front cover of Archiving the Unspeakable
Archiving the Unspeakable
Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia
Michelle Caswell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.

Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists

Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars
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Carceral Afterlives
Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda
Katherine Bruce-Lockhart
Ohio University Press, 2022
Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal detention spaces known as “safe houses” and wartime camps—and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and “disappearance” by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda’s postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state’s violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement—both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment—remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison’s expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison’s transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison’s enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.
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Charlotte Delbo
A Life Reclaimed
Ghislaine Dunant, Translated by Kathryn M. Lachman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
In 1943, Charlotte Delbo and 229 other women were deported to a station with no name, which they later learned was Auschwitz. Arrested for resisting the Nazi occupation of Paris, Delbo was sent to the camps, enduring both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück for twenty-seven months. There, she, her fellow deportees, and millions of others were subjected to slave labor and nearly succumbed to typhus, dysentery, and hunger. She sustained herself by reciting Molière and resolved to someday write a book about herself and her fellow deportees, a stunning work called None of Us Will Return. After the camps, Delbo devoted her life to the art of writing and the duty of witnessing, fiercely advocating for the power of the arts to testify against despotism and tyranny.

Ghislaine Dunant's unforgettable biography of Delbo, La vie retrouvée (2016), captivated French readers and was awarded the Prix Femina. Now translated into English for the first time, Charlotte Delbo: A Life Reclaimed depicts Delbo's lifelong battles as a working-class woman, as a survivor, as a leftist who broke from the Communist Party, and most of all, as a writer whose words compelled others to see.
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The Complete Lives of Camp People
Colonialism, Fascism, Concentrated Modernity
Rudolf Mrázek
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Complete Lives of Camp People Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrázek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt, a Nazi “ghetto” for Jews near Prague, and the Dutch “isolation camp” Boven Digoel—which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants, archival accounts, ephemera, and media representations, Mrázek shows how modern life's most mundane tasks—buying clothes, getting haircuts, playing sports—continued on in the camps, which were themselves designed, built, and managed in accordance with modernity's tenets. In this way, Mrázek demonstrates that concentration camps are not exceptional spaces; they are the locus of modernity in its most distilled form.
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Dialogue with Death
The Journal of a Prisoner of the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War
Arthur Koestler
University of Chicago Press, 2011

In 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler, a German exile writing for a British newspaper, was arrested by Nationalist forces in Málaga. He was then sentenced to execution and spent every day awaiting death—only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government. Out of this experience, Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, his most acclaimed work in the United States, about a man arrested and executed in a Communist prison.

Dialogue with Death is Koestler’s riveting account of the fall of Málaga to rebel forces, his surreal arrest, and his three months facing death from a prison cell. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Koestler manages to convey the stress of uncertainty, fear, and deprivation of human contact with the keen eye of a reporter.

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Doctors' Plot of 1953
Yakov Rapoport
Harvard University Press, 1991

On January 13, 1953, the official press agency Tass announced the arrest of a group of "killer doctors" who were systematically doing away with prominent public figures in the Soviet Union. Nine doctors, six of them Jews, were cited, and in the next few weeks many more were carted off to the dread prisons of Lubyanka and Lefortovo. Among them was Yakov Lvovich Rapoport, a distinguished pathologist; this book is a firsthand memoir of his imprisonment, revealing not only the suffering caused by a fabricated "plot" but also the devastating climate of antisemitism and the appalling disarray of medicine and science in the Stalinist era.

Rapoport outlines the background of the infamous incident: arrests of prominent physicians had begun in 1952 and created hysteria throughout the country. Clinics were empty, patients refused professional medical advice, rumors abounded of poisoned medicines in pharmacies and murdered infants in maternity wards. Public opinion was primed to accept the Doctors' Plot, and to this day no one knows how many hundreds or thousands of doctors, prominent and ordinary, were victimized. Rapoport himself was arrested in early February, and he recalls in meticulous detail the psychological and physical pain he endured, all the while steadfastly denying that there was any conspiracy. He was saved from certain execution only by the death of Stalin.

