Colonial Articulations: Race, Violence, and Coloniality in Kafka's "Penal Colony"

This chapter considers the history of Andaman migration from the institutionalization of a penal colony in 1858 to the present. It unpicks the dynamic relationship between the state and the population by investigating genealogies of power and knowledge. Apart from elaborating on subaltern domination, the chapter also reconstructs subaltern agency in historical processes by re-reading scholarly literature, administrative publications, and media reports as well as by interpreting fieldwork data and oral history accounts. The first part of the chapter defines migration and shows how it applies to the Andamans. The second part concentrates on colonial policies of subaltern population transfer to the islands and on the effects of social engineering processes. The third part analyses the institutionalization of the postcolonial regime in the islands and elaborates on the various types of migration since Indian Independence. The final section considers contemporary political negotiations of migration in the islands.

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Laughter, Gesture, and Flesh: Kafka's "In the Penal Colony"

Modernism/modernity ◽

10.1353/mod.2001.0046 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 315-323 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Malynne Sternstein

Keyword(s):

Penal Colony

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Ontological Captivity

differences ◽

10.1215/10407391-9479702 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 85-113

Author(s):

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Color Line ◽

Ontological Difference ◽

Detention Center ◽

Racial Capitalism ◽

Penal Colony ◽

Political Critique ◽

Conditions Of Possibility ◽

Material Conditions ◽

Broad Understanding

Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.

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Peter M. Beattie, Punishment in paradise: race, slavery, human rights, and a nineteenth-century Brazilian penal colony

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes ◽

10.1080/08263663.2015.1090086 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 40 (3) ◽

pp. 442-444

Author(s):

Ian Read

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Human Rights ◽

Penal Colony

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Kafka: Crime and punishment

Ethics & Bioethics ◽

10.2478/ebce-2019-0016 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (3-4) ◽

pp. 148-158

Author(s):

Timo Airaksinen

Keyword(s):

Crime And Punishment ◽

Penal Colony ◽

The Law

Abstract When we read The Trial and In the Penal Colony together, we read about the logic of law, crime, punishment, and guilt. Of course, we cannot know the law, or, as Kafka writes, we cannot enter the law. I interpret the idea in this way: the law opens a gate to the truth. Alas, no one can enter the law, or come to know the truth, as Kafka says. The consequences are devastating: one cannot know the name of one’s own crime, which is to say guilt is eternal and permanent; nothing can absolve us. Only one solution exists. Josef K. in The Trial should have committed suicide like the Officer in “Penal Colony.” That is to say, perhaps, that you always are your own judge and executioner. Guilt cannot be doubted and thus, you are doomed. Both narratives are cruel and ruthless in their own way in their moral pessimism.

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Ways to improve the incentive impact on life imprisonment convicts

Institute Bulletin: Crime, Punishment, Correction ◽

10.46741/2076-4162-2019-13-2-168-172 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 168-172

Author(s):

S. L. Babayan ◽

Keyword(s):

Death Penalty ◽

Court Decision ◽

Life Imprisonment ◽

Incentive Effect ◽

Penal Colony ◽

Successful Adaptation

The article reveals some issues of application of incentive norms and institutions that stimulate law-abiding behavior of convicts sentenced to life imprisonment. It is proposed to supplement the penal enforcement legislation with a provision providing for the transfer of positively characterized convicts to life imprisonment to a penal colony of strict regime after serving at least 20 years in a correctional colony of special regime for life imprisonment. In order to increase the effectiveness of the incentive effect on convicts it also seems appropriate to provide for the possibility of transferring convicts from the strict regime to the colony-settlement for the following categories of persons: convicted with a particularly dangerous relapse of crimes; convicted to life imprisonment; convicted persons who have been commuted to the death penalty by way of pardon. The possibility of transfer to the colony-settlement for these categories of convicts will contribute to the maintenance and restoration of their socially useful ties and successful adaptation to the conditions of life in society. In addition it is necessary to change the mechanism of grant of parole and provide for this incentive institution only in respect of positively characterized convicts to life imprisonment, transferred by a court decision from the special regime for convicts to life imprisonment in the strict regime.

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