucial. Artists have often been a disruptor in this system of auditory amnesia. They can show us two things. Firstly, how to listen deeply and ‘in place’. Secondly, that artists can use their platform to point towards and mediate the quiet voices of the people and the planet. The ethics and methods of listening can be complex. Joel Stern (personal communication 5th July, 2021) questions whether listening is restorative, and reparative—that perhaps we wrongly assume it to be, as the auditory is so marginalised by the visual. This position holds important value in carefully negotiating the implications of being heard. Refugees, First Nation peoples and others persecuted for their identity are rightfully concerned by who ‘listens in’. Equally, listening has also been a performative act—particularly in the cultural sector—a ruse carefully played out in the absence of systemic change. But perhaps systemic change is as much in the creative act, as in the outcome. Hope’s approach to writing and presenting ‘Speechless’ reminds us that we listen with our bodies, and that sound becomes embedded through a process of what Reynolds and Reason (2012) call kinaesthetic empathy. For Hope, abstraction using iterative listening and translation is crucial in opening up these pathways and possibilities for

296

K. McMillan

audiences. She believes that there is a telling in the voices of the musicians and singers who bring their own subjectivities and discomfort to the work. This goes on to shape the perspectives for the millions who engage with cultural work. Indigenous knowledges recognise that deep listening connects us to things are that not readily visible. Listening involves reciprocity and respect, and extends beyond human subjectivity. Scharmer (2016) calls this generative listening —a fourth level of listening that enables us to connect to wider ecologies of being. There is now a sense that Nuaru, which was once a society with highly evolved traditional systems of ecological knowledge that guided aquaculture and foresty practices, has suffered irretrievable loss. How might we also listen to loss as a form of parable? As McDaniel (2000) writes. in a mere century the island home of this once self-sufficient culture has been transformed into a wasteland of mined-out ruins devoid of much of its initial biological diversity—the 10,000 inhabitants are absolutely dependent upon the outside world for their survival. Nauru exquisitely illuminates the ruinous course of our global market culture.

I argue that artists engage with urgent listening. We constantly evolve and collect new ways of thinking. Where injustice occurs in specific locations, heightened by the island geography that affords authoritative governments a veil of secrecy, an ‘ethical-placed based care’ (Till, 2012, 2018) used so often by artists can be used to listen and heal communities. More and more, we must listen with our feet.

References Ananian-Welsh, R. (2020). The 2019 AFP Raids on Australian Journalists. Press Freedom Policy Papers. Background Briefing 1/2020. The University of Queensland. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from https://law.uq.edu.au/files/ 60164/afp-raids.pdf Atkinson, J. (2001). Lifting the blankets: The transgenerational effects of trauma in Indigenous Australia. Ph.D. thesis, Queensland University of Technology.

12 Listening with Our Feet

297

National archives of Australia. The immigration restriction act and the white Australia policy. Retrieved July 29, 2021 from, https://www.naa.gov.au/ learn/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/society-and-culture/mig ration-and-multiculturalism/immigration-restriction-act-and-white-austra lia-policy Australian Border Force, Australian Government. Department of Home Affairs. (2020). Immigration detention and community statistics summary. https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/immigration-detent ion-statistics-31-may-2020.pdf Biemmi, L. (2019, February 28). Some things leave you speechless. SeeSaw Magazine. https://www.seesawmag.com.au/2019/03/some-things-leave-youspeechless Brooks, A. (2020). Listening beyond the border: Self-representation, witnessing and the white sonic field . Retrieved August 3, 2021, from https://disclaimer. org.au/contents/manus-recording-project-collective/listening-beyond-theborder-self-representation-witnessing-and-the-white-sonic-field Buchan, B. (2001). Subjecting the natives: Aborigines, property and possession under early colonial rule. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 2, 143–162. Cave, D. (2019, June 5). Australia may well be the world’s most secretive democracy. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/world/ australia/journalist-raids.html Duffy, M., & Waitt, G. (2011). Sound diaries: A method for listening to place. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, 7, 119–136. Duffy, M., & Waitt, G. (2013). Home sounds: Experiential practices and performativities of hearing and listening. Social & Cultural Geography, 14 (4), 466–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2013.790994 Feary, S. (2008). Nauru—Opportunity in loss. Pacific Conservation Biology, 14, 238–239. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC080238 Galloway, A. (2021, April 2). Real risk of censorship: Claim academic research funding is becoming politicised. The sydney morning herald https:// www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/real-risk-of-censorship-claim-academic-res earch-funding-is-becoming-politicised-20210402-p57g4i.html Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on earth: How aborigines made Australia. Allen & Unwin. Gibson, R. (2002). Seven versions of an Australian badland . University of Queensland Press. Gibson, R. (2008). Palpable history. Cultural Studies Review, 14 (1), 179–186.

298

K. McMillan

Hope, C. (2019). Speechless. Retrieved July 23, 2021, from https://www.cat hope.com/art-work-speechless Australian Parliament House. Senate Committee Summary Report. Chapter 10 Pacific solution: Negotiations and agreements. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parlia mentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Former_Committees/maritimeinci dent/report/c10 Inder, C. (2010). International refugee law, ‘hyper-legalism’ and migration management: The Pacific solution. In M. Geiger, A. Pécoud (Eds.), The politics of international migration management. Migration, minorities and citizenship (pp. 220–251). Palgrave Macmillan. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. (2020). Statelessness in numbers: 2020 An overview and analysis of global statistics. https://files.institutesi.org/ISI_sta tistics_analysis_2020.pdf Laudine, C. (1991). Aboriginal environmental knowledge: Rational reverence (1st ed.). Routledge. Lewis, P. (2020, August 25). It seems the Australian government can’t go too far when it comes to shutting the gate to Covid. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2020/aug/25/ it-seems-the-australian-government-cant-go-too-far-when-it-comes-to-shu tting-the-gate-to-covid McDaniel, C. (2000). Paradise for sale: A parable of nature. California University Press. McMillan, K. (2019). Contemporary art & unforgetting in colonial landscapes: Islands of empire. Palgrave Macmillan Miller, R., Ruru, J., Behrendt, L., & Lindberg, T. (2012). Discovering indigenous lands. Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press. Milroy, T., & Bandler, L. G. (2021). Closing the gap: Where to now? The Medical Journal of Australia., 214 (5), 209–210. https://doi.org/10.5694/ mja2.50959 Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. Murray, R. (2021). Deep listening in practice. Retrieved August 3, 2021, from https://thelivingcircle21.com.au/deep-listening-in-practice/ (website) Nancy, J. L. (2007). Listening. Fordham University Press Neumark, N. (2019). Discursions: Eavesdropping. Art & Australia. Retrieved August 3, 2021 from, https://www.artandaustralia.com/online/discursions/ eavesdropping-curated-joel-stern-and-james-parker Oliveros, P. (2005). Deep listening: A composer’s sound practice. iUniverse Inc.

12 Listening with Our Feet

299

Parker, J., and Stern, J. (2020). ‘How are you today?, by the Manus Recording Project Collective’. Law Text Culture, 24. Refugee Council of Australia (2021, 1 March) Recent changes in Australian refugee policy https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/recent-changes-australianrefugee-policy/9/ Australian Government, Federal Register of Legislation. (1992). Migration reform act No. 184 of 1992. https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2004A 04475 Reid, K. (2007). Gender. Manchester University Press. Reynolds, D., Reason, M. (2012). Kinesthetic empathy in creative and cultural practices, Intellect. Rufo, C.F. (2019, January 2). Crimes of survival: A new trend in criminaljustice reform rationalizes stealing. The City Journal . https://www.city-jou rnal.org/survival-crimes Scharmer, O. (2016). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges, (2nd Edition), Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Schmid, M., Peter, P. (2015, March 12). The trouble with relying on how people speak to determine asylum cases. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-relying-on-how-peoplespeak-to-determine-asylum-cases-38562 Stern, J., Dockray, S., Parker, J. (2020, October 3). Machine listening. symposium. https://machinelistening.exposed/topic/lessons-in-how-not-tobe-heard/ Sullivan, S., Tuana, N. (2007). Race and epistemologies of ignorance. State University of New York Press Teaiwa, K. (2015). Consuming ocean Island: Stories of people and phosphate from Banaba. Indiana University Press. The United Nations Refugee Agency. (2021, August 8) Australia should not coerce vulnerable people to return to harm. Statement by United Nations high commissioner for refugees regional representation in Canberra. Retrieved August 29 2021, from https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/press/2017/8/59a558104/ australia-coerce-vulnerable-people-return-harm.html Till, K.E; Kaufman, E; and Woodward, C.L. (2018). Place, memory, and archive: An interview with Karen Till. disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 27, Article 4. https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.27.01 Till, K. E. (2012). Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. Political Geography, 3, 3–14.