The Doctors' Plot of 1953 is the gripping story of a brave man that gives a dismal picture of what life—especially for intellectuals and for Jews—was like in the Soviet Union under the paranoid Stalin. There is much information on the distortion of biology by Lysenko, the demagogic elevation of such charlatans as Olga Lepeshinskaya, the fictitious murder of Gorky and the quite likely murder of Frunze, and other mind-boggling examples of the surrealistic politics of Soviet science.

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Formations of Violence
The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
Allen Feldman
University of Chicago Press, 1991

"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist

"One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

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Fugitive Thought
Prison Movements, Race, And The Meaning Of Justice
Michael Hames-Garcia
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

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Govan Mbeki
Colin Bundy
Ohio University Press, 2012

Govan Mbeki (1910–2001) was a core leader of the African National Congress, the Communist Party, and the armed wing of the ANC during the struggle against apartheid. Known as a hard-liner, Mbeki was a prolific writer and combined in a rare way the attributes of intellectual and activist, political theorist and practitioner. Sentenced to life in prison in 1964 along with Nelson Mandela and others, he was sent to the notorious Robben Island prison, where he continued to write even as tension grew between himself, Mandela, and other leaders over the future of the national liberation movement. As one of the greatest leaders of the antiapartheid movement, and the father of Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008, the elder Mbeki holds a unique position in South African politics and history.

This biography by noted historian Colin Bundy goes beyond the narrative details of his long life: it analyzes his thinking, expressed in his writings over fifty years. Bundy helps establish what is distinctive about Mbeki: as African nationalist and as committed Marxist—and more than any other leader of the liberation movement—he sought to link theory and practice, ideas and action.

Drawing on exclusive interviews Bundy did with Mbeki, careful analysis of his writings, and the range of scholarship about his life, this biography is personal, reflective, thoroughly researched, and eminently readable.

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The Guantanamo Files
The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison
Andy Worthington
Pluto Press, 2007
In 2006, four years after Guantanamo Bay prison opened, the Pentagon finally released the names of the 773 men held there,along with 7,000 pages of transcripts from tribunals assessing their status as "enemy combatants". Andy Worthington is the only person to have analyzed every page of these transcripts.
Drawing on these documents,as well as news reports and interviews with lawyers and released detainees, this book reveals, for the first time, the stories of all those imprisoned in Guantanamo.
This book does not make for easy reading, Deprived of the safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, and, for the most part,sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the detainees have struggled for five years to have their stories heard. Looking in detail at the circumstances of their capture, and at the coercive interrogations and unsubstantiated allegations that have been used to justify their detention, The Guantanamo Files reveals that the majority of those captured were either Taliban foot soldiers or humanitarian aid workers, religious teachers and economic migrants,who were caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The book also uncovers stories of torture in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and contains new information about the process of "extraordinary rendition" that underpins the "war on terror"'.
Who will speak for the 773 men who have been held in Guantanamo? This passionate and brilliantly detailed book brings their stories to the world for the first time.
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I Write What I Like
Selected Writings
Steve Biko
University of Chicago Press, 2002
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." Like all of Steve Biko's writings, those words testify to the passion, courage, and keen insight that made him one of the most powerful figures in South Africa's struggle against apartheid. They also reflect his conviction that black people in South Africa could not be liberated until they united to break their chains of servitude, a key tenet of the Black Consciousness movement that he helped found.

I Write What I Like contains a selection of Biko's writings from 1969, when he became the president of the South African Students' Organization, to 1972, when he was prohibited from publishing. The collection also includes a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; an introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana, who were both involved with Biko in the Black Consciousness movement; a memoir of Biko by Father Aelred Stubbs, his longtime pastor and friend; and a new foreword by Professor Lewis Gordon.

Biko's writings will inspire and educate anyone concerned with issues of racism, postcolonialism, and black nationalism.

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Language, Resistance and Revival
Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland
Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh
Pluto Press, 2013

Language, Resistance and Revival tells the untold story of the truly groundbreaking linguistic and educational developments that took place among Republican prisoners in Long Kesh prison from 1972-2000.

