Prison Memoirs Research Articles

Sergei Dovlatov’s Zona as Metatextual Memoir

From the 1970s, the term metafiction has been mostly confined to studies of American and Western European literatures; I propose using metafiction as a means of approaching Sergei Dovlatov’s Zona [The Zone], a novel which blurs the line between fiction and memoir. In one sense a prison text, in that it concerns the lives of guards and prisoners in a camp, it is, however, divorced from survivor narratives in that the camp does not contain political prisoners, so the “heroes” are the thieves and criminals so universally reviled in other memoirs of the Soviet gulag. It is also a record of its author’s developing need to write as it tracks the transformation of the guard Boris Alikhanov, Dovlatov’s alter-ego. Dovlatov’s authorial persona serves not to elucidate the text, but to construct a hybrid prison memoir which supports his views on the prison experience; views which are in opposition to the pre-existing tradition, and this leads me to describe The Zone as a metatextual camp narrative, containing many of the attributes of the metafictional novel, though originating from the memoiristic impulse and still straddling the line between fiction and nonfiction in a way that true metafictions do not.

Censorship and the reading practices of political prisoners in South Africa, 1960-1990

Political prisoners undermined censorship in apartheid jails. The jail diaries, authorised biographies, autobiographies, prison memoirs, interviews and prison letters of more than fifty political prisoners and two prison censors describe the reading practices of South African political prisoners. Political prisoners generated original thoughts from books that ended up in prison libraries and in their possession. They continued the political struggle and reconstructed news and life experiences from reading materials denied to them by prison authorities. Political prisoners regulated their own reading spaces. Innovation Vol. 35 2007 pp. 24-55

Lost Boys and Recovered Classics: Literary and Social Memory in Lorenzo Carcaterra's Sleepers (1995)

This essay explores the interplay of literary and social memory in Lorenzo Carcaterra's prison and revenge memoir, Sleepers (1995), in particular its appropriation of Alexander Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–45) as both a literary template and a political marker. Monte Cristo is the central text in Carcaterra's rewriting of a long tradition of “bad-boy” narratives depicting juvenile dispossession, crime, and redemptive vigilantism. The essay also traces the transatlantic routes of Dumas in modern US popular culture, especially in Albert Kanter's Illustrated Classics, in light of Antonio Gramsci's theories of popular narrative and law.

'Blood from Stones': Censorship and the Reading Practices of South African Political Prisoners, 1960–1990

This article shows how political prisoners undermined censorship in the apartheid jails of South Africa. The jail diaries, authorized biographies, autobiographies, prison memoirs, interviews, and prison letters of more than fifty political prisoners and two prison censors are analyzed to describe the reading practices of South African political prisoners. The article, demonstrating the ways in which readers regulate their own reading space, concludes that the books that ended up fortuitously or filtered by censors in prison libraries in South Africa and in the possession of political prisoners, profoundly affected their thinking. From information fragments the prisoners reconstructed news and life experiences denied to them by prison authorities. Reading in a way that subverted the intentions of the censors in effect allowed the prisoners to continue their political struggle.

'These Strange Criminals': An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War (review)

