The Bastille Effect: Transforming Sites of Political Imprisonment

by Michael Welch

Overview

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As conceptualized throughout this richly illustrated book, the Bastille Effect represents the unique ways that former prisons and detention centers are transformed, both physically and culturally. In their afterlives, these sites deliver critiques of political imprisonment and the sustained efforts to hold perpetrators accountable for state violence. However, for that narrative to surface, the sites are cleansed of their profane past, and in some cases clergy are even enlisted to perform purifying rituals that grant the sites a new place identity as memorials. For example, at Villa Grimaldi, a former detention and torture center in Santiago, Chile, activists condemn the brutal Pinochet dictatorship by honoring the memory of victims, allowing the space to emerge as a "park for peace." Throughout the Southern Cone of Latin America, and elsewhere around the globe, carceral sites have been dramatically repurposed into places of enlightenment that offer inspiring allegories of human rights. Interpreting the complexities of those common threads, this book weaves together a broad range of cultural, interdisciplinary, and critical thought to offer new insights into the study of political imprisonment, collective memory, and postconflict societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520386037
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/14/2022
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michael Welch is Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and Visiting Professor at Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He is author of several books, including Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface xiii

Part 1 The Sacred and the Profane

1 Cultural Afterlives 3

2 States of Confinement 16

Part 2 In Search of Signs

3 Sites of Trouble 31

4 Sites of Condor 46

Part 3 Diagrams of Control

5 Economic Forces 67

6 Catholic Nuances 83

7 Architectural Designs 101

Part 4 Technologies of Power

8 Censorship and Propaganda: Transform the Mind 119

9 Torture and Torment: Transform the Body 134

10 Exterminate and Denial: Transform Society 150

Part 5 Performing Memory

11 Consecrate and Desecrate 171

12 Places of Resistance 184

References 197

Index 215