During a period of bitter struggle between Republican prisoners and the British state, the Irish language was taught and spoken as a form of resistance during incarceration. The book unearths this story for the first time and analyses the rejuvenating impact it had on the cultural revival in the nationalist community beyond the prison walls.

Based on unprecedented interviews, Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh explores a key period in Irish history through the original and 'insider' accounts of key protagonists in the contemporary Irish language revival.

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Letters from Robben Island
A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada's Prison Correspondence, 1964-1989
Robert D. Vassen
Michigan State University Press, 1999

Late one night in July, 1963, a South African police unit surrounded the African National Congress headquarters in Rivonia and arrested a group of Movement leaders gathered inside. Eventually eight of them, including Nelson Mandela, who was already serving a sentence, Walter Sisulu, Dennis Goldberg, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Elias Motsoledi, Andrew Mangeni, and Ahmed Kathrada, were convicted of sabotage and, on June 12, 1964, sentenced to life in prison. Soon, these men became widely known as the "Rivonia Trialists." Despite their imprisonment, the Trialists played active roles in the struggle against South Africa's racist regime. Instead of being forgotten, as apartheid officials had hoped, they became enduring symbols in a struggle against injustice and racism. 
     Kathrada and his colleagues were classified as high security prisoners, segregated from others and closely watched. Every activity was regulated and monitored. Among the many indignities visited upon them, the prisoners were prohibited from keeping copies of incoming and outgoing correspondence. Kathrada, or "Kathy" as he is known, successfully hid both. 
     Letters From Robben Island contains a selection of 86 of the more than 900 pieces of correspondence Ahmed Kathrada wrote during his 26 years on Robben Island and at Pollsmoor Prison. Some were smuggled out by friends; others were written in code to hide meaning and content from prison censors. These are among his most poignant, touching, and eloquent communications. They are testimonies to Kathrada, his colleagues, and to their commitment to obtaining human dignity and freedom for all South Africans.

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A Mother's Cry
A Memoir of Politics, Prison, and Torture under the Brazilian Military Dictatorship
Lina Penna Sattamini
Duke University Press, 2010
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil’s dictatorship arrested, tortured, and interrogated many people it suspected of subversion; hundreds of those arrested were killed in prison. In May 1970, Marcos P. S. Arruda, a young political activist, was seized in São Paulo, imprisoned, and tortured. A Mother’s Cry is the harrowing story of Marcos’s incarceration and his family’s efforts to locate him and obtain his release. Marcos’s mother, Lina Penna Sattamini, was living in the United States and working for the U.S. State Department when her son was captured. After learning of his arrest, she and her family mobilized every resource and contact to discover where he was being held, and then they launched an equally intense effort to have him released. Marcos was freed from prison in 1971. Fearing that he would be arrested and tortured again, he left the country, beginning eight years of exile.

Lina Penna Sattamini describes her son’s tribulations through letters exchanged among family members, including Marcos, during the year that he was imprisoned. Her narrative is enhanced by Marcos’s account of his arrest, imprisonment, and torture. James N. Green’s introduction provides an overview of the political situation in Brazil, and Latin America more broadly, during that tumultuous era. In the 1990s, some Brazilians began to suggest that it would be best to forget the trauma of that era and move on. Lina Penna Sattamini wrote her memoir as a protest against historical amnesia. First published in Brazil in 2000, A Mother’s Cry is testimonial literature at its best. It conveys the experiences of a family united by love and determination during years of political repression.

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Preso sin Nombre, Celda sin Numero
Jacobo Timerman; Con textos de Arthur Miller y Ariel Dorfman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
A classic of world literature back in print in a Spanish-language edition.

Wisconsin edition is for sale only in North America.
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Prisoner of Pinochet
My Year in a Chilean Concentration Camp
Sergio Bitar
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
September 11, 1973: Chilean military forces under General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected government of President Salvador Allende, bombing the presidential palace with the president inside. Minister of Mining Sergio Bitar was forcibly detained along with other members of the Allende cabinet and confined on bleak, frigid Dawson Island in the Magellan Straits.