Reviewed by: ‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War Thomas P. Socknat (bio) Peter Brock, editor. ‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War University of Toronto Press 2004. xviii, 505. $75.00, $45.00 During the twentieth century numerous men and women, either for religious or moral reasons, have refused to fight in or support the military. These conscientious objectors to military service were often treated harshly by their own governments, usually with imprisonment. The stories of their wartime experiences, however, have not always been easily accessible and have certainly not been gathered together in one volume. Now that has been corrected as the voices of imprisoned conscientious objectors come alive once again in this important anthology by Peter Brock, the world's leading historian on pacifism. Brock has pulled together the prison memoirs of thirty conscientious objectors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that describe their jail experiences during the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War. Although the documents are limited in terms of gender, mainly because women were not conscripted into the military itself and therefore few were viewed as conscientious objectors in the eyes of the law, Brock has extended the definition of 'conscientious objection to military service' in order to include two women objectors in Second World War Britain: Kathleen Lonsdale, a prominent scientist jailed for refusing to perform firewatching duties under compulsion, and Kathleen Wigham, jailed for refusing to obey a direction under wartime industrial conscription (she refused to do work that would relieve anyone to do military service). As the book's title suggests, conscientious objectors were not typical criminals. In fact, their only crime was to remain true to their conscience and oppose military service. Moreover, most of them were well educated, politically aware individuals who were highly observant of prison conditions and often became inspired to fight for penal reform. Strange criminals indeed! The objectors range from well-known historical figures, such as the Briton Stephen Hobhouse and the American Alfred Hassler, to little-known individuals, such as Canadian John Evans and New Zealander Archibald Baxter. While their personal backgrounds and the wars they refused to fight vary, their stories are held together by the common thread of moral conviction and carceral experience. The physical hardships suffered by the objectors were obviously greatest during the First World War, when torture was commonly employed. Both Evans and Baxter recalled instances of routine beatings and rough treatment. The 'worst torture,' however, was not physical, but psychological, and all of the accounts recognize the 'debilitating effects of imprisonment upon the mental, spiritual, and social well-being of the prisoner.' Every entry is a tale of survival and all objectors describe how they refused [End Page 528] to allow the penal system to break their spirit. Rather than just a record of the treatment of imprisoned conscientious objectors, therefore, this book provides an important glimpse into life behind bars throughout the twentieth century and, as such, it will be a valuable addition to the study of criminology and penology as well as to that of conscientious objection. One of the most noteworthy of the accounts is that of Brock himself. Peter Brock was one of those 'strange criminals' who spent four months in two well-known London jails, Wandsworth Prison and Wormwood Scrubs Prison. A second-year history student at the University of Oxford in 1940, Brock was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for refusing non-combatant service (a third of his sentence was remitted for good conduct). His account of those days underlines the general unpleasantness of life behind bars mentioned by others – the boredom, the dreary daily routines, the loss of personal privacy, and the menacing prison atmosphere. Brock's entry would be important for no other reason than because, as he says, there are very few British co prison memoirs from the Second World War, era even though over forty-five thousand objectors were sent to jail. But, of course, his account is also important because it underscores the fact...

An American Heroine in the French Resistance-The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d'Albert-Lake

This fascinating book tells the remarkable story of an ordinary American woman's heroism in the French Resistance. Virginia Roush fell in love with Philippe d'Albert-Lake during a visit to France in 1936; they married soon after. In 1943, they both joined the Resistance, where Virginia put her life in jeopardy as she sheltered downed airmen and later survived a Nazi prison camp. After the war, she stayed in France with Philippe, and was awarded the Lgion d'Honneur and the Medal of Honor. She died in 1997.Judy Barrett Litoff brings together two rare documents-Virginia's diary of wartime France until her capture in 1944 and her prison memoir written immediately after the war. Masterfully edited, they convey the compassion and toughness of a nearly forgotten heroine as they provide an invaluable record of the workings of the Resistance by one of the very few American women who participated in it.An indelible portrait of extraordinary strength of character ...[D'Albert-Lake] is sombre, reflective, and attentive to every detail.-The New Yorker A sharply etched and moving story of love, companionship, commitment, and sacrifice...This beautifully edited diary and memoir throw an original light on the French Resistance. -Robert Gildea, author of Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940-1945 At once a stunning self-portrait and dramatic narrative of a valorous young American woman ...an exciting and gripping story, one of the best of the many wartime tales.-Walter CronkiteAn enthralling tale which brims with brave airmen and plucky heroines.-David Kirby, St. Petersburg Times

Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (review)