300

K. McMillan

The Transportation Act: 1717: 4 George 1 c.11. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from, http://statutes.org.uk/site/the-statutes/eighteenth-century/1717-4-geo rge-1-c-11-the-transportation-act/ Triggs, G. (2014). The forgotten children: National inquiry into children in immigration detention 2014. Australian Human Rights Commission. Retrieved July 30, 2021, from, https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/ files/document/publication/forgotten_children_2014.pdf Western Australian museum. ‘Right Wrongs ’67 Referendum—WA 50 years on’ (exhibition and online archive) Retrieved July 29, 2021, from http:// museum.wa.gov.au/ref- erendum-1967/referendum-day Wyatt, A. & Hope, C. (2020). Conducting animated notation: Is it necessary? Conference Proceedings, Tenor Conference: International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation. Retrieved July 30, 2021, from https://www.tenor-conference.org/proceedings/2020/ 22_Wyatt_tenor20.pdf

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing: Artists in the Penal Colony Complex Ros Liebeskind and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll

Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can. Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Gilmore & Lambert, 2019)

In this chapter we explore and critique the artist’s and activist’s attempts to absorb abolition into academic writing and art practise (in forums such as this book) identifying common problems and positions that artists adopt in carceral sites. The sites we work in as artists and academics engaged in the projects of abolition range widely, including R. Liebeskind History of Art, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK K. von Zinnenburg Carroll (B) Central European University, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5_13

301

302

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

the museum, where display architecture can be broken down to reflect the border between the power of the nation state able to create a definition of culture and those, often not complicit, representatives of it. We will primarily address the carceral state and projects of abolition in Australia and Britain. We have taken an abolitionist approach to this project, examining the ways that cultural institutions continue to uphold the carceral state. We understand abolition to be an ongoing and shifting project with a long history, always in the process of becoming, moving towards revolution. Previous abolitionist campaigns, such as those to end slavery, transportation and the death penalty, have in many ways been left incomplete—as evidenced by the persistence and growth of the contemporary prison. Racial capital dictates that when one mechanism of state violence can no longer function, another is erected in its place, made from the debris its predicator left behind. In the wake of slavery new conditions for control and subjugation were created, such as in French Guiana where a penal colony was created in order to contain newly freed people, the undesirables of the state. It must be understood that these issues are the result of interference with abolitionist demands, that reform is a dangerous weapon of the state. The carceral state cannot be destroyed simply to be replaced by something else, abolition means a war against the state, including cultural institutions, and revolution. The reach of the carceral archipelago is long, as such not all sites within it constitute a penal colony. The definition of penal colony we use includes historical iterations and various contemporary forms of incarceration and migration control, because the ways we observe these through the lens of art and architecture have productive commonalities. This brief chapter will address the areas in which we are experienced: in particular immigration detention and removal centres and prisons in Britain and Australia. We understand that these institutions, along with secure psychiatric wards and secure schools, compose the carceral state; as Ruby Tapia says: The carceral state encompasses the formal institutions and operations and economies of the criminal justice system proper, but it also encompasses logics, ideologies, practices, and structures, that invest in tangible

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

303

and sometimes intangible ways in punitive orientations to difference, to poverty, to struggles to social justice and to the crossers of constructed borders of all kinds. (French et al., 2018)

The Site of Immigration Detention as a Carceral Extension of the Colonies It is sites of prisons being repurposed for artistic actions that in turn allow us to reflect on the necessity of real action. Moving between the imaginary futures in art and the work of changing carceral institutions is difficult but possible. To give a case study example, let us turn to the experience Khadija had of being an artist together with criminologists inside detention centres in the United Kingdom. Together with criminologist Mary Bosworth, in a series of workshops, publications, exhibitions and policy advice, they reflected on the ‘immigration detention archive’ they made of material produced within the detention centres. This archive includes a range of material culture produced by and about detention. It is constantly growing and currently holds several thousand pages of bureaucratic documents and 30 letters, 3000 photographs, 400 drawings and over 70 other art works and materials gathered during fieldwork and art workshops (Bosworth et al., 2019). Many of the drawings that ‘residents’ (as the interned asylum seekers are euphemistically called) made clearly show the carcerality of the spatiality of the detention centre (Fig. 13.1). In a series of floorplans with an inventory of belongings, the residents listed for us the bare minimum they lived with inside the detention centre in Dover, where the treacherous English Channel is crossed. The lack of possessions is demonstrative of the limitations that the institution and the cell space have on affectual capacity. These cells are indistinguishable from those found in prisons in every way except the way that time space and thus affect are experienced within them. Whereas people incarcerated in prisons have a sentence with an end date, people held in detention centres are kept there for an indeterminate amount of time, meaning that they live in complete uncertainty. Such uncertainty is often exasperated by experiences of being moved between centres in ‘carceral churn’,

304

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

or even taken to the site of deportation to be sent back to a detention or removal centre. As a result, these spaces remain impersonal and sterile, reflecting the liminal experience of those held in the cell, suspended between hope and fear. The photographs Khadija and Mary took of Colnbrook behind Heathrow airport show the high-level security, with barred windows and outdoor spaces (Fig. 13.2). For the film Artists in Residence, one of the detainees made a drawing of himself behind bars, desperately gripping them and the small cage of a room. Focussing on the carceral architecture, which is directly based on the H form design of British prisons, Khadija’s process included building a model of one to use as part of the mise-en-scène in her play Shadow’s Talk. In testimonies from inmates, the building was often to blame for sleeplessness, the lights were always on,

Fig. 13.1 Drawing of a cell by Mohamed from Morocco in Dover, 2015. Immigration Detention Archive Oxford

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

305

there were rats, locks, and the atmosphere of oppression was palpable as soon as one entered. Using the art room within detention centres as spaces in which to talk to the residents and guards in Harmondsworth (next to Colnbrook, also behind London’s Heathrow Airport) and other detention centres led to lens based, digital media, sculpted and drawn material made in these spaces. These form the basis of the immigration detention archive. Conversations during the process of drawing and making together often covered family and immigration stories of the people detained. Case files and paperwork were exchanged and help sought in the form of explaining bureaucratic language. Those detained lived in fear of being deported and their mental health clearly deteriorated over time inside the centre. This form of state violence experienced by those in Harmondsworth results in self-harm and frequent suicide attempts. Responding to people quickly meant to shift from being an art workshop facilitator to being personally accountable.

Fig. 13.2 Courtyard in Colnbrook IRC, Heathrow, outside the exercise area, taken by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll during a photography workshop inside, 2015

306

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

The artists entering this space were at once faced with their complicity in the potential to disrupt the carceral space. I (Khadija) was constantly being threatened by loss of citizenship in the form of a revoked passport, because I had been forced to sign the Official Secrets Act before entering the detention facilities with my camera. Being constantly surveyed and searched to the extent that permission given was revoked and the lack of consistency created a menacing sense of being easily punished. There was no comfortable position to take in the context of the detention centre as an artist. Yet the urgency of the stories given with the intent of my releasing them to a larger public in turn created a social contract (Azoulay, 2019) in which I felt bound to the promise of making public what the detainees themselves could not. As in Ariella Azoulay’s more recent work on restitution, her theory of the social contract of photography is limited by a privileged theoretical position that moves so far from material questions of practise that it becomes problematic in attempted application. Azoulay often emphasises the artificiality of oppressive structures, encourages practises of ‘unlearning’ and ‘rewinding’; however, in this approach the material mechanisms of the state, underpinned by racial capital, are often neglected (Ariella Azoulay, 2019, 67). So, violence and imperialism are conceptualised as immaterial and unstoppable forces rather than things that can and, and must be, dismantled. The situation of being under pressure from the state and its agents, such as guards and administrators, while attempting to honour those relationships to the detained makes a potential accomplice but also a mediator between the incarcerated and the public and government. In these roles, there was a methodological difference between the criminologist Mary Bosworth, who is the only person with access to detention and deportation facilities in the United Kingdom, and the disruptive urge of the artist trained in institutional critique. We met in the effort to represent and analyse the material in the immigration detention archive. But mere representation and analysis is limited in its effects, as we have set out above. If an abolitionist project is to succeed, then it has to go beyond the frame to action.

