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METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20140912T112014Z
DTSTART:20140922T150000Z
DTEND:20140922T170000Z
SUMMARY:Torture and laughter: Political incarceration and the art of perf
 orming happiness in an urban Indian prison
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 q-8lfx8n
DESCRIPTION:This paper explores the politics of prison art through oral t
 estimonies of former female cadres of a Maoist-Naxal uprising in 1970s I
 ndia. It specifically focuses on guerrilla women who were captured\, inc
 arcerated and pitilessly beaten by prison officials in the women's corre
 ctional facility under the surveillance of the Alipore Central Jail in C
 alcutta\, a city in eastern India. My ethnography attempts to reconstruc
 t a volatile urban past through re-memorising the experiences of politic
 al detainees\, and employs women’s voices to revive indigenous and infor
 mal notions of justice and resistance (at a time when ‘humanitarianism’ 
 and ‘civil rights’ were abstract ideals in Indian political practices). 
 My research shows how prisoners organised crude musical performances\, p
 layed 'happy families' and enacted spontaneous puppet shows in the face 
 of torture and anguish\, primarily to challenge their brutal encounters 
 with various disciplinary orbits of the post-colonial penitentiary. I ar
 gue that these performances\, coordinated by both convict and guerrilla 
 women\, exhibited an affective and resilient political aesthetic\, which
  in turn contested repressive cultures of confinement at a critical stag
 e in the political history of the region. Taking a small step away from 
 penological research on the management of political imprisonment\, the p
 aper attempts to highlight how punitive and silencing state practices (S
 carry 1985) and the governance of social enclosures (Deleuze 1992) can b
 e defied by creative cultural imagination. Thus my analysis eventually c
 ontributes towards an anthropology of human herding. It narrativises a p
 eculiar relationship between art and survival within a non-western deten
 tion system which enacted routine violence on the bodies of the 'dangero
 us others'\, and yet these spaces of regimentation continue to remain ca
 mouflaged by their intangible location in the wider public imagination.
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:2.016/2.017\, Arthur Lewis Building\, Manchester
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