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition Margaretta Jolly, Sr. Lecturer and Richard Jolly, Sr. Research Fellow Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition, by Kay Schaffer & Sidonie Smith (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xii, 303 p., Hardcover £55.00; Paperback £16.99 Human rights are widely perceived to advance as part of a legal process—with rights codified into law, appeals made to courts in response to deprivation and abuse, and with obligations acquired by governments and citizens in law-abiding countries. Rights become legal rights for which there are both beneficiaries and duty holders. This legal approach has an important place—but it is only part of a much wider story. Human rights in fact develop over time in response to people's everyday demands that those around them understand their experiences of injustice. This book looks at one of the frequently neglected dimensions of change and delivery: the mobilization of public concern through personal accounts and narrations. Could black South Africans have overturned apartheid without narrating personal stories of suffering? Could Aboriginal Australians or Korean "Comfort Women" have emerged as political subjects without readers, listeners, and cinema-goers, not to mention lawyers and politicians, witnessing their narrations? But public airing of human narratives of suffering and abuse is not all-powerful. The eloquent personal petitions from Chinese dissidents have done little to dislodge the Chinese government's position on local democracy. Nor have African-American prison memoirs and websites convinced many Americans that their prison system might involve abuse of rights. How effective are testimonies as tools for enhancing human rights? This book does not set out to answer this directly. Its thesis is more diffuse, but surely more accurate: that the rise of human rights and the rise of life story telling are intertwined phenomena. They are symbiotic outgrowths of Enlightenment legacies beginning with a few poignant tales, such as that of the former slave Olaudah Equiano in the 1760s, growing with ever more personal accounts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and mushrooming in the human rights era of the 1990s. The advancement of human rights has leant upon personal story-telling, while increasingly, people frame their life stories, especially when they are painful ones, through a language of rights and humanity. Smith and Schaffer trace this symbiosis through five dramatic political and legal arenas in impressive detail, beginning with South Africa, as the paradigmatic case where the narration of life-stories was explicitly encouraged as a process of national healing as well as arbitration. The stories generated out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission show that in many ways it stimulated hopes it could not always or entirely fulfill. At the same time, it undoubtedly formalized and legitimized the status of narration as part of the restoration of human relationships in extremely influential ways. Aboriginal Australians' campaign for the Australian state to accept charges of genocide, galvanised by the South African [End Page 780] experience, got worldwide attention in the 1990s, and is the second case Schaffer and Smith explore as a site of public storytelling. For example, early readers of Sally Morgan's 1987 autobiography My Place took it as a coming of age story, albeit one with terrible pain and suffering. After the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's Inquiry into the Forced Separation of Indigenous Children from Their Families concluded with a devastating report, Bringing Them Home, in 1997, Morgan's book was reissued as a narrative of human rights violations. In this guise, it sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide. In contrast to South Africa, Aboriginal Australians have not yet had any formal apology or redress from the Australian government. Yet, clearly there is a growing market for such stories in a way that plays a crucial role in the Aboriginals' political struggle. Schaffer and Smith's third study deals with the "belated" story telling of Korean women who were forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military during the Second World War. Most of these stories were kept hidden for fifty years. The authors attribute the end of the long silence to a "confluence of forces at the intersections...

‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War

‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War

Asiye's Story (review)

