Session Abstract
Our panel frames the prison as a global project, contributing to an ongoing diversification of carceral histories beyond Europe and North America, which have monopolized the attention of the field and informed virtually all of its methodological and analytical tools. Crucially, the papers do more than simply supply fresh case studies, profiling a handful of new institutions that happen to be outside Europe and the Americas. Rather, they locate carceral history precisely in the interconnections—institutional, ideological, economic, technological—that link one prison to another, one legal regime to another, and one continent to another. Indeed, they raise the possibility that it is through these sweeping webs of carcerality that globality is constituted, and in turn that carcerality furnishes a uniquely powerful lens through which to approach global history.
Spencer J. Weinreich’s paper interrogates how the prison became a global form of punishment, by revealing the theoretical and practical adaptations and improvisations entailed in implementing solitary confinement in colonial India and post-colonial Cuba. Through the juxtaposition of two far-flung case studies, linked by a common investment in solitary confinement as a universal, distinctly modern punishment, the paper at once restores the contingency of the penitentiary’s spread and exposes how these very difficulties helped construct the myth of universality.
Ron Leonhardt examines a more concrete global connection, the political alliances between Khmer Socialist Cambodia and Third World Leftists in the United States. The paper not only demonstrates the place of carcerality in the construction of empire in the twentieth century, it emphasizes the need for a global history that is also a domestic history. Leonhardt traces the growing divergence between Cambodia’s international activities and the domestic development of precisely the kind of carceral structures it was opposing abroad.
Finally, Stéphanie Latte Abdallah formulates the concept of a “carceral web” to characterize the network of confinements by which the Israeli occupation controls and manages the Palestinian population. The carceral web offers a methodological tool for grappling with the sheer diversity of carcerality, attending to borders and morgues as well as prisons and jails.
Together the panel progresses in a twofold movement, narrowing geographically even as it broadens in the kinds and levels of carceral violence under analysis. In their very diversity, methodological and historical, the papers model the capaciousness that is required to contend with the protean manifestations of the prison across continents and centuries.
The panel will be chaired by Mary Gibson, a leading scholar of carceral institutions in the European context, and the author of a landmark 2011 essay in American Historical Review, a veritable manifesto for the global history of the prison.