Reinventing the penitentiary: Punishment in Florida, 1868–1923

This study of the origins and development of Florida's state prison system, and the shift from the penitentiary to convict leasing in the 1880s, examines the relationship between penal practice in one Southern state and Foucault's conception of penal modernity, and the connections between race and gender and leasing. It argues that convict leasing which emerged from the failure of the penitentiary in Florida, reflects the continuity of an older model of punishment centering on punishing the body physically. Discipline and surveillance were essential features of Florida's convict lease system, but the absence of massive walls, individual cells and regimes of silence meant this Southern model conducted on private turpentine farms and phosphate mines was very different from the original Auburn and Pennsylvania penitentiaries.     

The Prosecution of Informers in Eastern Germany, 1945–51

This work is an examination of the practices and experiences of administering transitional justice in post-war eastern Germany after 1945, examining the adjudication of informers as indirect perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Allied occupation law allowed for the prosecution of informers retroactively in the German courts through legislation specifically enacted for the purpose of prosecuting crimes against humanity. The implementation of the law and the prosecution of informers in the Soviet occupation zone under the auspices of the military government administration, and then later in the early years of German Democratic Republic of Germany is examined. This work also addresses the theoretical and practical problems associated with the implementation of the law, and the lessons to be drawn from this historically significant attempt to call individuals to account for their crimes against humanity after they had occurred through the use of retroactive legislation.     

Rituals of Commemoration,Rituals of Self-Invention: Safavid Religious Colleges and the Collective Memory of the Shi‘a

Shi‘ism, perhaps more than any other current of Islam, places emphasis on numerous forms of commemorative culture. Throughout the history of Shi‘ism, commemorative rituals have provided a comprehensive framework for interpreting a wide array of historical encounters between the Shi‘a and the dominant Sunni culture, thereby allowing Shi‘ism to construct itself as a community of learning and remembering. This self-construction required both a high degree of institutionalization as well as specialists to preserve the religious identity of the Shi‘a and to transmit religious knowledge to the next generation. Madrasas (Islamic institutions of higher learning) as well as the shrines of the Shi‘i Imams and their progeny served as the best institutions to achieve these goals. This paper argues that Safavid madrasas were not only centers for disseminating religious knowledge and preserving Shi'a intellectual heritage. They also rearticulated and contemporized the community's past through the active memorializing of pivotal events in the religious calendar of the Shi‘a. More specifically, the paper delineates the nature and scope of religious rituals and rites carried out in the Madrasa-ye Sultānī and a number of other madrasa-mosque complexes of Safavid Isfahan in order to explore the process by which the Shi‘i past was contextualized or contemporized as salient to suit the needs of Safavid power and society.     

Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment,Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939

From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire. This article explores the scale, reach and significance of these convict flows in the period after 1788, arguing for a transnational history of penal transportation in the Australian colonies and Indian Ocean. It quantifies convict numbers, and maps convict destinations, providing comparative data on their intra-imperial character to construct a new cartography of criminal justice and Empire. Focusing on Asian convict flows, this enables an articulation of the relationship between transportation, population management and repression, as well as other forms of coerced labour migration, including African and Asian enslavement and indenture. The history of penal transportation proposed here thus moves beyond an exploration of its role in the outward metropolitan expansion of Empire, and towards an appreciation of its importance in labour extraction and governance within the larger imperial world.     

Domestic Secrets: women and property in Sweden, 1600–1857

This article explores and analyses narratives in social report-books in the context of structural rationalization during the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden, which entailed large movements of people both in Sweden and Finland (as it did in other countries of Western Europe). The characteristics of the report-books are that they claim to depict the truth and to give voices to marginalized people with the aim to contribute to social change. The analysis dwells not only on the content of the books, but also on the narrative techniques employed. It is discussed how the authors were tied to their political context and the general discourse of social critique in their rendering of voices. The main questions of this article are: whose voices were paid attention to and how was home narrated and represented?

One kind of narrative content links home attachment to roots in a rural context, where home centres on reproduction of families, territorial claims and nature hugging. It is established through rhetoric of nature and timelessness, fathers passing inheritance on to their sons and a desire for a non-alienated existence in an archaic landscape. The narrative techniques used are based on an invisible narrator and on a travel narration with questions and answers. It is mainly male voices that are paid attention to. Female voices are to some extent heard but marginalized. Female bodily practices and habits are connected to positions as wives and daughters. The fisherman, the hunter, the woodlander and the farmer, are (re)presented as threatened male positions and therefore male bodies will in a near future be out of place. These narratives are framed by a patriarchal discourse where bodies are naturalized and made straight.

Quite another kind of narrative content is forward-looking, dealing with voices in a suburban context. The montage as a narrative technique is systematically used there, combining text and image. The didactic montage is intended to be educational, to enlighten people with the aid of pointers. This calls for activity on the part of the reader/observer, who is supposed to be given the impression of having interpreted the meanings independently. It is based on consciousness-raising as a feminist method for change. This narrative of home is about societal participation and resenting and resisting patriarchal distinctions such as public/private. It is framed by a feminist discourse where bodies are denaturalized and orientated at finding space for the displaced body to expand.