Prison Diary Research Articles

Hostile Witnesses and Queer Life in Kenyan Prison Writing

This article explores three Kenyan political prison narratives, J. M. Kariuki's Mau Mau Detainee (1963), Ngugi wa Thiong'o’s Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981), and Maina wa Kĩnyatti's Kenya: A Prison Notebook (2009), as archives of anxious disputes over alternative sexual intimacies in Kenya at the very moment in which politicians formulated visions for a future after colonization. Situating prison writing within emerging queer historicisms, the author argues that since representations of homosexuality have frequently emerged through denial or negative exemplification, the task is to examine the functions of such denial and negativity within the gender politics of political struggle. The debates over homosexuality in these narratives preserve intra-African conversations, which readers now revisit in the context of demands for political recognition and transformations in cultural representation of alternative sexualities.

The Road to Stalin’s Witnesses : Seeking Truth through Fiction

The Road to Stalin’s WitnessesSeeking Truth through Fiction Julius Wachtel (bio) In November 1936, shortly after returning with his family from Washington, where he had played the role of an Izvestiia correspondent, veteran Soviet intelligence officer Vladimir Romm found himself locked up in the bowels of the Lubianka. He and four other “witnesses” would soon take the stand at one of the most notorious show trials in history. Presented before diplomats and correspondents from around the world, their coerced testimony helped corroborate the equally false confessions of the accused, sending top Communists to the executioner and leaving Stalin the undisputed leader of the USSR.1 Based on extensive research in North American, European, and Russian archives, interviews with descendants, and secondary sources, my novel Stalin’s Witnesses is a fictionalized yet historically faithful account of how the lives of four Soviet citizens and one German expatriate came to intersect in a Moscow courtroom some three-quarters of a century ago. A third-person narrative chronicles Romm’s life and work from the late tsarist era through the 1937 Moscow show trial. We perch on his shoulders as he agitates for socialism; navigates the treacherous shoals of the revolution; serves as a Soviet correspondent/spy in Japan, Europe, and the United States; and, as his career reaches its zenith, unexpectedly becomes a victim of the Great Terror. In a parallel thread, Romm’s fictional prison diary conveys how authorities gained the cooperation of witnesses and accused, yielding a scenario so persuasive that it convinced Western leaders, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt and U.S. Ambassador Joe Davies, that leading members of the Party had conspired to topple Stalin and abandon the USSR to Germany and Japan. [End Page 365] Stalin’s Witnesses is intended, in part, as supplementary reading for university courses. Toward that end, a factual appendix, “A Little Bit of History,” reports on the aftermath of the trials. To help readers distinguish between what is real and what was invented, the novel includes a detailed author’s notes section that identifies significant deviations from fact and provides references to source materials. The Back Story It may seem unusual for a criminal justice instructor in early 21st-century America to explore these issues, particularly in the form of historical fiction. As in most such journeys, the best explanation is personal. My mother, Bella, a Polish Jew, was liberated from a concentration camp by Soviet troops. So even at the height of the Cold War, when “drop” drills were a weekly classroom ritual and the Evil Empire was supposedly about to plunk the big one on our heads, I could not get angry at the inscrutable Reds. My high-school classmates idolized Salinger, but my literary hero was Dostoevskii. Salvation through degradation. Magnificent! In 2000, while teaching in the Criminal Justice Department at California State University Fullerton, I pursued my long-standing interest in Soviet justice by designing an elective course about the Moscow show trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938.2 Neither a historian (my Ph.D. is in criminal justice) nor a Russian speaker, I tried to find another faculty member with whom to share the class. Alas, the ranks of Soviet-era experts on campus proved thin, so in the end I went it alone. Falsification was the lifeblood of Stalinism. Eager to please their superiors, secret policemen built careers on bringing in “counterrevolutionaries,” and the more the merrier.3 While the Great Terror is an admittedly extreme example, I knew from personal experience that pressures to make arrests and gain convictions can distort justice even in a democracy. My hope was that the course would also have some comparative value.4 [End Page 366] Most of my students had little exposure to world history and were unlikely to know about the show trials. Considering their needs, Peter Kenez’s highly approachable A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End was used to convey the historical context, and selected chapters from Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment were assigned to cover the “investigations” and trials. My students were taking the class to satisfy an upper-division electives requirement. All were...

