Professor Iglesias- Physician, Inventor and Political Prisoner

Pending

Narrating Memory: Weighing up the Testimony

Memory is the ability to store, maintain and recall information and experiences. Although predominantly an individual attribute, memory coincides with the life-world, with consciousness and with the ability to define reality – all of which are shared with others. When analysing narratives the sociologist needs to situate individual memory within its broader context. The article follows the argument that individuals acquire their memories within a broader social context. They also recall and localise their memories within a broader social context. This article interprets a remarkable testimony: the story of a former political prisoner who circumcised a large number of young fellow inmates in the notorious prison on Robben Island, South Africa, during the period of Nelson Mandela‟s incarceration. The article relates the narrative in question to the life-world of the narrator and to his experiences whilst serving his 18-year prison sentence. It reflects on the epistemological questions regarding memories. Memory as recollection, as reconstruction of events and information, and as process of re-membering come under the spotlight. Narratives that are often repeated start taking on a life of their own – particularly in the case of trauma memories. When analysing these narratives, the sociologist needs to distinguish between objective markers and subjective interpretation. Memory does not constitute pure recall by the individual. The article illustrates the effect of intersubjective and collective factors on the process of remembering. It calls for a reflexive process to identify, re-interpret and unpack the process of remembering.

Teaching Transitional Justice: Towards a Political and Personal Transformative Journey

In reflecting on my teaching experience of transitional justice I realised that it was not just an academic exercise but a deeply spiritual, political and personal journal for many of my students and me. In introducing myself as a South African former political prisoner there was what i felt some immediate empathy and rapport. In this chapter i will trace sharing new learnings, apprehension, pain, celebration and hope. Intimately encountering the comprehensive spirit of reconciliation in my class and Rwanda, it encouraged a personal journey conjuring up courage to communicate with my torturer/interrogator exploring possibilities of reconciliation.

Jafta Masemola’s Master Key

Jafta Kgalabi Masemola is the longest serving (1963–1989) anti-apartheid political prisoner in South Africa’s notorious Robben Island. Although Masemola is well known in the struggle narratives, not much has been written about him and his practices as a political organiser beyond biographical and anecdotal narratives. This article considers, with a certain degree of detail, an even more unthought aspect of Masemola’s life, his creative productions; in particular, the aesthetic logic that underwrites the master key that he cloned from a bar of soap while jailed in Robben Island. Looking from the vantage point of aesthetic and critical discourse, the article attempts to open up new vistas and interests in Azanian cultural praxis.

The Desire to Disappear in Order Not to Disappear

This article tells a story of the aftermath of the ‘failed revolution’ in Egypt through the prism of sound and gendered political prisoner bodies. It created embodied reactions among Cairene men—years after their lived prison experiences—in which depression, sorrow, stress, paranoia, rage, or painful body memories are prevalent. Affect theory shows how sonic vibrations—important stimuli within everyday experience, with a unique power to induce strong affective states—mediate consciousness, including heightened states of attention and anxiety. Sound, or the lack thereof, stimulates, disorients, transforms, and controls. The sound of life is transformed into the sound of death; the desire to disappear in order not to disappear again produces ‘ghost bodies’ alienated from the ‘new Egypt’, but from the family and the self too.

