Lady Gregory's The Gaol Gate,Terence MacSwiney and the Abbey Theatre

In September 1920, a French translation of Lady Gregory's 1906 play The Gaol Gate was staged in a Parisian drawing room. The play's original setting outside the gate of Galway Gaol was transferred to Mountjoy Prison at a time of republican hunger strikes. The drama's central character of Denis Cahel – refusing to inform on his neighbours and hanged as a consequence – gained contemporary currency with Terence MacSwiney's hunger strike and impending death as both men had turned their bodies into a political tool. With a focus on the concept of the political body, this article illustrates the power of The Gaol Gate by tracing the play's provenance and production history, demonstrating its flexibility through performance in a particular historical context.     

Graffiti Revelations and the Changing Meanings of Kilmainham Gaol in (Post)Colonial Ireland

Kilmainham Gaol (1796–1924) became the de facto holding center for political prisoners in Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century. Officially closing in 1910, it reopened a number of times for “emergencies” before its final closure after the Irish Civil War (1922–23). After 1924 it lay abandoned until reopening as a heritage attraction in the early 1960s. It was taken into state protection in 1986. Using a range of graffiti assemblages predominantly dating from 1910 onwards this paper will explore the “imperial debris” of contested narratives of meaning, ownership, and identity that the prison walls continue to materialize.     

Prison Heritage,Public History and Archaeology at Fannie Bay Gaol,Northern Australia

Prisons play an important role in the Australian psyche. As places in which the lawless element of society is incarcerated they possess a resonance that harks back to the stereotyped and mythologised convict foundations of the Australian nation. Many former places of confinement have been transformed into publicly accessible heritage sites and museums, but visitor numbers often do not reflect the widespread public interest in confinement. It is not at all clear how to engage the public with the individual histories of these places. This paper examines this issue by reference to the public display of Fannie Bay Gaol prison museum in Darwin. Changing themes and foci in the display of this site are discussed. The role of the historian and archaeologist is examined in the context of the public presentation of narratives of the Gaol's past.     

‘Looking at the Others’: Oscar Wilde and the Reading Gaol Archive

In looking at Wilde and the prison, scholarship has understandably focussed on the lengthy and complex De Profundis, and how the prison experience confirmed or re-shaped Wilde as a writer and thinker. Wilde himself claimed to have been saved by the ‘others’ that he encountered in prison, and these ‘others’ have received scant attention. Who were they? How does a greater knowledge of them supplement our sense of the nineteenth-century prison and of Wilde? This essay looks closely at the Reading Gaol archive, tracing out the lives of some of those with whom Wilde was incarcerated and providing analyses of the prison population in Reading while Wilde was there. Aside from yielding the only known photographs of any of the young working-class men in whom Wilde took an interest, the essay seeks to build a more nuanced reading of Wilde's experience. Above all, the aim is to open out the meanings of the Wilde myth, and, in particular, to offer a more socially inclusive version.     

Religious Colonialism in Early Modern Malta: Inquisitorial Imprisonment and Inmate Graffiti

Early modern Malta was governed by three competing Roman Catholic institutions—Order of St. John, Bishopric, and Roman Inquisition—all of which ultimately answered to the Pope. By focusing on the inquisition, the institution most directly controlled by the Vatican, this paper explores the role of imprisonment in furthering the Vatican’s cultural and political control on the island. In doing so, this paper offers an archaeological perspective on an early modern prison context. Through analyses of the prison cells and the inmates’ graffiti, I argue that the inquisition’s ability to imprison was crucial to the Vatican’s colonial position in Malta.     

"Ready to shoot and do shoot": black working-class self-defense and community politics in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and self-defense in Harlem during the 1920s. While historians have examined race riots, blacks’ everyday encounters with police violence in the North have received inadequate treatment. By approaching everyday violence and black responses—self-defense, legal redress, and journalists’ remonstrations—as a process of political development, this article argues that the systematic violence perpetrated by the police both mobilized and politicized blacks individually and collectively to defend their community, but also contributed to a community consciousness that established police brutality as a legitimate issue for black protest.     

Ordinary Emergency: Drones,Police, and Geographies of Legal Terror

This paper brings into conversation two ostensibly disparate geographies of state violence: the routine police surveillance and killing of members of the “dangerous classes” in the United States, an issue that is in no way new but nevertheless has gained increased attention over the last year with the Black Lives Matter movement; and the targeted drone strikes against “terrorist suspects” in the “war on terror”. By laying side by side the “war drone” and domestic police power, it becomes readily apparent that despite ostensible differences—foreign vs. domestic, war vs. peace, exceptional vs. normal, military vs. police, legal vs. extralegal—the unmanning of state violence gains much of its political and legal force from the language and categories that have long animated the routine policing of domestic territory. The paper calls for taking the violence of police power more seriously than many drone commentators have.     