Prisoner of Pinochet is the gripping first-person chronicle of Bitar's year as a political prisoner before being expelled from Chile; a poignant narrative of men held captive together in a labor camp under harsh conditions, only able to guess at their eventual fate; and an insightful memoir of the momentous events of the early 1970s that led to seventeen years of bloody authoritarian rule in Chile. Available in English for the first time, this edition includes maps and photos from the 1970s and contextual notes by historian Peter Winn.
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Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number
Jacobo Timerman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
"At two in the morning of April 15, 1977, twenty armed men in civilian clothes arrested Jacobo Timerman, editor and publisher of a leading Buenos Aires newspaper. Thus began thirty months of imprisonment, torture, and anti-Semitic abuse. . . . Unlike 15,000 other Argentines, 'the disappeared,' Timerman was eventually released into exile. His testimony [is] gripping in its human stories, not only of brutality but of courage and love; important because it reminds us how, in our world, the most terrible fantasies may become fact."—New York Times, Books of the Century

"It ranks with Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in its examination of the totalitarian mind, the role of anti-Semitism, the silence."—Eliot Fremont-Smith, Village Voice

"It is impossible to read this proud and piercing account of [Timerman's] suffering and his battles without wanting to be counted as one of Timerman's friends."—Michael Walzer, New York Review of Books

"Timerman was a living reminder that real prophets are irritants and not messengers of reassurance. He told it like it is, whether in Argentina, Israel, Europe, or the United States."—Arthur Miller
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The Reappeared
Argentine Former Political Prisoners
Park, Rebekah
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Between 1976 and 1983, during a period of brutal military dictatorship, armed forces in Argentina abducted 30,000 citizens. These victims were tortured and killed, never to be seen again. Although the history of los desaparecidos, “the disappeared,” has become widely known, the stories of the Argentines who miraculously survived their imprisonment and torture are not well understood. The Reappeared is the first in-depth study of an officially sanctioned group of Argentine former political prisoners, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Córdoba, which organized in 2007. 


Using ethnographic methods, anthropologist Rebekah Park explains the experiences of these survivors of state terrorism and in the process raises challenging questions about how societies define victimhood, what should count as a human rights abuse, and what purpose memorial museums actually serve. The men and women who reappeared were often ostracized by those who thought they must have been collaborators to have survived imprisonment, but their actual stories are much more complex. Park explains why the political prisoners waited nearly three decades before forming their own organization and offers rare insights into what motivates them to recall their memories of solidarity and resistance during the dictatorial past, even as they suffer from the long-term effects of torture and imprisonment. 

The Reappeared challenges readers to rethink the judicial and legislative aftermath of genocide and forces them to consider how much reparation is actually needed to compensate for unimaginable—and lifelong—suffering. 
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Red Virgin
Memoirs Of Louise Michel
Louise Michel, edited and translated by Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Gunter
University of Alabama Press, 1981
Louise Michel was born illegitimate in 1830 and became a schoolmistress in Paris. She was involved in radical activities during the twilight of France’s Second Empire, and during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the siege of Paris. She was a leading member of the revolutionary groups controlling Montmarte. Michel emerged as one of the leaders of the insurrection during the Paris Commune of March-May 1871; and French anarchists saw her as martyr and saint – The Red Virgin. When the Versailles government crushed the Commune in May 1871, Michel was sentenced to exile in New Caledonia, until the general amnesty of 1880, when she returned to France and great popular acclaim and support from the working people of the country. Michel was arrested again during a demonstration in Paris in 1883 and sentenced to six years in prison. Pardoned after three years, she continued her speeches and writing, although she spent the greater part of her time from 1890 until her death in 1905 in England in self-imposed exile. It was during her prison term from 1883 to 1886 that she compiled her Memoires, now available in English.
            These memoirs offer readers a view of the non-Marxist left and give an in-depth look into the development of the revolutionary spirit. The early chapters treat her childhood, the development of her revolutionary feelings, and her training as a schoolteacher. The next section describes her activities as a schoolteacher in the Haute-Marne and Paris and therefore contains much of interest on education in 19th-century Europe. Her chapters on the siege of Paris, the Commune, and her first trial show those events from the point of view of a major participant. Of particular interest is a chapter on women’s rights, which Michel saw as part of the search for the rights of all people, male and female, and not as a separate struggle.
            The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel will be useful to both scholars and students of 19th-century French history and women’s studies.
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Shadow Lives
The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror
Victoria Brittain
Pluto Press, 2013