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

307

Framing the penal colony in an art piece, novel, or any kind of cultural artefact estranges the experience of being in the penal colony because the medium creates distance. In the context of the art gallery, the white cube is designed to produce an aesthetic experience by turning a subject (i.e. of colonial violence) into an object on display. Again, in danger of reinscribing a form of disempowerment, the experience of framing the penal colony in order to create the kind of identification that art often seeks to evoke in the public, with activist intent of raising awareness, necessarily suspends this problematic objectification (Fig. 13.3). Inevitably work, for example Behrouz Boochani’s testimonial novel No Friend but the Mountain, creates an image of a detention centre which the reader can imagine. But it is the limits of the imagination of both reader and writer that cannot represent completely the breadth of experience.

Fig. 13.3 Bordered Lives exhibition at VBKOE Vienna (from left to right: exhibition from the book, performance lecture from Darwin College Cambridge on screen, script and censorship, and border intervention by Emma Humphris), August 2021

308

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

It is the privileged role of the storyteller that creates discomfort over the partiality of the representation. However, as a testimony painstakingly written in text messages and translated from Farsi, No Friend but the Mountain is a call to action, and as such it reached the liberal readership who in turn, in the case of Boochani, were able to organise asylum. In his case, it was through an invitation to a writers’ festival in New Zealand. Boochani notes this route out of detention is not available to others who have not framed their experience in literature and remain in detention. Detained people are not always interested, of course, in representing the penal colony but as with Fang Chong Ye, would rather frame the coloniser, in an appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities, in attempts to save themselves from facing yet more violence. Fang, who was detained and deported 3 times back to China, spent his time in detention in Campsfield House, painting portraits of the British Royal Family, horses and David Cameron. Fang attempted to give these art works to the heads of state, the royal family and the prime minister in order to gain residency in the United Kingdom. His paintings and accompanying letters arrived at number 10 Downing Street and in Buckingham Palace, and he received a reply from the Queen herself. He was incredibly pleased with this reply which in fact only suggested that he should both contact her son, Prince Charles, through his foundation and Theresa May. Neither of which, needless to say, helped Fang. This form of framing the colony through portraits of the coloniser with an explicit intent to gain their patronage in the centre of empire is one of the many surprising twists on the typical representation of the penal colony that one might expect. Fang also drew portraits of his daughter in China, whose searching, serious look, reveals a melancholic longing, a burden and compromise at the core of this attempt at economic migration. In comparison to the steely and uncompromising gaze of the queen, Fang’s portraits show the figureheads of English power as they are in the public eye. The Queen is painted in regalia. Charles is both benevolent and sinister in his portrait, looking down and smirking. David Cameron is said to have received his portrait from Fang and then he was swiftly deported, never to return to England, and disappeared. The portrait returned to Campsfield House and was hung on the wall; however, it soon had to be removed as it was an election year and a

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

309

state institution could not be seen to be supporting one candidate over another. This made clear the attempt to sanitise in order to depoliticise, which is part of such spaces of incarceration naturalising themselves, rather than drawing attention to their highly political role in enacting state violence. As British neo-imperialist immigration and refugee policy often claims to want to take on the vulnerable, and the valuable—those who are able to assimilate and become productive members of the state, it is unsurprising that Fang attempted to demonstrate his ‘worth’ through painting and gifting classical portraits to the heads of state, who in spite of their presiding over extensive violence, all over the world, maintain an image of imperial benevolence to many.

Architecture and Abolition in the History of the Penal Colony The colonial and carceral are constitutive of each other, as carcerality is an imperial mechanism. The development of carceral capitalism must be understood as a colonial project; the prison does not at some point in history become an imperialist entity, rather it has always been one. The abstract state that the prison occupies in the social imagination places it in a remote, if not utterly separate, spatial and temporal plane. The carceral institution is imagined as a place in which danger is contained, when in reality, violence is central to the very notion of the prison and other institutions that cage people. Those people who are held in such carceral institutions, so-called undesirables, and ‘others’, are placed there in order to relieve ‘good citizens’ and the state of reckoning with the fact that ‘crime’ is a construct, that the law is a weapon, and that oppressive conditions of racial capitalism created and maintain the expanding carceral state (Davis, 2003). Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes that the argument for incarceration can be broken down into four schools: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation. Each school supposes that prisons produce safety and stability, though of course these claims are dubious (Gilmore, 2007). It may be said that the failure of each school of incarceration is simply demonstrated by the continuous growth of the prison industrial complex, the persistence of crime and the

310

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

failure of reform. This however affirms the notion that the prison was born of some kind of benevolence. In fact, the continuous expansion of the carceral state does not demonstrate the failure of the prison, but its success. At every opportunity, the state’s moral authority and the reasons given for the continuation of the prison’s existence should be refuted. This chapter posits that the carceral state is fundamentally cruel, and its complete abolition is absolutely vital. As abolitionist ideas move into the mainstream there appears to be the growth of an imposed separation between the academic or artistic vision, and the activist or organiser on the ground. This separation of imagination and action is as false as it is dangerous; there are of course incarcerated artists, academics, organisers and revolutionaries as well as free activists, artists and academics whose work within the institution is only a fraction of the abolitionist action they engage in. The categories of visionary and organiser are collapsed when met with the reality of abolitionist pedagogy, which demonstrates the inseparability of imagination and action; organising is, after all, a creative practice that depends on one’s ability to envision another world. This pervasive separation stems from the desire to detach and absorb aspects of abolitionist theory into the academy, distorting and diminishing abolition into a palatable and commodifiable metaphor. The strangleholds that the academy, the gallery/museum and the prison each have on the imagination grow tighter as these institutions present abolition as merely the argument for a clear analysis of state violence, rather than an extensive, and ever urgent project, of war against the state, which is beyond reform (James, 2019). The scale of abolition is immense, and for many, so transformative it is almost impossible to imagine. Here the artist and academic play a pertinent role in visualising abolitionist futures, in proving their viability, and elucidating abolitionist theories. It is far easier, safer and indeed more profitable for those academics and artists detached from abolition, who benefit from state violence, to draw abolition into abstraction. This must be resisted as abolition is a revolutionary project consisting of tangible actions such as decarceration, excarceration and the development of robust, caring communities, equipped with the resources to support vulnerable people, rather than punishing them. Abolition is multidimensional. It is at once a project of the imagination

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

311

and a tangible practise. Worldmaking requires both the ability to envision a world in which we are all free, and to trace those ‘fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities of what the world will become’ and the work of enacting or translating the imagined into reality. The unincarcerated artist cannot simply respond to the penal institution without reinscribing, or in some way legitimising, its place in society. As Walter Benjamin writes, the artist must actively enter into class struggle, producing artwork that responds to their context, creating work that advances the ‘proletariat in the class struggle’. In writing this, we asked each other what is the role of the artist, academic, activist in advancing abolition? The danger of the production of artistic responses to carceral institutions from outside the prison, by those who are disconnected or benefit from carceral violence, is that it allows for the reconstruction of colonial carcerality as a separate abstract space, rather than a series of material conditions. The engagement of art institutions and the academy with the colonial carceral often distorts and disconnects the reality of incarceration, marginalising the knowledge and experience of incarcerated people. So, the gallery or university then becomes a means by which disempowerment is reinscribed as it speaks about or over incarcerated people, othering them, in order to produce a narrative that does not pose a question regarding the legitimacy of cultural institutions. In making abolition a metaphor, cultural institutions obscure their own entanglement with carceral capitalism. The pervasiveness of carceral ideology is not simply a case of carcerality extending beyond walls and fences, but bleeding into another world. That other world, the world of the ‘free’, can only exist as long as ‘other’, ‘bad’ people are unfree. The means by which the world of the ‘free’ is constructed is through the creation of penal spaces into which ‘undesirables are deposited’ (Davis, 2001). The carceral institution is a contradictory and contested space, and so often simultaneously functions as a means to admonish the citizenry by exhibiting punishment, and to conceal or to ‘hide the state’s secret human foundations’ across both urban and rural sites (Wilkinson, 2018). To write of the artist, academic or activist is to address the pervasive role and construction of penal ideology in culture. Tate Britain is an example of the many ways in which cultural institutions are entwined with or, as in the case of Tate, founded