Reviewed by: Asiye’s Story Roberta Micallef Asiye’s StoryAsiye Guzel. London: Saqi Books, 2003. 123pages. 7.99. Asiye's Story,the winner of the 2002 Tucholsky Prize for Human Rights Writing, awarded by the Swedish Pen Club, is a prison memoir that was smuggled out of prison chapter by chapter and was published first in Turkey, in 1999, when the author was still in prison; it became an instant best seller. Asiye's Storyis an important text in terms of what it documents and the debate it spawned at the time it was first published in Turkey, as well as the discussion it continues to foster at home and abroad, but in addition to its contents, this book is valuable because the author is a gifted writer. Asiye Zeybek Guzel, who had been the features editor of a socialist magazine and had worked for a socialist newspaper, was arrested in February [End Page 122]1997, in a raid on her home, where she had been living in hiding with her husband, also a political activist. When she appeared in court, in 2002, after five years of untried detention, she was charged with being a member of an illegal Marxist Leninist organization but was released from prison in June 2002, while the Turkish court was determining her fate. In October 2002, she traveled to Sweden to receive the prestigious Tucholsky Prize, awarded to writers who show courage when their freedom of expression is in danger; two days after the ceremony, the court sentenced her in absentia to twelve-and-a-half-years in prison. Guzel applied for and was granted political asylum in Sweden, where she continues to reside. Helen Bamber, a leading campaigner against torture and the founder of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, wrote the foreword for Asiye's Story.Bamber's question of "What is my society prepared to do about such a stain on the conscience of the world?" (6) globalizes the issues in this book. In addition, the English translation of Asiye's Storyincludes two prefaces. The preface to the English edition, written in January 2003, hints to Guzel's next book—the hunger strikes and struggles related to the implementation of "F-type" prisons—but also her hopes for the future. The preface to the Turkish edition, written in October 2000, after the book had been in circulation, is significantly different and not to be missed, as Guzel tells of her mindset when writing this book. She discusses the significance of rape as a tool of torture in a society with feudal values, asking, "If there is no difference between rape and other forms of torture, why do those who have experienced it hide it, while speaking easily of suspension, shock treatments, beatings, and so on?" (14). In her acknowledgment to those seeking retribution from the Turkish state for rape and sexual violence in custody, she expresses hope for change in Turkey and her affirmation of her "desire, passion and joy of life" (15). Asiye's Storybegins with a terrifying scene in which Guzel comes home to a group of policemen searching her apartment. Her account of this encounter and her two weeks in the security headquarters in Istanbul, where she is subjected to horrific acts of violence, including suspension torture, gang rape, and psychological torture, provide further testimony to the fact that in the twenty-first-century state, sponsored violence continues to take place. Throughout the book, we read descriptions [End Page 123]of daily life in the prisons where she is being held. The reader cannot help but applaud the solidarity among the prisoners and the support Guzel receives from her family, including her in-laws, long-lost cousins, and friends. Even in the most desperate conditions and degrading circumstances, one can find acts of heroism and great compassion. Much of the book deals with the especially debilitating nature of rape for women as an instrument of torture, as Guzel puts it, even for "women who become revolutionaries" (14). It is clear early on that of all the forms of torture inflicted on her, gang rape is the most traumatic and has...

The nature of violence in Fukasaku Kinji's Jingi naki tatakai (War without a code of honor)

This article focuses on the role of violence in Fukasaku Jinji's Jingi naki tatakai(War without a code of honor) series (1973–4). It reviews the formalistic way in which violence was presented in pre-1973 yakuza films and contrasts this with Fukasaku's cinematic style, which broke all the rules of the genre. Fukasaku opted for a highly realistic, documentary approach. This documentary style is examined by considering the prison memoirs of a yakuza gang member and other sources upon which the films were based and then by providing examples of the manner in which Fukasaku translated these written materials into cinematic images. It is argued that, for Fukasaku, the world of the yakuza is only a microcosm of the broader society and international order of the post-war period, in which violence lacks moral significance and exists without heroes. The continued relevance of these films in the light of current events is noted.

"These Strange Criminals": An Anthology of Prison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War (review)