Zionist identity and the British Mandate: Palestine's internment camps and the making of the Western native

This paper examines the relationship between British police officers, Jewish guards, and German internees in Palestine's internment camps during World War II. Using the reports of the Jewish guards, the paper investigates the role of Western‐identified actors in the Zionist identity‐making project. The reports evince a surprising rapport between the British and their German prisoners and the mistreatment of the Jewish guards by their British superiors. The paper analyses these Jewish accounts in the context of identity‐ and ethnic boundary‐making and argues that they illustrate Zionism's intent to construct itself as a Western but noncolonial movement and Zionists in Palestine as natives but not “Orientals.” The reports also reveal a breach between the formal hierarchy—British officers, Jewish guards, German internees—and the ethnic order, which situated British and Germans at the apex and the Jews at the bottom. The paper highlights the utility of researching group‐making interactions in different contexts to develop a more nuanced understanding of identity‐making processes.     

The Bang Beggars of Derry city: borough policing in Londonderry,c.1832–70

Was Derry's independent city police force wholly inadequate, was it just inefficient for the suppression of riots; or was it the demonstration of politico-religious partisanship that ensured the force's abolition in 1870? This paper will attempt to explore and answer these three questions. It will also look at the borough force in some detail, examining issues with regard to the force's pay, discipline, its duties and conditions of service. It will not attempt to analyse Derry's nineteenth-century riots or the political and sectarian issues surrounding these riots, except where aspects of these directly affected the borough police.     

Prison and sacrament in the cult of saints: images of St Barbara in late medieval art

This article analyses the changing visual representation of St Barbara during the later middle ages. The article identifies a shift in St Barbara's iconography: whereas earlier medieval representations of the saint almost always show her with her prison tower, a number of fifteenth-century representations show the saint holding a chalice and host. The article traces how and why this shift occurred. In particular, the article explores the ways in which medieval thinking linking incarceration and liberation were integrated into new representations of St Barbara to stress her intercessionary, sacramental functions. Overall, the article argues that the visual transformation of St Barbara's prison tower into a liturgical vessel reveals how saints like Barbara were increasingly viewed as conduits to the inclusive sort of freedom that participation in Christianity's sacramental economy invited.     

When Druid went to jail: returned migrants,Irish prisoners,and Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming

Irish playwright Tom Murphy became Writer-in-Association with Druid Theatre of Galway, Ireland, in September 1983. The partnership began with Druid's production of Murphy's Famine (1968) in February 1984, and was followed by a lunchtime production of On the Outside (written in 1959 with Murphy's friend Noel O'Donoghue). Druid premiered Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985) in December 1985 and Conversations on a Homecoming in April 1985. Druid toured Conversations locally, nationally, and internationally for two and a half years. In February 1987, Druid presented the play at three Irish prisons. This article attempts to reveal how the prison audiences related to a play about a returned migrant; and to discover what prompted the professional company to perform in Irish prisons.     

Handling Sorcery in a State System of Law: Magic,Violence and Kastom in Vanuatu.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the consequences of a local sorcery accusation that came to the attention of Vanuatu state police, courts and media. The paper discusses what happens to sorcery practices when these become absorbed into a modern, bureaucratic context. The argument revolves around the national imaginary formed by state power and the mass media in people's contemporary lives. In formulating new forms of opposition to sorcery, they also create a new imaginary space of national belonging.     

An Informational Right to the City? Code,Content, Control,and the Urbanization of Information

Henri Lefebvre talked of the “right to the city” alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any “informational right to the city”. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question—“How do we get rid of you?”—the paper seeks to apply post‐political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies.     

The Death of Beauty: Goya's Etchings and Black Paintings through the Eyes of André Malraux

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of the time. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a significance of a much deeper kind. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the European artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance, an essentially humanist tradition founded on the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty—an ideal world outside of which, as Malraux writes, ‘man did not fully merit the name man’. Following the illness that left him deaf for life—an encounter with ‘the irremediable’, to borrow Malraux's term—Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind—an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’, which replaced transcendence with a pervasive ‘feeling of dependence’ and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, and created semi-clandestinely, the etchings and black paintings are an early announcement of the death of beauty in Western art.     

Situating (Young) teenagers in geographies of children and youth

The past decade has been an exciting and productive period in the study of children's and young people's geographies. The principal aim of this paper is to contribute to this field of research by presenting the arguments for a more substantive focus on teenagers' geographies. Firstly, the terms ‘children’ and ‘young people’ are constructed as synonymous and used interchangeably and the complex transitional positioning of young teenagers—situated between childhood, youth and adulthood—has been relatively neglected. Secondly, many researchers have been engaged in developing methods, which aim to challenge unequal power relations between adult researchers and young participants but little focus has been placed on utilizing participants' own constructions of themselves. The final argument for a more coherent focus on teenagers' geographies rests on the contribution that geographers can make to challenging negative stereotypes of teenagers within policy and the media. The paper concludes by outlining what form an emphasis on teenagers' geographies may take.     

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

The recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.