312

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

upon the colonial carceral. There is of course the connection to slavery and colonialism through the sugar company Tate & Lyle, which profited extensively from slavery, colonialism, and the exploitation of labour and extraction of natural resources in the Caribbean. These colonial and slaving connections remain present through the Tate’s involvement with neo-colonial companies such as British Petroleum (only severing their sponsorship in 2016). As well as the appalling ongoing presence of The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats mural in the Rex Whistler restaurant, which has been continuously restored despite its racist depictions of enslaved Black children. In addition to these financial foundations, there is also the matter of the physical foundations of Tate Britain, which stand on the former site of Millbank Prison. The land was originally purchased in 1799 by Jeremy Bentham, acting on behalf of the Crown, for the erection of his proposed panopticon prison. It remained public property following the demolition of the Prison in 1890, making way for building works for the National Gallery of British Art as it was originally proposed in 1893, only three years after the prison’s final closure. The prison was stripped of its national status in 1842, and later abandoned completely due to its many failings, a combination of the marshy site and neglect of inmate health meant that the penitentiary was swept by epidemics of dysentery and scurvy. These poor conditions, in combination with being confined in almost complete isolation and utter maltreatment, also fostered widespread mental health problems amongst inmates, though they were not recognised as such at the time. After 1842, when Millbank Prison was no longer used as a reformatory prison, it was used to hold convicts prior to their transportation to Australia, illuminating yet another colonial carceral connection to the site. To build a national gallery of British Art on the site of a prison where so many suffered demonstrates the state’s desire to completely disappear incarcerated people and epitomises its attempts to conceal immense violence through cultural institutions. Exploring the foundations of the Tate Britain is to get but a glimpse into the entangled histories of violence that show how the colonial carceral and cultural institutions are intertwined. In order to disrupt and destabilise the carceral state, it must be denaturalised. The history of incarceration as we know it today demonstrates that the carceral state is relatively new, coming into being through the

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

313

rise of racial capitalism and imperialism. That is to say, despite what we are told, history proves that prisons are neither natural nor necessary. Walnut Street Prison, built in Philadelphia in 1773, is widely regarded as the first contemporary prison due to its deployment of a cellular system, isolating incarcerated inhabitants in order to contain and deprive the body. Walnut Street Prison should also be understood as a colonial structure, built on Lenape land. The colonial prison is an object imposed, a claim, a threat, a device of suppression or genocide to enforce and uphold the colonial at large, and its ideology extends beyond the walls of the prison into the wider colony. Examples of this can be found in places such as the plantation, the penal colony and legislation such as ‘the introduction of curfews, and the production of passes’ as means of the imposition of colonial hegemony (Harper, 2001). The prison plays an essential role in the construction of the colony, the spectre of prison looms over the colony which is in and of itself a carceral space. It constructs the colonised and coloniser, with the category of other formed in no small part around those who are free, and those who are not. The colonial carceral state alienates, pathologises and dehumanises colonised people to maintain its legitimacy, and exert its power over both land and people. Fremantle Prison, the first prison built in Australia (1855), is extensively influenced by Pentonville Prison (1842), and thus Walnut Street Prison (1773) and Millbank Prison (1816). These interconnected architectures demonstrate the development of the imperial, carceral colonial project. The example of Australia is particularly interesting, since the country as a whole was envisaged as a prison, legally suitable because terra nullius could be claimed and Aboriginal people indentured, murdered and imprisoned—demonstrating the multidimensionality of the penal colony, not only as a prison, but as a colonial and genocidal mechanism. Joseph Banks remarked on its suitability for the purpose of a penal colony when he disembarked the Endeavour in ‘Botany Bay’ (now Sydney) with Lieutenant James Cook. The colonial carceral relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia can be mapped not only through penal architecture, but also social and physical geography, policies and practises surrounding contemporary detention and policing. The relationship between the

314

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

colonies and the extreme forms of detention are also imbricated because the former penal colonies have become the most draconian sites of detention. The phenomenon of Australia leading the deterrence of migrants through brutal offshore detention centres echoes the violence of the penal colony. This reversal is accompanied by a tendency towards isolation, also expressed in the COVID-19 crisis and Australia’s extreme form of border closure to the outside world. The experience of isolation in the penal colony causes an anxiety of invasion and by extension colonial violence continues to resonate to this day. The internalisation and inner exile that those in present and former penal colonies like Australia experience gives an extended sense of what Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielson (2013) have said about the border not only being a built construct but rather the mechanism and method for exclusion. As in many spheres of neoliberal urban development, artistic interventions in prisons inform part of a process of privatisation and gentrification. The large empty spaces such as Cockatoo Island in Sydney lend themselves to major art events for the Sydney Biennale. Similarly, there are many former prisons, such as Pentonville in Melbourne, that have been renovated to become luxury apartment buildings. Other sites like the Quarantine Station on Mornington Peninsula have become heritage exhibitions, with artists commissioned to narrate the history of the site in audio installations. In the United Kingdom, the arts organisation Artangel created a large exhibition of contemporary works commissioned site-specifically, including a durational reading of Oscar Wilde and an array of well-known contemporary artists, set in the abandoned panopticon of Reading prison. When a cultural institution attempts to inhabit a penal space, they either take the role of Tate Britain, attempting to conceal their violent foundations, or they ‘convert’ and commodify former penal institutions, on the basis of their violent history. This regeneration of the penal institution functions to hyper-visiblise violence that can either be disavowed as ‘primitive’; sensationalised to attract various iterations of ‘dark tourism and heritage’; and/or narrativised to affirm or reinforce the status quo. As certain aspects of these sites are sensationalised or exaggerated, the other aspects of violence that challenge or

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

315

disrupt dominant narratives surrounding the state and colonial carceral are obscured.

Conclusion Another example of the complex nature of artistic production in carceral institutions is the exhibition of art by incarcerated people in the ‘free world’ while the creators remain caged. The Koestler Foundation runs an annual art prize in Southbank, London, which poses a question of whether a site outside the prison, with all the trappings of high art, makes the reception of work by incarcerated people problematic. The Koestler Foundation continuously presents narratives of redemption and rehabilitation, which legitimise the carceral state as it implies that all people enter incarceration ‘bad’ and it is the work of incarceration to make these people better. The tagline of the foundation is ‘unlock the talent’. The organisation is by no means abolitionist, or even reformist, so what does this slogan mean? It means unlocking the art that can be commodified and detached from the person who made it, and who remains caged. How do you reckon with freedom granted to objects, and not people, and how these art objects are often appropriated to justify the incarceration of the creator and continue the narrative of the indispensability and benevolence of prisons. The Koestler Foundation openings are often frequented by the great and the good, dignitaries and so on. On the occasion that I (Khadjia) attended there was a speech by Michael Gove, neatly demonstrating the political situation of the exhibition, and its investment in the continuation of incarceration. This opening stood in stark contrast to the openings at Grendon Prison organised by artist Edmund Clark, where incarcerated people could be visited and speak about their art works that they put on display (Clark et al., 2017). In these exhibitions run by IKON gallery, a group could come inside the prison, an experience which was less sanitised and made the life of the incarcerated more palpable than a traditional gallery. Historic prisons attempt to convey this atmosphere to the visitor, although their emptiness of those actually living in current sites of incarceration removes them from the kind

316

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

of experience that Grendon creates. Grendon is notably a ‘therapeutic prison’ that is focussed on creative arts as therapy and even as a means of gaining a shorter sentence. This incentive conditions inmates to confess their crimes in detail even outside of the therapeutic circle, creating an arguably greater vulnerability and distance from the outside world. The liberal audience of the Southbank Centre exhibition and the gallery that Koestler has established, especially with the deflated but nevertheless commercial aspect of the works being for sale and winning minor cash prizes, like the ‘museum of everything’ that commercialises ‘outsider art’ instrumentalises this very identity to create value for the work (See https://koestlerarts.org.uk/ and https://www.musevery.com/#main). The ubiquitous production of objects and artworks in penal colonies that are made to be purchased by guards and doctors also reveal the commodity fetishism evident in the Koestler awards and clientele. Abolition is a complex, ‘wandering process’, of which we both remain students (Robinson, 2021). It is an unfixed, malleable practise, that takes form depending on what is needed, and where there is no single application of abolitionist politics. The plurality of abolition, its ability to transform, and create capacity for imagining and creating other ways of being renders it an immense and vital task. In this chapter, we have just begun to explore the many ways in which artists, academics and other cultural institutions are entangled with the carceral state. The appropriation and exploitation of abolition to garner capital to maintain or extend one’s place in the carceral state or those institutions adjacent to it are instrumental in its continuation and take form as mistranslation, reform and exclusion. The vast machinery of the state recognises the potency of abolition, and takes many different forms in its deliberate mistranslations, attempted neutralisations of abolitionist practise and politics (Samudzi, 2021).These opportunist attempts to defang and commercialise what is ultimately a revolutionary project, demand that constant task of reshaping and reimagining this practice in order combat the desperate attempts of racial capitalism to perpetuate its blood-soaked existence. Effective academic and artistic engagements with the carceral state cannot draw the reality of penal institutions, or the project of abolition into abstraction. Abolition is not a metaphor. It is always in motion,

13 Abolitionist Ways of Seeing

317

manifold, multidimensional and abundant—it is the work of bringing the imagined into reality.