62Quaker History for the split in Genesee Yearly Meeting when 200 Friends walked out and formed the Congregational Quakers. Their statements sound very much like some Friends today who do not want anything to do with hierarchy, ministers, elders, or select meetings. In the context ofthe heated abolitionist /Free Soil/women's rights arguments of the 1840s, the Quaker leadership seemed to offer very little, particularly in terms of real spiritual nourishment. The question for each generation, it seems, is how to live out the radical call of discipleship in the thorny, controversial issues of the day—and do it under God's guidance, in community. Martha Paxson GrundyCleveland Heights, Ohio "These Strange Criminals ": An Anthology ofPrison Memoirs by Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Ed. by Peter Brock. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, xviii + 505 pp. Notes and bibliography. Cloth, $75; paper, $45. This anthology included the prison experiences ofthirty-one war resisters from World War I to the Cold War and in seven different countries. It is edited by the dean of peace historians, Peter Brock, who was himself imprisoned in England during the first World War. Most of the material was mined fromunpublished or privately published memoirs though some, like Donald Wetzel's Pacifist, are excerpts from previously published accounts. Seven of the memoirs are by Quaker pacifists, most from England during the first World War. Others are from a variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds. There is great variety in these accounts, yet their reactions to the prison environment are remarkably similar. The impact ofbeing isolated from society in an institutional setting designed to humiliate and depersonalize inmates seems universal. Though all of these young war resisters were political prisoners, none set themselves apart from their fellow convicts. While there is much discussion ofprison rules and the attitude of prison guards—called "screws" by the British and "hacks" by the Americans—there is very little discussion of sex. Several resisters described their disgust with the foul and sexually-explicit language they confronted for the first time. Two of Brock's authors, Kathleen Lonsdale and Kathleen Wigham, were British women jailed during WWII. Both were Quakers who refused to perform assigned work under compulsion. In prison, unlike many ofthe men, they were concerned about the lack of sanitation and the poor medical care given prisoners. One ofthe most interesting memoirs, which Book Reviews63 appears in the Appendix, was written by Michael Frenzei, an East German resister who served time in a Communist prison. Several authors described the negative impact of prisons on inmantes and insisted that an enlightened society would find creative alternatives to incarceration as they had experienced it. Besides their intrinsic readability, these essays provide a useful reference tool for researchers studying a prison system based on the assumption that increasingly punitive tactics bring desirable results. Despite frequent use of severe punishment, including solitary confinement, only one of the resisters included in this anthology abandoned his pacifism. These Strange Criminals is must reading for any young man or woman considering a moral stand that might lead to a prison sentence. It will also help make visible the absolutist pacifists from past wars, for their stories constitute an important chapter in the much neglected history of active nonviolence. For collecting these memoirs, and contributing one of his own, Peter Brock has earned the thanks of all Friends and others who are working to end the horror ofwar. Larry Gara, EmeritusWilmington College The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia. By Paul Lyons. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95. The story of the New Left in Philadelphia is complex, tangled, ultimately both sad and inspiring. Paul Lyons tells it clearly and sympathetically in seven well-focused chapters. He weaves together a broad overview in the first and final chapters and documents the social activism fueled by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam anti-war movement, first on the Quaker campuses—some ofwhose students had traveled South and worked in predominantly African-American communities like Chester, Pennsylvania; then in the Catholic institutions La Salle, Villanova, and St...

Гулаг: От Мифотворчества к Изучению

SUMMARY: This article discusses the methodological problems of Gulag studies and suggests directions for future research. While the older tradition of viewing the Gulag primary as a repressive institution has been left behind, this conceptual framework continues to influence contemporary academic conceptualizations and representations. Current studies often fail to appreciate the social complexity and cultural diversity of the Gulag, as well as the mobility of the system. The application of such outdated categories of analysis contributes to the constant mythologizing of the Gulag. The problem of the Gulag’s social complexity is often underappreciated in the academic literature, because the unique social and cultural milieu that existed in the camps and that consisted of many interesting subcultures – such as the criminal culture dating back to Odessa of the 1910s and 1920s, peasant culture, the “high” culture of the Soviet artistic elite, and finally, ethnic subcultures – has been reduced to a vision formed mainly on the basis of the memoirs of a few prominent political prisoners. In order to get beyond the old mythologies, Klimkova argues that we must bring to the forefront many previously unheard voices. Arguing that we must connect the study of Gulag culture to both the broader framework of Soviet modernization and the narrower framework of “Soviet society in a microcosm,” Klimkova outlines possible approaches (from oral history and cultural studies) that, in light of the critical review of the current literature and sources, might be used to enrich the social and cultural history of the Gulag. The article suggests how such a cultural study of the Gulag – embedded with a more comparative approach as well as a broader understanding of the Gulag as an inherent part of the history of Soviet civilization – can contribute to the study of the driving forces of the Soviet modernization project.

