Of Satellites and Sentiment: The Forgotten Vietnamese Prisoners of French Guiana
By Dr. Lorraine M. Paterson On April 18, 2008, Vietnamese journalist Danh Đức was standing in the rain at the Kourou Space Center, the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana, a territory that is, as an overseas département, still an integral part of France.[1] Eyes heavenward, Danh Đức was eager to witness the […]
In my prison notebook
Last year I came across a rare archival find: multiple editions of a 19th century prison newspaper covertly produced by Russian inmates between 1890 and 1905. The newspaper editions, now brittle paper manuscripts fraying brown along their edges, were archived along with a note of introduction by the editor-in-chief. The editor describes the way in […]
The Great Escape
Peter Kropotkin is remembered today as a brilliant Russian social revolutionary, geographer, scientist, and anarchist writer.Less well known, however, is the name of the friend and co-conspirator who significantly prolonged Kropotkin’s life by engineering his remarkable prison break in 1876. Dr. Orest Edward Veimar, a St. Petersburg surgeon, was the chief architect of Kropotkin’s […]
Empire’s Exile: The Story of Lý Liễu
by Lorraine M. Paterson In 1923 in the British colony of Trinidad, a young English woman returned from visiting her family in a suburb of the capital, Port of Spain, to find that her Chinese husband of six years, Lý Liễu, had packed up his possessions and left her and their two small children. […]
The Carceral Archipelago Conference, Leicester 13-16 September 2015
The Carceral Archipelago conference, held in Leicester from 13 to 16 September 2015, felt just like reading over thirty outstanding monographs in two-and-a-half days, getting to know their authors personally, and having the chance to reflect collectively about their mutual entanglements. It was an intense marathon through the burgeoning field of the global history of […]
Sounds in the silence of political exile
My recent discovery of Alexander Sochaczewski’s painting, Farewell to Europe!, in the Museum Pawilon-X in Warsaw compelled me to think anew about the experience of political exile and about the innate “wordlessness” that the state intended it to symbolize. Although Sochaczewski never sold a single painting during his life, today his work is viewed by thousands of visitors who […]
Reflections on the world’s largest prison
Several days ago, I broke from reading through the notes of nineteenth-century Russian penal inspectors to admire the 23rd edition of the International Prison News Digest, a publication of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research. As I perused this amazing compendium, I was struck anew by the way in which certain facets of the prison […]
Legacies of a British penal colony: adivasis in the Andaman Islands
It is an unexpected pleasure to be back in the Andaman Islands for the first time in almost two years. I have been researching aspects of the Islands’ history for almost 15 years, and in 2013 completed a research project with two colleagues based in Ahmedabad: historian of science Dr Madhumita Mazumdar and anthropologist Professor […]
Peniche Fado
During a recent trip to Portugal I took the chance to visit the fortress of Peniche, situated on the rocky coast in the homonymous village, approximately one hundred kilometres north of Lisbon. The imposing fortress was built between the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries as part of a system of coastal defense against foreign […]
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