References Azoulay, A. (2019). Potential history: Unlearning imperialism. Verso. Bosworth, M., Khadija Carroll La, & Christoph Balzar. (2019). Bordered lives: Immigration detention archive. Sternberg Press. Clark, E., Watkins, J., & Ikon Gallery (Birmingham. (2017). In place of hate: Edmund Clark. Ikon. Davis, A. Y. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press. French, G., Goodman, A., & Carlson, C. (2018). What is the carceral state? ArcGIS StoryMaps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7ab5f5c3fbca 46c38f0b2496bcaa5ab0 Harper, G. (2001). Colonial and postcolonial incarceration. Continuum. James, J. (2019). The architects of abolitionism. https://m.youtube.com/watch? v=z9rvRsWKDx0 Knopp, F. H., Boward, B., & Morris, M. O. (2005). Instead of prisons: A handbook for abolitionists. Critical Resistance. Koestler Trust. (n.d.). Koestler Trust. Koestler trust. https://koestlerarts.org.uk/ Robinson, I. (2021). Grounding practise. Presented at the Abolition: In Defence of Translation, Somerset House. Samudzi, Z. (2021). Grounding Practise. Presented at the Abolition: In Defence of Translation, Somerset House. Sandro Mezzadra, & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Duke University Press. Solinger, R., Johnson, P. C., Raimon, M. L., Reynolds, T., & Tapia, R. (2010). Interrupted life : E+xperiences of incarcerated women in the United States. University Of California Press. The Museum of Everything. (n.d.). The museum of everything. www.musevery. com. https://www.musevery.com/#main Wilkinson, T. (2018, June 11). Typology: Prison. Architectural Review. https:// www.architectural-review.com/essays/typology/typology-prison

318

R. Liebeskind and K. von Zinnenburg Carroll

Wilson Gilmore, R., & Lambert, L. (2018, December 20). Making abolition geography in California’s central valley. The Funambulist Magazine. https:// thefunambulist.net/magazine/21-space-activism/interview-making-abolit ion-geography-california-central-valley-ruth-wilson-gilmore. Accessed July 2021 Zinnenburg Carroll, K. von, & Boswort, M. (2015, August 28). Immigration detention archive. Oxford law faculty. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-sub ject-groups/immigration-detention-archive. Accessed 15 June 2022

Index

A

Abashiri 109–111, 113, 115–117, 119–121, 124, 127–129 Abashiri prison 111, 112 Abashiri prison museum 19, 109, 112, 115–119, 121–123, 125, 126 abolition abolition geographies 13 detention abolition 21, 306 prison abolition 13, 21, 47, 101, 111 abolitionist 21, 100, 302, 306, 310, 315 abolitionist politics 316 Aboriginal peoples 278, 291, 313. See also indigenous inhabitants absence 46, 69, 142, 145, 146, 236, 295, 301

activist 13, 14, 21, 129, 185, 229, 284, 301, 307, 310, 311 activist practices 291 adaptation 15, 19, 79, 84, 86, 92–96, 98, 99 administrators 49, 80, 252, 306 aerial view 117, 118 agriculture, agricultural 11, 70, 124, 125, 127, 157, 165, 166, 182, 187, 249, 251, 257, 259, 261. See also farm, farms Ainu people 130 Algeria 39, 133, 185, 188 allegory 8 Amazon rainforest 80 American imperialism 223, 224, 234 American War 204, 223. See also Vietnam War Andaman Islands, the Andamans 4, 34

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fuggle et al. (eds.), Framing the Penal Colony, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19396-5

319

320

Index

Anthropocene 14 anti-colonial 8, 15 anti-transportationists 34 archipelago 2, 146, 182–184, 249, 251 architecture 12, 16, 199, 204, 206, 211, 213, 302, 313 archive graphic archive 180 iconographic archive 180 visual archive 180 Argentina 12 artefacts 122, 125, 233 art gallery 307 artist 17, 21, 82, 83, 159, 168, 180, 187, 248, 276, 277, 280, 281, 289, 290, 292, 293, 295, 296, 301, 303, 306, 310, 311, 314–316 arts-based research 276 artwork 17, 84, 95, 212, 276, 287, 311, 316 Ascension Island 1, 2 asylum 162, 276, 279, 280, 286, 288, 308 asylum seekers 1, 2, 49, 50, 279, 280, 289, 290, 303 audience 84, 120, 204, 206, 210, 222, 223, 225, 236, 237, 253, 254, 257, 284, 285, 288, 296, 316. See also visitor audience perception 200 auditory engagement 275 Australia 2, 4, 6, 12, 18, 21, 32–37, 39, 41–50, 71, 80, 189, 276–283, 288–292, 294, 295, 302, 312–314

B

Bagne 15, 20, 32–34, 38, 42, 80, 82–84, 86–89, 91, 95, 98–101, 134, 137, 138, 140, 145–148, 154, 156–160, 169, 180, 182–189, 191–194 bagnards 35, 36–38, 40, 42, 44–50, 85, 86, 91, 95, 101, 133, 181. See also convict Forçats 86, 88–92, 96–98, 100, 101, 179 bande dessinée 85, 97, 180, 187, 194. See also comics Belbenoît, Rene 80, 102, 103 Bennani, Meriem Life on the CAPS 23 Bonaparte, Napoleon 2 borders 2, 3, 23, 24, 49, 97, 113, 279, 290, 303 maritime borders 41, 110 Bouyer, Frédéric 87, 89, 179 Brazil 80, 85, 86 Brexit 2 Britain 12, 21, 32–34, 40, 41, 44, 50, 58, 289, 292, 302. See also England; United Kingdom (UK) Bryant, Mary 36 bushrangers 36

C

camp, camps 14, 16, 21–23, 69, 87, 102, 119, 121, 138, 140, 172, 187, 190, 191, 226, 253, 257, 258, 260–262, 264 concentration 15, 16, 128, 251 labour 87, 111, 140, 249, 250, 267

Index

Camus, Albert 16, 163 captivity 222, 231, 238 carceral archipelago 16, 97, 180, 302 carceral capitalism 309, 311 carceral geography, carceral geographies 11–13, 74, 81, 82, 86, 87 carceral islands 12, 21, 275, 277, 287, 292. See also prison island carceral state 21, 114, 302, 309, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316 care 169, 172, 294 Caribbean 161, 180, 312 cartography cartographic silence 142, 143, 146 critical cartography 135, 136 cartoons 82, 83, 94, 124, 180 Castro, Fidel 21, 248–250, 252, 259, 264 Cayenne 87, 91, 99, 137, 138, 148, 161, 170, 171, 181 celebrity 4, 100, 180, 181, 185, 210, 211 cell, cells 9, 16, 85, 87, 88, 92–94, 96, 103, 121, 124, 172, 173, 210, 226–228, 231, 233, 241, 303, 304 Charrière, Henri 15, 79, 80, 102, 181. See also Papillon children, child 2, 23, 127, 155, 157–159, 164–166, 168, 185, 186, 188, 190, 198, 250, 258, 261, 263, 264, 267, 276, 279, 280, 284, 312. See also youth, youths China 20, 42, 112, 197–199, 201–208, 210, 213, 214, 308 City Gallery, Wellington 287, 291