Albie Sachs, Indres Naidoo and the South African prison memoir

Detained by security police in 1963 and again in 1965, Albie Cachs was subjected to a “self”-destroying regime of psychological torture. Over the years he repeatedly visits the prison cell in his autobiographical and polemical writings to rewrite his “self” as an oppositional political subject. In his Jail diary of 1966, his depiction of himself emerging from months of solitary confinement without making a statement is one of a resolute individual defying his captors. But in Stephanie on trial (1968), Sachs narrates how during his second detention he broke and made a statement within twenty-four hours; he is thus forced to find another basis on which to establish an oppositional identity. He does so in part through a collaborative autobiography with Indres Naidoo, whose Robben Island (1982) depicts the more communal experience of imprisonment on the island. Sachs is thus able to continually revise his identity to meet what Paul John Eakin describes as the everchanging “needs of present consciousness”.

'These strange criminals': an anthology of prison memoirs by conscientious objectors from the Great War to the Cold War

'These strange criminals': an anthology of prison memoirs by conscientious objectors from the Great War to the Cold War

Colonial and postcolonial memories

Hue-Tam Ho Tai (ed.), The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (2001) (University of California Press, Berkeley). Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (200I) (University of California Press, Berkeley). The Country of Memory, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, provides a remarkable and wide-ranging analysis of the forms and uses of collective and individual memory in twentieth-century Vietnam, even though the subtitle suggests a narrower focus on the last few decades. The book spans topics ranging from film to folk art, village shrines, official monuments, short stories, museums, tourist sites and memoirs. It is concerned both with the articulation and expression of official memory, and individual resistance to this same official memory, concluding with challenges to the dominant narrative of chien tranh than thanh, or sacred war. For most of this edited volume, the sacred war in question is the American War (more commonly known to Americans as the Vietnam War), although Peter Zinoman also deals with the French colonial era, and at least two of the contributions mention the Vietnamese war with Cambodia. In addition, Hue-Tam Ho Tai's chapter refers to earlier wars of liberation against the Chinese. Implicit in the book's tite, and hinted at by Shaun Kingsley Malarey when he refers to 'Vietnams's history of repelling foreign aggression', is the official narrative's central theme involving centuries of resistance against outside invasions, from the Mongols to the Chinese, French, Americans and Chinese once again. I might add that nowhere is this trope more clearly exposed than in Hanoi's National History museum, where a diorama depicts wave upon wave of outside invasion, by means of multi-coloured arrows, each one rebuffed by successive groundswells of popular resistance. The Country of Memory is very well conceived, featuring an internal coherence and a series of helpful cross-references, flagging topics yet to come. Indeed, such coherence is all too rare in edited volumes originating from a conference. The volume is divided into three parts, the first dealing with the construction of memory, the second with the repackaging of the past, and the third with gendered memories. Peter Zinoman's chapter on revolutionary memoirs opens the edited volume with a fascinating analysis of a formulaic genre. Indeed, Zinoman demonstrates that Vietnamese revolutionary prison memoirs assumed an almost serialized and uniform aspect, reflecting the state's influence in funding and sometimes even ghost-writing these texts. The many surprising characteristics of prison memoirs include some revealing omissions: the elision of common

REZA AFSHARI, Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Pp. 382. $49.95 cloth.

Using a vast array of government documents, newspapers, journals, memoirs of political prisoners, and reports issued by the Special Representative appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), Reza Afshari provides a rich, sensitive, and very sympathetic presentation of the experiences and voices of victims of human-rights violations in Iran. This timely book is organized into eighteen chapters and is, to a large extent, the story of two decades of interaction between the UNCHR and Iranian officials. It discusses reports issued by the Special Representative of the UNCHR on the conditions of human rights in Iran and documents their violations in 1979–2000. In addition to gender discriminations and threats to the liberty and life of secular intellectuals, each of the following rights is discussed in a separate chapter: the right to life; freedom from torture and cruel punishment; liberty and security of person and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; a fair trial; freedom of conscience, thought, and religion; freedom of opinion, expression, and the press; participation in the state's political affairs; and the rights of women to equal opportunities in public life.