A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America by Martin J. Hershock (review)

A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America By Martin J. Hershock. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. 256. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $35.00.)In spring of 1812, Unitarian minister William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, belittled a scandal that had lately rocked his state. A drunken shopkeeper, posing as a British soldier, had committed slander by accusing a Federalist gubernatorial candidate of organizing a plot to deliver America to Britain. Bentley called this episode the trifling affair of a boy, intimating that it was a distraction from real problems that party faced in 1812.In his incisive study of diary-writing, economics, politics, and religion in early America, Martin J. Hershock demonstrates that this allegation of high treason was, in fact, no small matter. It was, instead, uncommon action of a common man, a product of dramatic changes that commercialism and partisanship had wrought in New England and United States as a whole. Ultimately, trader's defamation and his subsequent incarceration revealed tumultuousness of both revolution and republican government.Hershock terms diary that Timothy M. Joy kept while imprisoned for libel a microcosm of an 'extraordinary' moment in nation's (9). The author traces Joy's angst, which stemmed from his accusation that statesman Timothy Pickering had committed treason. After issuing a comprehensive genealogy of Joy family in Strafford County, New Hampshire, and offering a brief, but strong, political history of that area, Hershock tracks Joy's transition from a world of farming to one of commerce.He details risk that young man incurred in abandoning respectability and security his family had acquired in town of Durham. In late 1811, Joy opened a small store in nearby Middleton and for a few short months adopted a middle ground in nascent market economy (43). By mid-March 1812, a combination of bad weather and market forces left Joy (a man just building a reputation in a fragile trade) in a dire situation; he faced pressures from creditors amid mounting diplomatic tension and a consequent reduction in Anglo-American trade. Soon after, creditors ransacked Joy's shop and threatened to have him arrested for outstanding debts. The twenty-two-year-old fled town, leaving behind a family of three. Examining broadsides, newspapers, court records, land grants, and journal itself, Hershock reconstructs Joy's flight and his 1812 jailing in Essex County, Massachusetts.Hershock builds on scholarship about honor and masculinity from historians such as Toby Ditz, Joanne Freeman, and Bruce Mann. He scrutinizes Joy's debt, defamation, and imprisonment in order to probe humiliation of a shopkeeper-on-the-run in light of market volatility during Napoleonic Wars. …

A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America

A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America

‘Bless the Gods for my pencils and paper’: Katie Gliddon's prison diary, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the suffragettes at Holloway

This article discusses the life and imprisonment of the largely unknown middle-class artist and British suffrage activist Katie Gliddon and analyzes her extensive prison diary, secretly written and drawn in her copy of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley at London's Holloway Prison in March and April 1912. By creating a platform for the voices of ‘ordinary’ prisoners and by opening up a space for a transgressive gaze between suffragettes, ‘ordinary’ prisoners and female officers, Gliddon's writings allow us to complicate our understanding of cross-class relations within the women's suffrage campaign and in women's prisons more generally speaking.

Prison Diary of a Child Bride

Prison Diary of a Child Bride

Gender Fluidity and Closure in Perpetua’s Prison Diary

Perpetua’s Passio, a prison diary or narrative, tells the remarkable story of a young Roman Christian woman awaiting martyrdom in the arena in Carthage. This article focuses on the gender ambiguities and fluctuations in the Passio, both in language and in narrative structure. With a particular focus on Perpetua’s fourth vision, in which she “becomes male” (masculus), the article explores the gendered language of the text, the implications of Perpetua’s brief transformation into a male body, the different gender choices made by Perpetua and by her editor, and the role that gender plays as a structuring narratological device.