321

civilian 72, 88 civil society 38 class 37, 64, 73, 83, 261, 278, 311 climate 11, 39, 41, 45, 87, 199 collage 209, 210, 212, 214 collecting 20, 85, 120, 122, 154, 160, 169, 212 colonial imaginaries 11 colonialism 4, 20, 35, 40, 45, 74, 113, 135, 146, 200, 204, 223–225, 233, 234, 236, 239, 276, 312 extractive colonialism 275 colonial possessions 138, 147 colonies 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16, 22, 32–37, 39, 41–45, 47–50, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 72, 91–93, 98–101, 138, 148, 158, 165, 166, 172, 183, 184, 189, 192, 194, 197–199, 201, 202, 278, 279, 313, 314 colonised landscapes 276 coloniser 308, 313 colour 89, 98, 123, 208 comics 17, 81, 82, 84, 87, 89, 91–94, 97, 98, 101, 102, 180–182 prison comics 82, 92, 97–99 commemoration 224, 237 communism 223, 224, 234, 235, 237–239 community 13, 14, 24, 38, 48, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 71, 130, 157, 165, 166, 191, 192, 203, 277, 284, 290, 292, 296, 310 compliance 38 Con Dao 4, 103, 203, 211, 221, 222, 225, 226, 228, 233–236, 238–241

322

Index

confinement 11, 14, 17, 21, 22, 60, 82, 87, 88, 92–94, 96, 101, 209, 226, 228, 231, 251 conflict 44, 67, 70, 74, 190, 191, 221–224, 231, 232, 234, 235, 238, 294 contact zones 221, 222, 232, 238, 239 contemporary art 314. See also artwork convict celebrity convict 4, 15, 100 convict journey 179 convict records 60, 74 convict ship 184, 186 convict transportation 4, 5, 6, 12, 33–37, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 80, 81, 88, 99, 113, 129. See also transportation creative practice 21, 275, 276, 310. See also contemporary art criminal 10, 14, 22, 23, 32, 33, 35, 45–47, 71, 73, 98, 128, 157, 158, 170, 260, 302 criminality 39, 128, 249, 261, 263, 265 Cuba 15, 21, 137, 247, 249, 250, 252, 260, 264, 266 human rights abuses 265 revolutionary 249, 254, 255, 258, 261, 265 Cuban Institute for Cinematic Art and Industry (ICAIC) 248, 254, 259, 260, 263 cultural artefact 307 cultural institutions 302, 311, 312, 314, 316 culture 4, 10, 15, 84, 86, 110, 112, 171, 181, 201, 203, 268, 280,

286, 293, 294, 296, 302, 303, 311 Czapski, Józef 17

D

dancing 65, 256 dangerous 10, 37, 46, 70, 74, 302, 310 dark heritage 114, 208, 314 dark tourism 112, 119, 201, 314 death 2, 10, 16, 68, 95, 111, 154, 164, 166, 167, 170, 189, 200, 235, 266. See also premature death death penalty 5, 167, 302 death sentence 36, 96 decolonization 221, 223, 224 delinquency 71, 154 Détective 100, 156, 157, 171 detention 2, 3, 49, 226, 228, 232, 280, 284, 286–288, 308, 313 detention centres 21, 199, 278, 303, 305–307 offshore detention 3, 275, 276, 279, 289, 314 deterrent 40, 49 Devil’s Island 7, 15, 87, 111, 161. See also Salvation Islands, Iles du Salut Dieudonné, Eugène 19, 81, 82, 85, 86, 88–90, 92–94, 96–101, 103, 181 discipline 13, 16, 61–63, 65, 73, 74, 86, 92, 128, 162, 261, 262 discomfort 285, 288, 296, 308 display cabinets 127, 210 dockyard prisons 39, 80, 102

Index

documentary 17, 21, 84, 247, 252–254, 256, 257, 261–263, 267 documents 155, 207, 208, 210, 303 doublage 38, 40, 90, 91 Dreyfus, Alfred 181 Dreyfus Affair 7

323

exile 2, 5, 9, 11, 16, 18, 20, 22, 38, 39, 41, 80, 86, 186, 226, 228, 314 experiment 8, 35, 49, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 69, 70, 73, 301, 311

F

E

Eavesdropping 276, 277, 287 ecology, ecologies 12, 180, 181, 292, 295, 296 carceral ecology 12, 13 economy 70, 71, 73, 74, 109, 125, 127, 224 Elba, Isle of 2 emancipists 44, 72 empathic, empathy 9, 120, 181, 208, 275, 279, 284, 287, 288, 294, 295 endurance 59, 223 England 36, 46, 58, 60, 71, 72, 74, 227, 308. See also Britain; United Kingdom (UK) environmental wasteland 292 escape 2, 5, 17, 19, 22, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 47–49, 67, 68, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 101, 158, 183, 235, 236, 251 escaped prisoner 33, 47 ethnography, ethnographies 18, 19, 114, 120, 124 exhibition 19, 112, 120, 121, 124, 206, 207, 214, 233, 235, 236, 240, 276, 287, 288, 290, 303, 307, 314–316

Fang Chong Ye 308 farm, farms 22, 116, 249, 261, 266, 267 farming 124, 292, 293 Feillet, Paul 14, 35, 182 filmmaking 248, 253 First Nation peoples 277, 278, 295 floggings 69, 70 France 15, 17, 19, 22, 31–35, 37–43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 79, 80, 82, 84, 91, 92, 95, 97, 98, 102, 104, 133, 138, 140, 147, 155, 157, 170, 179, 180, 183, 186, 187, 189–191, 193, 194, 204, 226 Fremantle Prison 313 French Guiana 4, 7, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 33, 39, 80–92, 95, 99, 102, 104, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 147, 148, 153–161, 164, 165, 167, 170, 172, 180, 181, 183, 227, 302 frontier 113, 118, 129, 277 fugitives 37

G

Genet, Jean Le Bagne 153, 158, 172 Miracle of the Rose 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 164, 166, 167

324

Index

Our Lady of the Flowers 153, 155, 157, 158, 167, 171, 172 The Man Condemned to Death 153 The Thief’s Journal 153, 156, 158, 159, 164, 166, 167 genocide 6, 313 geography 5, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 37, 80, 81, 86, 88, 89, 134, 139, 147, 154, 155, 157, 159, 168, 169, 224, 249, 276, 296, 313. See also abolition, abolition geographies; carceral geography, carceral geographies geopolitical 223, 224 German colonialism 207, 214 German Prison Museum 197, 199–209, 211, 212 Germany 197, 199, 292, 293 global 3–5, 14, 19, 20, 57, 110, 120, 134, 140, 147, 148, 156, 180, 184, 190, 200, 224, 291, 296 global agriculture 275 Gómez, Sara En la otra isla, On the Other Island 249 Isla del Tesoro, Treasure Island 247 Una isla para Miguel, An Island for Miguel 249 Google Maps 117, 118 graphic history 180–182, 191 Grendon Prison 315 Guantánamo 3 guards 90, 92, 93, 95, 142, 161, 211, 227, 255, 305, 306, 316 guillotine 82, 94–96, 104. See also death, death penalty gulag, gulags 15, 16

H

hell, green hell 12, 58, 66, 89, 90, 157–159, 190, 285 heritage. See also dark heritage heritage trail 19, 134–136, 141, 147 penal heritage 114, 116, 118, 141, 233 prison heritage 112, 201 war-related heritage 225 heritagization 222 heroism 24, 89, 203, 215, 235, 236, 239 anti-hero 5 historical site 222. See also heritage historic prisons 315 Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi Hilton 203, 204, 225 Hokkaido 15, 19, 109–113, 119, 125, 130 Hu, Xinzhi 210

I

Ian Potter Museum of Art 287 iconography, iconographies 10, 19, 82, 95, 96, 101, 104, 121 identification 35, 46, 47, 117, 226, 234, 236, 307 photographic identification 47 image 9–12, 14, 81–84, 86, 87, 89, 95, 99, 100, 102, 110, 112–114, 117–124, 129, 130, 140, 141, 146, 156, 159, 174, 179, 180, 187, 193, 194, 203, 206, 208, 209, 211–213, 222, 235, 247, 248, 253, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 280–282, 286, 307, 309