White South African and latter‐day bohemian two editions of Herman Charles Bosnian

This article surveys the publication history of Bosnian's works and the roles that he has played as author in his own eyes and those of his readers. During his lifetime, his stories appeared in periodicals which tended to be ephemeral, and he published in volume form only an early novel, his prison memoir and one volume of stories, which by his own account were hastily selected. His former pupil and friend, Lionel Abrahams, took on the task after Bosman's death of compiling a large selection of the rest of the work into volume form. Since at this stage Bosman was known as a writer to a relatively small circle, Abrahams could not justify the publication of anything but a generous selection of his work; but the resultant publications have been all‐time best sellers in the South African market. Readers of this edition have often taken from the stories a perception of Bosman as in sympathy with the racism of his characters, an impression which the new, more complete edition edited by Stephen Gray and Craig MacKenzie will correct. Though the edition is not yet complete, and volumes will continue to appear until 2005, the centenary of Bosman's birth, it is already possible to understand more of his beliefs and ambitions than the Abrahams edition allowed for.

The Country of Memory: Remaking the past in Late Socialist Vietnam

Acknowledgments Illustrations Foreword John Bodnar Introduction: Situating Memory Hue-Tam Ho Tai Part One: Constructing Memory 1. Reading Revolutionary Prison Memoirs Peter Zinoman 2. Motherland Remembers Your Sacrifice: Commemorating War Dead in Northern Vietnam Shaun Kingsley Malarney 3. Museum-Shrine: Revolution and Its Tutelary Spirit in the Village of My Hoa Hung Christoph Giebel Part Two: Repackaging the Past 4. Framing the National Spirit: Viewing and Reviewing Painting under the Revolution Nora A. Taylor 5. The Past Without the Pain: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam's Tourism Industry Laurel B. Kennedy & Mary Rose Williams Part Three: Gendered Memory 6. Faces of Remembrance and Forgetting Hue-Tam Ho Tai 7. Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema Mark Philip Bradley Afterword: Commemoration and Community Hue-Tam Ho Tai Glossary Bibliography List of Contributors Index

Tradurre e Tradire: The Treason and Translation of Breyten Breytenbach

This essay argues that Breyten Breytenbach's use of the English language to write his prison memoir True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1994[1984]) represented a kind of linguistic treason consistent with Breytenbach's legally defined treason against the apartheid state. While Breytenbach himself has been dismissive of the cultural productivity of his work, especially of the youthful rebelliousness of the work associated with the so-called Sestiger movement, the treason/translation of Confessions blazes a trail for a new politics of Afrikaans by insisting on the language's genuinely local,thoroughly hybrid nature. Well in advance of the birth of the new South Africa in 1994, Breytenbach undermined racialist notions of Afrikaans (whether as some sort of Herderian Sprachgeist of the white Afrikaner Volk or as the language of the white oppressor) and offered ways of conceiving Afrikaans as a defiantly impure language of local and national dissent (neither black nor white, neither traditionally African nor Europeanly modern) pitted against global and international systems of an anglophone world order.

Lessons learned about working with men: a prison memoir.

From the very beginning of my career as a social worker, I have believed that the fullest and most effective use of self requires an integration of personal, professional, and spiritual-political values and beliefs into a framework that respects their dialectical tensions while striving for wholeness. In this very personal memoir, I tell of such a period in my life. The setting is a maximum-security prison. I learned about mutuality, transparence, risk taking, openness, and vulnerability from men in the prison: inmates, the warden, and other prison staff. The lessons I learned have served as ground and guide for my subsequent psychotherapy practice with men, my own relational growth, and my commitment to the struggle for gender equality and social justice.