Shadow Lives reveals the unseen side of the '9/11 wars': their impact on the wives and families of men incarcerated in Guantanamo, or in prison or under house arrest in Britain and the US. Victoria Brittain shows how these families have been made socially invisible and a convenient scapegoat for the state in order to exercise arbitrary powers under the cover of the 'War on Terror'.

A disturbing exposé of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services’ unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments.

Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.

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The Soviet Gulag
Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison
Michael David-Fox
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous “literary investigation” The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. But modern research is developing a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag.  There is a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, many not isolated in far-off Siberia; prisoners often intermingled with local populations. The forced labor system was not completely distinct from the “free” labor of ordinary Soviet citizens, as convicts and non-prisoners often worked side-by-side. Nor was the Gulag unique when viewed in a global historical context.

Still, the scale and scope of the Soviet Gulag was unprecedented. Intrinsic to Stalinist modernization, the Gulag was tasked with the construction of massive public works, scientific and engineering projects, and such mundane work as road repairs. Along with the collectivization of agriculture, the Soviet economy (including its military exertions in World War II) was in large part dependent on compulsory labor. The camp system took on an outsized economic significance, and the vast numbers of people taken in by zealous secret police were meant to fulfill material, not just political, goals. While the Soviet system lacked the explicitly dedicated extermination camps of its Nazi counterpart, it did systematically extract work from inmates to the verge of death then cynically “released” them to reduce officially reported mortality rates.

In an original turn, the book offers a detailed consideration of the Gulag in the context of the similar camps and systems of internment. Chapters are devoted to the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century British concentration camps in Africa and India, the Tsarist-era system of exile in Siberia, Chinese and North Korean reeducation camps, the post-Soviet penal system in the Russian Federation, and of course the infamous camp system of Nazi Germany. This not only reveals the close relatives, antecedents, and descendants of the Soviet Gulag—it shines a light on a frighteningly widespread feature of late modernity.

Overall, The Soviet Gulag offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact parts of the same entity.
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Stalin's Romeo Spy
The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative
Emil Draitser
Northwestern University Press, 2010
Sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov (1901–75) led a life that might seem far-fetched for a spy novel, yet here the truth is stranger than fiction. The result of a thirty-five-year journey that started with a private meeting between the author and Bystrolyotov in 1973 Moscow and continued through the author’s subsequent research in international archives, Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative pieces together a life lived in the shadows of the twentieth century’s biggest events. One of the “Great Illegals,” a team of outstanding Soviet spies operating in Western countries between the world wars, Bystrolyotov was mthe response to Sidney Reilly, the British prototype for James Bond. A dashing man, his modus operandi was the seduction of women—among them a French embassy employee, a German countess, the wife of a British official, and a Gestapo officer—which enabled Stalin to look into diplomatic pouches of many European countries. Risking his life, Bystrolyotov also stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. A man of extraordinary physical courage, he twice crossed the Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo. But his success as a spy didn’t save him from Stalin’s purges, at the height of which he was arrested and tortured until he falsely confessed to selling out to the enemy. Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag, Bystrolyotov risked more severe punishment by documenting the regime’s crimes against humanity in unpublished and suppressed memoirs that rival those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The first full-length biography in any language, at once a real-life spy thriller, a drama of desire, and a prison memoir, Stalin’s Romeo Spy is the true account of a flawed yet extraordinary man.
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Surviving Mexico's Dirty War
A Political Prisoner's Memoir
Alberto Ulloa Bornemann, edited by Arthur Schmidt and Aurora Camacho de Schmidt
Temple University Press, 2007
This is the first major, book-length memoir of a political prisoner from Mexico's "dirty war" of the 1970s. Written with the urgency of a first-person narrative, it is a unique work, providing an inside story of guerrilla activities and a gripping tale of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Mexican government. Alberto Ulloa Bornemann was a young idealist when he dedicated himself to clandestine resistance and to assisting Lucio Cabañas, the guerrilla leader of the "Party of the Poor." Here the author exposes readers to the day-to-day activities of revolutionary activists seeking to avoid discovery by government forces. After his capture, Ulloa Bornemann endured disappearance into a secret military jail and later abusive conditions in three civilian prisons. Although testimonios of former political prisoners from other Latin American nations have recently come into print, there are very few books about Mexico's political wars—and none as vivid and disturbing as this.
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Talk of Darkness
By Fatna El Bouih
University of Texas Press, 2008

Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader with connections to the Marxist movement. Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master's degree.

Beginning with the harrowing account of her kidnapping during the heightened political tension of the 1970s, Talk of Darkness tells the true story of one woman's struggle to secure political prisoners' rights and defend herself against an unjust imprisonment.

Poetically rendered from Arabic into English by Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics, Fatna El Bouih's memoir exposes the techniques of state-instigated "disappearance" in Morocco and condemns the lack of laws to protect prisoners' basic human rights.

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Tell Mother I'm in Paradise
Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador
Ana Margarita Gasteazoro, edited by Judy Blankenship and Andrew Wilson
University of Alabama Press, 2022
The life and times of Ana Margarita Gasteazoro: political activist, clandestine operative, and prisoner of conscience
 
Ana Margarita Gasteazoro (1950–1993) was a Salvadoran opposition activist and renowned Amnesty International prisoner of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise:Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in El Salvador recounts her extraordinary life story. From a privileged Catholic upbringing, with time spent studying and working abroad, Ana Margarita first became a member of the legal political opposition in the late 1970s and later a clandestine operative at work against the brutal military junta.

Gasteazoro recounts her early rebellion against the strictures of conservative upper-class Salvadoran society. She spoke perfect English and discovered a talent for organizing in administrative jobs abroad and at home. As the civil war progressed, she quickly became a valued figure in the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), a social democratic party, often representing it at international meetings. Against the backdrop of massive social oppression and the “disappearances” of thousands of opposition members, Gasteazoro began a double life as an operative in a faction of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Multitalented and energetic, she organized safe houses for fellow activists, transported weapons and equipment, wrote scripts for an underground radio station, and produced an award-winning documentary film. But the toll on her family life and personal relationships was heavy.

Ana Margarita was disappeared in May 1981 by the infamous National Guard and endured a nightmare 11 days of interrogations, beatings, and abuse. Through international pressure and the connections of her family, her arrest was finally made public, and she was transferred to the women’s prison at Ilopango. There, she and other activists continued the political struggle through the Committee of Political Prisoners of El Salvador (COPPES). During her two years in prison, tested by hunger strikes, violence, and factional divisions, she became one of Amnesty International’s best-known prisoners of conscience. Tell Mother I’m in Paradise is a gripping story of a self-aware activist and a vital young woman’s struggle to find her own way within a deeply conservative society.
 
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Threat
Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel
Edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar
Pluto Press, 2011

Palestinian prisoners charged with security-related offences are immediately taken as a threat to Israel's security. They are seen as potential, if not actual, suicide bombers. This stereotype ignores the political nature of the Palestinian prisoners' actions and their desire for liberty.

By highlighting the various images of Palestinian prisoners in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Abeer Baker and Anat Matar chart their changing fortunes. Essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyse the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners. These contributions deal with the prisoners' status within Palestinian society, the conditions of their imprisonment and various legal procedures used by the Israeli military courts in order to criminalise and de-politicise them. Also addressed are Israel's breaches of international treaties in its treatment of the Palestinian prisoners, practices of torture and solitary confinement, exchange deals and prospects for release.

This is a unique intervention within Middle East studies that will inspire those working in human rights, international law and the peace process.