Index

imaginary futures 303 imagination 80, 99, 160, 165, 211, 228, 229, 307, 310 carceral imagination 5, 309 immigrants 2, 3, 21, 42, 72, 198, 278. See also asylum, asylum seekers; migrants immigration 42, 43, 50, 305, 309 immigration detention 276, 302, 303, 305, 306 immigration detention archive 303, 305, 306 Immigration Restriction Act 44, 278 incarceration 4, 10, 22, 38, 59, 80, 86, 99, 110, 111, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 165, 179, 185, 192, 197, 199–201, 203, 215, 236, 247, 275, 278, 279, 282, 288, 294, 295, 302, 309, 311, 312, 315 independence 2, 21, 191, 193, 223, 224, 235, 249 indigenous inhabitants 36, 43, 49, 156, 161, 183, 213, 291, 296, 313 knowledges 296 peoples 72, 193 indigenous inhabitants 43, 49 Indochina, Indochine 4, 104, 134, 137, 138, 140, 147, 148, 226 inequality 71, 198 infrastructure 11, 19, 23, 42, 109, 111, 114, 119, 125, 143, 145, 146, 183, 209, 279 Instagram 118, 119, 123, 206, 212, 215 institution 6, 16, 20, 58–60, 97, 101, 128, 172, 180–184, 188,

325

192, 193, 302, 303, 309–311, 314 international travel 221 international visitors 209, 225, 232 interpretation 8, 10, 17, 18, 20, 23, 89, 93, 122, 135, 145, 146, 197, 200–202, 205–207, 212, 214, 215, 222, 223, 225, 233, 235–238, 240, 241 island, islands 2, 4, 8–11, 15, 18, 21–24, 32, 33, 43, 47, 57, 58, 60–68, 70, 74, 87, 102, 110, 112, 125, 138, 141, 143, 146, 161, 181, 182, 184, 188, 193, 226, 228, 232, 233, 247, 249–252, 254, 258, 260, 262, 264, 267, 275, 278–280, 282, 291, 292, 295, 296, 314. See also prison island Isle of Pines 21, 247–253, 255, 258–264, 266, 267 isolation 36, 39, 41, 228, 312, 314. See also solitary confinement itinéraire du bagne 134, 136, 141, 142, 144, 148

J

Japan 15, 19, 110, 112, 115, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 198, 199, 204, 214 Japanese colonial expansion 3, 20, 109 journalism 84, 156, 250. See also photojournalism investigative 16, 19, 32, 85, 100, 101

326

Index

K

Kafka, Franz 8, 9, 11, 24 In the Penal Colony 7 Kanak population 184, 187, 188, 191 Kelly, Ned 4, 36 Koestler Foundation 315

L

labour convict labour 12, 13, 15, 19, 65, 88, 109–111, 118, 124, 125, 140, 194 forced labour 4, 5, 11, 15, 16, 20, 81, 83, 99, 101, 110, 111, 120, 138, 148, 154, 158, 161, 171, 172, 179, 209, 247, 250, 251, 266, 267 indentured labour 20, 191 labour history 5, 12, 118 Lagrange, Francis 95, 180 land 6, 13, 14, 34, 40, 70–72, 110, 117, 138, 159, 167, 188, 213, 277, 291–293, 312, 313 acquisition 40 dispossession 14, 48 landscape 11, 13, 110, 115, 117, 118, 120, 124, 129, 130, 136, 140, 141, 190, 205, 277, 280, 282, 283, 292, 294 language 9, 12, 32, 58, 69, 147, 154, 158, 169, 279, 285, 289, 292, 293, 305 law 8, 24, 40, 65, 70–73, 90, 138, 170, 172, 213, 290, 309 legal barriers 38 legitimacy 42, 48, 49, 72, 234, 311, 313

Le Petit Parisien 19, 82, 83, 86, 94, 102 Life magazine 222, 228, 230 listening 11, 12, 18, 21, 163, 173, 276, 277, 280, 282, 284, 287–289, 291, 293–296 deep listening 276, 292–294, 296 literary, literature 5, 8, 18, 19, 58, 112, 153, 154, 157–160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 171, 192, 201, 202, 234, 308 local 13, 14, 19, 59, 73, 74, 98, 127, 129, 134, 135, 141, 143, 180, 190, 198–200, 207, 213, 214, 223, 237, 238, 278, 289, 292 Londres, Albert 19, 81–86, 88–104, 156, 161, 170, 181 Lushun Russo-Japanese Prison (LRJP) 204

M

Maconochie, Alexander 13, 57–74 mannequin, mannequins 123–126, 128, 209–211, 214, 233 Manus Island 276, 287, 288, 290 map-making 139. See also cartography map, maps 3, 11, 12, 17, 19, 117, 134–143, 145–147, 154, 167, 168, 186, 251 mark system 18, 57, 59, 60, 63, 68–70, 72 media 5, 15, 17, 74, 135, 279, 280, 290, 305 Mediterranean 2, 22 memoir 3, 10, 15, 17, 19, 79, 80, 82, 87, 95, 103, 124

Index

memory 4, 16, 17, 97, 98, 119, 120, 136, 163, 166, 168, 180, 187, 191, 193, 221, 223–225, 240, 282, 293 metaphor, metaphorical 2, 8, 24, 159, 160, 166, 182, 221, 259, 310, 311, 316 metropole 38–41, 47, 58, 73, 92 metropolitan 11, 31, 33, 38–40, 71, 98, 157, 179, 193 Mettray 157–159, 165–169, 172 Michel, Louise 20, 181, 185–187 migrants 34, 40, 42, 43, 137, 189, 280, 285, 314. See also immigrants migration 34, 35, 44, 49, 97, 280, 302 economic migration 308 forced migration 23, 134, 141 military 21, 24, 42, 47, 48, 72, 82, 161, 171, 183, 184, 199, 214, 238, 261 Millbank Prison 312, 313 mineral phosphate 275 mining 111, 277, 292 mining industry 183, 192 mobilities, counter-mobilities 12, 20, 23, 48, 49, 86, 87, 146, 148 Molesworth Committee’s review of transportation 59 morality 10, 34, 37 moral order 72, 157 Morocco 163, 165, 304 mugshots, mug shots 119, 208 museology 18 museum 10, 17, 19, 20, 110–114, 116–121, 123–125, 127–130, 200, 202–215, 222, 223, 225,

327

226, 233–239, 290, 291, 302, 310 myths 12, 80, 81, 225

N

narratives cultural narratives 224 master narrative 214, 215 official narratives 205, 235, 236, 239 postcolonial narratives 112, 201, 207, 239, 240 state narratives 203, 234, 236 national identity 202, 203, 224 nationalism 42–44, 224, 234, 235, 239 nation-state 6, 276 nature, natural environment 14, 64, 69, 72, 89, 92, 94, 180, 187, 208, 224, 250, 252, 267, 287, 290, 293, 294, 315 Nauru island 275, 278 navy 8, 39, 198 naval officer 58 New Caledonia 7, 18–20, 22, 31–43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 82, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140–142, 144, 146–148, 170, 180–193 New South Wales 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 44–47, 57, 58, 60–67, 71–74 newspaper, newspapers 15, 18, 32, 34, 37, 45, 48, 58, 65, 73, 83, 101, 156, 158, 179, 204, 210, 260, 264. See also press; reporting, reportage Niles, Blair 80 non-human ecologies 276, 291

328

Index

Nordic exception 22 Norfolk Island 18, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63–68, 70, 73, 74

O

objects 10, 18, 61, 127–129, 136, 139, 168, 169, 211, 264, 307, 313, 315, 316 offshore detention 275, 276, 279, 289, 314 oppression 101, 203, 215, 276, 290, 305