Perpetua

Perpetua was martyred with her fellow catechumens in Carthage in 203. Her story is told in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity , a composite document made up of Perpetua's prison diary, her catechist Saturus' account of his own dream, and a wraparound narrative describing the exemplary deaths of the whole group. The writing illustrates the pouring out of the Spirit on young men and women, slaves male and female, and youngsters and elders (cf. Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17—18). It may have Montanist connections, though these should not be overstated.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed: A Prison Diary P. Cox and H. Shore (Eds.) Becoming Delinquent: British and European YouthY. Jewkes. Cullompton Captive Audience: Media, Masculinity and Power in PrisonsA. Crawford (Ed.). Cullompton Crime and Insecurity: The Governance of Safety in EuropeT. Crofts The Criminal Responsibility of Children and Young Persons: A Comparison of English and German LawJ. Pratt Punishment and Civilization: Penal Tolerance and Intolerance in Modern SocietyJ. Silverman and D. Wilson Innocence Betrayed: Paedophilia, the Media and Society

Singing to the deaf

On 20 June, the Russian environmental journalist Grigory Pasko stood up again before the military court in Vladivostok, charged for the second time with treason. If convicted, he faces a prison sentence of 12-20 years. Pursued by the Russian authorities for almost four years, Pasko was an investigative journalist with the Russian Pacific Fleet paper Boyevaya Vakhta. He was initially arrested on 20 November 1997 and accused of passing of classified documents to the Japanese television network NHK; he claims he was prosecuted for blowing the whistle to Japanese media on Russian nuclear waste-dumping in the Sea of Japan (Index 3/1999, 1/2001, 2/2001). After 20 months in prison awaiting trial, he was acquitted of treason, found guilty of 'abusing his authority as an officer' and sentenced to three years' imprisonment. He was released under an amnesty but recharged after the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court overturned the verdict of the lower court and called for new hearings on 21 November 2000. Index presents the first English translation of excerpts from his prison diary. JVH

On Translating The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh

On Translating The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh

Book Review: Lord Longford's Prison Diary

Book Review: Lord Longford's Prison Diary

Early Modern

Ayrshire and the Reformation: People and Change 1490–1600. By Margaret H. B. Sanderson Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare: Renaissance to Revolution, 1492–1792. By Jeremy Black The Impact of the English Reformation, 1500–1640. Edited by Peter Marshall The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages. Edited by Eric A. Johnson and Eric H. Monkkonen A History of the University in Europe, Volume II: Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800. Edited by Hilde de Ridder‐Symoens Patronage and Recruitment in the Tudor and Early Stuart Church. Edited by Claire Cross The Christian's ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–1740. By Ian Green Thomas Arden in Faversham: The Man Behind the Myth. By Patricia Hyde The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536. By Michael Bush The Anabaptists. By Hans‐Jürgen Goertz Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount. By Carol Edington The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. Edited by Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales Life Cycles in England 1560–1720. By Mary Abbott Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook. Edited by David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell The European Reformations. By Carter Lindberg Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the 16th Century. By A. Lynn Martin The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits. Edited by Thomas M. McCoog SJ. Boydell History of Pedlars in Europe. By Laurence Fontaine ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. By Michael Heyd Apprenticeship in England 1600–1914. By Joan Lane The Stuart Age 1603–1714. By John Wroughton An Exile of Ireland: Hugh O'Neill, Prince of Ulster. By Micheline Kerney Walsh Denmark in the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648: King Christian IV and the Decline of the Oldenburg State. By Paul Douglas Lockhart King or Covenant? Voices from Civil War. By David Stevenson The Anglo‐Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century. By J. R. Jones The English Civil War: A Contemporary Account, Volume 1: 1625–1639. Edited by Peter and Edward Razzell The English Civil War: A Contemporary Account, Volume 2: 1640–1642. Edited by Peter and Edward Razzell The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651. By Martyn Bennett The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. By Leo Damrosch John Bunyan in Context. By Michael Mullet Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth 1660–1722. By Perry Gauci The Parliamentary Diary of Sir Richard Cocks 1698–1702. Edited by D. W. Hayton An Illustrated History of Eighteenth‐Century Britain, 1688–1793. By Jeremy Black By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth‐Century Russia. By Anthony Cross Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts Parties, Patriots and Undertakers: Parliamentary Politics in Early Hanoverian Ireland By Patrick McNally Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1832. By Peter R. Campbell Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? By David Parker Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730–1737. By Alexander Pettit The Early Letters of Bishop Richard Hurd 1739–1762. Edited by Sarah Brewer Manila Ransomed: The British Assault on Manila in the Seven Years War. By Nicholas Tracy The Prison Diary (16 May–22 November 1794) of John Horne Tooke. Edited by A. V. Beedell and A. D. Harvey