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Tomorrow Will Be Better
Surviving Nazi Germany
Walter Meyer with the assistance of Matt Valentine
University of Missouri Press, 1999

How does a young German who has been a member of the Hitler Youth and has competed in Nazi-organized athletic competitions become, over the span of two years, an eighty-pound, tuberculosis-stricken concentration camp escapee?

In this larger-than-life memoir, Walter Meyer leads readers from one harrowing moment to the next as he recounts his experiences during and after Hitler's reign. As a teenager, Meyer refused to conform to institutional rules. While serving in the Hitler Youth, he rebelled by joining a subversive group that focused its efforts on pranks against the youth organization. During World War II, Meyer was arrested, interrogated, and beaten for stealing shoes, but he received a sentence of one to four years, as opposed to the standard penalty for looting—death.

The sixteen-year-old Meyer's refusal to conform to prison regulations and his foiled escape attempts resulted in solitary confinement on several occasions. His fiery spirit eventually landed him in a Nazi work camp. Unbeknownst to his family, Meyer became a concentration camp prisoner. Transported to Ravensbrueck, he was forced to work under grueling conditions in a quarry. He struggled to reach his daily work quota so he could dine on watery broth and bits of bread. In these subhuman conditions, Meyer developed tuberculosis. Knowing he would soon die in the camp, he again plotted his escape. This time he succeeded.

Upon returning home to Duesseldorf, Meyer despaired at the destruction of his hometown. He lamented the pallor that had spread throughout the town and the country itself. After recovering his health, he regained his youthful lust for adventure. His postwar travels began with his infiltration of the Russian-occupied zone of Germany to retrieve his family's possessions. Meyer then began a whirlwind odyssey, ducking into train cars and stowing away on ships, occasionally landing in jail for traveling without a passport—from France to Spain, Belgium to Holland, and finally to South America--in pursuit of something other than the aftermath of war.

Meyer's memoir gives insight into the climate in Germany during World War II and in the defeated nation after the war. His experience as a non-Jewish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps provides an enlightening and varied perspective to the Holocaust dialogue.

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The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
Stanislav Aseyev
Harvard University Press, 2022

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation). Aseyev also reflects on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the world to share his story.

Since February 2022, numerous cases of illegal detainment and extreme mistreatment have been reported in the Ukrainian towns and villages occupied by Russian forces during the full-scale invasion. These and other war crimes committed by Russian troops speak to the horrors wreaked upon Ukrainians forced to live in Russian-occupied zones. It is important to remember, however, that the torture and killing of Ukrainians by Russian security and military forces began long before 2022. Rendered deftly into English, Aseyev’s compelling account offers a critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

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The Torture Doctors
Human Rights Crimes and the Road to Justice
Georgetown University Press

Torture doctors invent and oversee techniques to inflict pain and suffering without leaving scars. Their knowledge of the body and its breaking points and their credible authority over death certificates and medical records make them powerful and elusive perpetrators of the crime of torture. In The Torture Doctors, Steven H. Miles fearlessly explores who these physicians are, what they do, how they escape justice, and what can be done to hold them accountable.

At least one hundred countries employ torture doctors, including both dictatorships and democracies. While torture doctors mostly act with impunity—protected by governments, medical associations, and licensing boards—Miles shows that a movement has begun to hold these doctors accountable and to return them to their proper role as promoters of health and human rights. Miles’s groundbreaking portrayal exposes the thinking and psychology of these doctors, and his investigation points to how the international human rights community and the medical community can come together to end these atrocities.

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Voices from the Gulag
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Northwestern University Press, 2010

After the publication in 1962 of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn began receiving, and would continue to receive throughout his life, testimonies from fellow survivors of the gulag. Originally selected by Solzhenitsyn, the memoirs in this volume are an important addition to the literature of the Soviet gulag. Written by men from a wide variety of occupations and social classes, the writing in Voices from the Gulag lends a voice to the many ordinary people—including a circus performer, a teenage boy, and a Red Army soldier—whom a brutal system attempted to erase from memory.

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