SOCIAL CRITICISM IN KONSPIRASI ALAM SEMESTA NOVEL BY FIERSA BESARI

Every litterateur makes existing issues or phenomena as inspiration in making literary works. In case with novelist, they convey criticism expressly or implicitly in their novel. Besides the love story, the Konspirasi Alam Semesta novel by Fiersa Besari, the author also criticizes the social conditions that exist in Indonesia. Social criticism in the novel will be the purpose of this research. Furthermore, this research focuses on analyzing the Konspirasi Alam Semesta novel using a sociological literary approach with social criticism. The research method is qualitative research methods with reading and note-taking techniques. The purpose of the research is to describe the problem of social criticism and the form of its presentation in the novel. The research result has obtained: (1) social criticism about politics such as discrimination against families of ex- political prisoner, government policies towards those who have made the country proud, Papua’s wealth and injustice in the development of remote areas, (2) moral criticism of corruption, (3) social criticism of humanity such as generalizations about a group, individual differences, violence against separatists and stigma about spinster, (4) social criticism about religion / belief about the creator. It can be concluded that the author implicitly conveyed his message and response through the Konspirasi Alam Semesta novel. It describes conditions that deviate from social conditions that must be criticized. This novel revives the people’s insights about social problems that exist in Indonesia. Furthermore, the author’s main topic of social criticism is political and humanitarian in Indonesia.

Ideology and Subversion: A Comparative Study of Mrinal Sen’s Padatik and Raghav Bandopadhyay’s Communis

Padatik, the final part of Mrinal Sen’s movies of the Calcutta Trilogy, offers both a historical document on the political mindset of the burgeoning Bengali youth and a personal struggle of Sen himself making sense of the Marxist revolutionary ideology and ascertaining whether or not it is a misguided enterprise. Raghav Bandyopadhyay in his conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty recollects how during his prison days he had sent a letter to the regional comrades. He had enlisted the reasons why their project had failed, also stating, how it would be best to abort the mission and retreat to "safer shelters" to study and reconsider the struggle. His years as a political activist and a political prisoner were penned down as Communis (1975). This paper is a comparative study of the picture of the 1970s Calcutta that Sen and Bandyopadhyay present in Padatik and Communis respectively, with special attention to the youth upsurge and the violent mission that the contemporary youth had dedicated themselves to. Bandyopadhyay, through his words, paints an equally realistic portrait of the "infernal city" that Sen films in his Trilogy. While Bandyopadhyay has largely been an unsung hero in the canonical growth of Indian Literature, Sen has been a world phenomenon with his brand of parallel cinema. However, both of them offer criticism to the left movement, when it was lying low and was in disarray. The paper would thus assess both their differences and their similarities in their reception and representation of the movement, its ideology, and its subversion.

The Arabist from Shemakha Who Dreamed of the Sea: Theodor Adamovich Shumovsky (1913-2012)

The twentieth century witnessed heyday of the Russian-Soviet Arabic and Islamic studies, whose academic school created by Victor von Rosen and his disciple Ignaty Krachkovsky had flourished already in the late Russian empire and survived the Soviet period. Its representa-tives included many outstanding yet controversial figures, whose scientific biography still needs to be rethought in the context of late post-colonial Orientalism under the Stalinist rule and the Cold War period. One of these scholars was Theodor Adamovich Shumovsky, political prisoner, poet and memoirist. He belonged to the last generation of students of I. Yu. Krachkovsky, specialized in early modern Arabic maritime geography, later translated the Qur’an into Russian in verses. The present work attempts to give a comprehensive discursive analysis of the work of this maritime Arabist, with whom the author knew well in the last decade of his life.

Games prisoners do not play: against the Hobbes-Zimbardo approach of unmitigated prison violence

I analyze institutions of prison subculture that mitigate potential violent confrontations among inmates, in contrast to Hobbesian-Zimbardo default spontaneous violence. The games that are relatively rarely played in prison are Chicken and other violent confrontation games. Incoming rookie inmates are subject to initiation tests that allocate them into different subcultural groups, which signals their toughness and disincentivizes fighting. Most experienced inmates develop the eristic skills utilizing prison argot, use informal conflict adjudicators, and fake aggression toward rookies. All inmates form defensive coalitions. Finally, when inmates commit self-injuries, they follow well-rehearsed protocols to minimize the damage to their bodies and to maximize the impression made on the authorities. The secret knowledge of the associated rules, tricks, and cons is passed down over generations of prisoners through informal schooling. The material for this study comes from two Polish prisons, where the author spent 5 months as a political prisoner in 1985.