“Death as Life”: Political metaphor in the testimonial prison literature of Kanno Suga

This essay argues that what most clearly reveals Kanno Suga's last texts to be “resistance literature” was her use of figurative language to express the idea that death is life. In the prison diary and letters she wrote in the week before her execution for treason, Kanno repeatedly used metaphors of regeneration in connection with her faith in the revolutionary immortality she and her co-defendants would be accorded and in the ultimate victory of Truth and the anarchist Cause. Appearances notwithstanding, the Japanese state had only won this round of the fight. This essay also reflects upon the plural nature of Kanno's resistance whereby in these late texts, in effect, she practiced a subversion of more than one social institution. Attributing to Kanno a subversion of literary canons as well, the author situates the prison diary within a transnational “out-law” genre of autobiography described today as “testimonio” (testimonial literature).Kanno Suga (1881–1911) achieved the dubious distinction of being the first female political prisoner in Japan's modern history to be executed. She was the one woman among twenty-four Meiji socialists to be sentenced to death early in 1911 for her involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate the emperor. Yet Kanno Suga is noteworthy for reasons other than for her role in the so-called Meiji High Treason Incident. As one of Japan's first feminists and also one of its first female journalists, she played an active role in various social movements in the Meiji era (1868–1912). Any one of these factors would qualify Kanno as a significant historical figure. Historians of Japan, however, have long tended either to ignore her or to focus their attention on her love life. Doubtless some have seen her as merely the “other half” of the “more important” anarchist theorist Kotoku Shusui, while others have apparently concluded that her romantic involvements are the most noteworthy features of her life. The fact that even works of women's history published in Japan seem preoccupied with Kanno Suga's romantic involvements suggests that it has not only been “within mainstream U.S. feminism [that] the good insistence that ‘the personal is political’ often transformed itself into something like ‘only the personal is political’.”

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:LOOKING AT DARWIN'S PAST: Material Evidence of European Settlement in Tropical Australia By David Carment.THE EUROPEANS IN AUSTRALIA: A History, Volume One: The Beginning By Alan Atkinson.THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: Labour Parties and Public Policy Transformation in Australia and New Zealand Edited by Francis Castles, Rolf Gerritsen and Jack Vowles.THE WIRED NATION CONTINENT: The Communication Revolution and Federating Australia By K. T. Livingston.WRITING IN HOPE AND FEAR: Literature and Politics in Postwar Australia By John McLaren.THE NEW SOUTH WALES STATE ELECTION 1953 By David Clune.THE NEW SOUTH WALES STATE ELECTION 1927 By Kevin Cosgrove.NEW SOUTH WALES POLITICS, 1901–1917 By Joan Rydon, R. N. Spann and Helen Nelson.THE MIGHTY BEARS: A Social History of North Sydney Rugby League By Andrew Moore. Statistics by David Middleton.VOX RE/PUBLICAE: Feminism and the Republic Edited by Jeanette Hoorn and David Goodman.DIALOGUES ON AUSTRALIA'S FUTURE: In Honour of the Late Professor Ronald Henderson Edited by Peter Sheehan, Bhajan Grewal and Margarita Kumnick.APPRENTICESHIP IN ENGLAND, 1600–1914 By Joan Lane.THE PRISON DIARY (16 May‐22 November 1794) of John Home Tooke Edited with introduction and notes by A. V. Beedell and A. D. Harvey.THE REPUBLICAN CROWN: Lawyers and the Making of the State in Twentieth Century Britain Joseph M. Jacob.GERMANY: A New Social and Economic History General Editors: Sheilagh Ogilvie and Bob Scribner. Vol. 11450–1630, edited by Bob Scribner; Vol. 2. 1630–1800, edited by Sheilagh Ogilvie.THE GHOSTS OF BERLIN: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape By Brian Ladd.A HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN MILITARY HISTORY: From the Revolutionary War to the Present Edited by Jerry K. Sweeney.THE PACIFIC BASIN SINCE 1945: A History of the Foreign Relations of the Asian, Australasian and American Rim States and the Pacific Islands By Roger C. Thompson.REGIONAL SECURITY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC: The Quarter‐century 1970–95 By Ken Ross.TRADITION VERSUS DEMOCRACY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC: Fiji, Tonga and Western Samoa Stephanie Lawson.POWER BY DESIGN: Constitution‐making in Nationalist China By Zhao Suisheng.VIETNAM 1945: The Quest for Power David G. Marr.TONKIN GULF AND THE ESCALATION OF THE VIETNAM WAR By Edwin E. Moïse.BUDDHIST KINGDOM, MARXIST STATE: The Making of Modern Laos By Martin Stuart‐Fox.THE POL POT REGIME: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 Ben Kieman.WAR AND TELEVISION By Bruce Cumings.CHRISTIANITY AND DEMOCRACY:. A Theology for a Just World Order By John W. De Gruchy.THE CAMBRIDGE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF MEDICINE Edited by Roy Porter.CULTURES OF NATURAL HISTORY Edited by N. Sardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary.