P

Pacific Model, Pacific Solution 2, 49, 280 Pacific (Ocean) 33, 40 panopticon 9, 12, 247, 312, 314 Papillon 4, 15, 79–81, 87, 91, 95–97, 102, 188, 194 Paris Commune 20, 182, 184, 185 patriotism 58 patronage 129, 308 penal afterlives 182 penal colony 4–22, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41–43, 45, 47–49, 57, 58, 80–84, 86, 87, 89–92, 95, 97–102, 110, 113, 115, 119, 129, 130, 133–136, 141, 142, 145, 147, 148, 153–158, 165, 167, 170, 179–185, 188, 190–192, 226, 228, 277, 278, 302, 307, 308, 313, 314, 316 penal discipline 59, 65, 66 penal heritage 114, 116, 118, 141, 233

penalscape 110, 113–115, 117, 118, 127, 129, 135, 136 penal settlement 4, 7, 18, 32, 37, 39, 49, 57, 58, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70 penal spectatorship, penal spectator 10, 81, 101, 114 penal theory 59, 67 penal tourism 112, 115, 123. See also penal heritage Pentonville Prison 60, 313 perpetrators 208, 234 persecution 286 photography, photograph 17, 18, 20, 80, 84, 114, 118–120, 123, 130, 171, 180, 200, 264, 305, 306 photojournalism 156, 228 Phu Quoc 124, 222, 225, 226, 228, 230, 231, 233–240 plantation 80, 88, 140, 313 poetry, poetic 154, 157, 159, 160, 164, 165, 168, 226 Police Magazine 156, 157 policies 38, 42–44, 49, 61, 73, 111, 157, 198, 201, 203, 231, 248, 261, 276, 278–280, 289, 290, 303, 309, 313 policing 6, 23, 35, 45–48, 50, 313 Port Arthur 6 port-city 38, 198 postcards 95, 104, 138, 147, 148, 179 postcolonial museum 225, 239 postcolonial prison 202 postcolonial regimes 200 poverty 71, 90, 99, 168, 191, 198, 303

Index

power 39–42, 102, 136, 139, 148, 158, 167, 182, 203, 204, 208, 224, 251, 252, 302, 308, 313 premature death 3, 13 Presidio Modelo 247, 255 press 32, 36, 58, 65–67, 69–71, 73, 80, 100, 156, 250, 252, 260, 261, 263. See also newspaper, newspapers; reporting, reportage prison architecture 12, 19, 21, 112, 116, 117, 127, 199, 204, 206, 211, 213, 215, 227, 230, 302, 304, 313 art 154, 168, 302, 303, 314, 315 prisoner 9, 16, 17, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 45, 46, 58, 59, 61–64, 66–70, 74, 75, 87, 102, 116, 124, 125, 127–130, 157–159, 164–167, 172, 173, 181, 183, 187, 188, 197, 199, 210–214, 222, 227, 228, 234–236, 238, 241, 251, 266, 267, 278 political prisoners 4, 23, 111, 184, 185, 222, 232, 248, 251 prison industrial complex 13, 88, 129, 309 prison island 4, 7, 11, 12, 15, 22, 24, 103, 222, 226 prison tourism 204. See also penal tourism productivity 67, 70 punishment 4–6, 8–11, 18, 20, 21, 39, 49, 57, 59–61, 65, 66, 69–74, 81, 85, 86, 92, 95, 100, 110, 114, 171, 201, 205, 209, 213, 228, 248, 266, 311 capital punishment 71

329

corporal punishment 62, 67, 69

Q

Qingdao 20, 112, 197–214 Quarantine Station 314 Queen Victoria’s birthday party 73

R

racism. See also white supremacy racist anxieties 43 racist attitudes 278 racist policy 42 railroad 44 rations 59, 85, 90, 192 Reading prison 314 recordings 276, 287 re-education 15, 249, 250, 253, 259 reform 19, 62, 65, 73, 100, 247, 250, 262, 302, 310, 316 reformers 181 reformation 59, 61, 70, 72, 73 rehabilitation 57, 58, 128, 247, 309, 315 remembering, remembrance 202, 212, 214, 223–225, 234. See also memory Rémire-Montjoly 154, 161 remoteness 41, 57 reporting, reportage 5, 10, 17, 18, 82–85, 94, 99, 156, 170, 279 representation 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 21, 37, 81, 84, 86–88, 91, 93–95, 97, 101, 118, 130, 135, 157, 163, 181, 182, 194, 201–204, 225, 235, 239, 248, 253, 261, 268, 306, 308

330

Index

visual representation 80, 85, 87, 89, 93, 94, 96, 179, 180 resistance 69, 71, 101, 124, 183, 204, 212, 214, 234, 235, 262, 277 reunification 185, 226, 234–236, 238 revolution 71, 239, 240, 248, 251, 252, 302 revolutionary 39, 182, 186, 223, 234, 235, 237, 238, 248–251, 253–256, 258, 259, 261, 264, 265, 267, 268, 310, 316 Rochaix, Jules 32, 35, 45–47 Rochefort, Henri 36, 147, 171, 183, 186 Rousselot, Charles 46 ruin, ruins 10, 19, 20, 82, 114, 116, 137, 143, 145, 161, 296 Rwanda 1, 2, 49

S

Said, Edward 11. See also colonial imaginaries Saint Helena 2 Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni 19, 83, 87, 95, 104 Saint Martin de Ré 22 Salvation Islands, Iles du Salut 82. See also Devil’s Island Ile Saint-Joseph 92 Second World War 80, 172, 180 secrecy 228, 279, 296 self-government 42 semi-colonial 198 Shu Qun 210, 214 signage 19, 134–136, 141–147 signs 127, 135, 140–142

silence 4, 21, 94, 102, 123, 143, 146, 169, 186, 279, 289, 290 silenced voices 11 slavery 302, 312 slave 5, 80, 88, 99 Smith, Patti Just Kids 160 M Train 154, 162, 168, 173 Year of the Monkey 172 social control 279 social hierarchy 72 social media 20, 119, 201, 205, 206, 209, 215 social structures 70, 71, 193 solitary confinement 82, 87, 92–94, 96, 101 sound 93, 253, 258, 261, 276, 281, 283–285, 287, 295 sound art 282 soundscapes 93, 94, 156, 282, 287, 288 South Korea 112 sovereignty 2, 37, 112, 198, 277, 280, 290 Stalin, Joseph 16 state control 225 state legitimacy 224 state surveillance 276 storyteller 293, 308 suffering 4, 10, 24, 46, 62, 81, 88, 120, 129, 200, 211, 222, 231, 236–239 surveillance 9, 37, 44, 47, 255, 256

T

Taiyuan prison camp 204 takobeya system 111. See also labour, forced labour

Index

Tasmania 6, 35, 45. See also Van Diemen’s Land Tate Britain 311, 312, 314 tiger cages 20, 93, 221–223, 225–234, 236–241 torture 3, 10, 20, 124, 203, 206, 209, 211–214, 232–237, 248, 266 tourism, tourist 22, 110, 118, 120, 127, 135, 143, 145, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207, 214, 225, 237. See also visitor tourist attraction 117, 127, 221 trace, traces 14, 19, 137, 148, 184, 311 transcolonial flows 188 transnational 4, 18, 184, 223, 226, 237 transportation 3, 5, 13–16, 19, 23, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46, 58, 59, 64, 71, 74, 80, 86, 100, 133, 137, 138, 179, 186, 194, 278, 302, 312 trauma 224, 235, 288, 294 travelogues 179 true crime magazines 180

331

Ushuaia 12 utopia, utopian 5, 92, 100, 117

V

Van Diemen’s Land 44, 45, 58, 60. See also Tasmania viapolitics 23 video, videos 23, 200, 206, 209–212 Vietnam 21, 103, 124, 147, 191, 192, 208, 211, 221–226, 228, 230, 232, 237–240. See also Indochina, Indochine Vietnam War 192, 223 violence 5–8, 36, 69, 81, 110, 165, 170, 191–193, 236, 257, 277, 280, 294, 306–309, 311, 312, 314 state violence 238, 302, 305, 309, 310 visitor 6, 18–20, 95, 110, 112, 114–121, 125, 127, 129, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 184, 197, 200–202, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 233, 234, 236, 237, 315 visual culture 5, 17, 114, 188, 191, 194

U

uncertainty 190, 208, 236, 303 UNESCO 6 Unit 731 Museum 204, 214, 215 United Kingdom (UK) 1, 2, 4, 121, 147, 303, 306, 308, 313, 314 United States, USA 3, 10, 13, 15, 80, 114, 130, 221, 222, 224–227, 232–234, 238, 240 user generated data 200, 201, 206, 214

W

Walnut Street Prison 313 War Remnants Museum 203, 204, 225, 234 Weinong, Li 210 white supremacy 290 Wilde, Oscar 314 Wilson Gilmore, Ruth 3, 12, 13, 301, 309

332

Index

Wonnerup Massacre 282

Y

youth, youths 155, 156, 158, 250–253, 258, 260, 261, 263, 264