Foo, A Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun: The Secret Prison Diary of Frank "Foo" Fujita.

Foo, A Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun: The Secret Prison Diary of Frank "Foo" Fujita.

Foo, a Japanese-American prisoner of the Rising Sun: the secret prison diary of Frank "Foo" Fujita

During his time as a POW, Frank Foo Fujita kept a diary of daily happenings, embellished with drawings of life in the camp. He secreted the diary in the walls of his barracks, as the practice was forbidden. That diary forms the basis of these memoirs. Fujita's memoirs are also unique in that he was one of the fewer than nine hundred Americans taken prisoner on the island of Java. The bulk of American POWs in Japanese hands surrendered in the Philippines, and most of the published POW memoirs reflect their experience. Fujita's account of the defense of Java and of the fate of the Lost Battalion of Texas artillerymen serves to distinguish this memoir from others. At one point while a POW in Japan, Fujita was forced to be part of the Japanese radio group broadcasting propaganda. After the war, he testified at some of the war crime trials in San Francisco, and the diary on which this book is based was used as evidence in those trials.

Editorial

The life of Albert Speer should be a required study for aspiring technical specialists all over the world. For those unfamiliar with him, Speer was Adolf Hitler's confidant as well as chief architect and later Minister of Armaments for Nazi Germany during World War II. For his part in the war effort, Speer was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment by the Allied Tribunal at Nuremburg. While serving time, he maintained a fascinating prison diary which has been published as Spandau: The Secret Diaries (New York: Macmillan, 1976). His autobiography, entitled Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), has been used by many to study the inner workings of Hitler's Germany.

La guerra del general Escobar

This frequently reprinted bestseller provoked strong reactions when it was first published eight years after Franco's death. Himself a leading Spanish thinker coming to terms with a permissive socialist society, Olaizola here explores the paradox of General - a Civil Guard and Franciscan tertiary who joined with communists and anarchists to defend the Republic against Franco's catholic crusade. Winner of the prestigious Planeta Prize, La Guerra del General Escobar is the fictional diary of the General as he awaits the death sentence in Barcelona. He reviews his experience of the civil war, the divided loyalties within his own family and the divisions that threatened to destroy the Republic. Unknown to Olaizola, the General had indeed kept a prison diary. In her critical introduction, Rosemary Clark discusses, among other things, how its remarkable similarities to the fictional diary add authority to Olaizola's exploration of the deeper significance of the Spanish Cicil War.

Review: Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary by Ngugi wa Thiong'O

Review: <i>Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary</i> by Ngugi wa Thiong'O