A Prison by any Other Name: Incarceration in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth- Century Audiencia de Quito. 公开
Czeblakow, Agnieszka (2011)
Published
Abstract
Until recently, scholars have characterized pre-modern or colonial modes of penal justice as exemplary, violent, cruel, public and uncivilized, while portraying its modern counterparts as humane, benevolent, and civilized. This dissertation attempts to unsettle the commonly accepted dichotomy between pre-modern and modern practices of criminal justice, and challenges the assumptions about the beginnings of prisons and related institutions of confinement and their development in Latin America. By examining the myriad of confinement systems and practices in the Audiencia of Quito, such as obrajes, custodial jails, banishment and transportation as well as torture from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, the dissertation demonstrates that early modern incarceration was not only prominent feature in colonial penal systems, but it coexisted alongside physical punishment and the scaffold for a long period of time.
Intertwined throughout the project are questions of modernity, civilization, and their less triumphant sibling, colonialism. The dissertation shows how modernity was not an essentially and exclusively Western European phenomenon. Colonial prisons in Latin America provided an outlet for the articulation of cultural, racial, economic and ideological mythology of domination engendered by Europe's earliest foray into colonialism--the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of America. Finally, analyzing colonialism from the perspective of its corrective institutions and their inmates also provides an opportunity to understand how the colonial state managed to maintain its power, to legitimate and to define its authority. The co-existence of penal bondage with corporeal and capital punishment suggests that the use of force and fear were not the only tools available to colonial state-makers. Rather, colonial political power and state formation depended on a number of forces, coming together in pursuit of shared mission for social order and public security. A network of local office holders, state bureaucrats, and private individuals and entrepreneurs who created, mediated and enforced rules, policies and practices of the state became central to the successful formation and operation of an increasingly active and intrusive state apparatus.
Table of Contents
Introduction...1
Chapter One: Colonial architecture of confinement...34
Chapter Two: "Es un cementerio de vivos": Internal Life in the Quiteño Prisons...66
Chapter Three: "O for a voice to speak! -- oh, horror! -- oh, any horror but this!:" The Practice of Torture in Colonial Quito...97
Chapter Four: "Sin Tener Otra Vida que de la Carzel a el Obraje y del Obraje a la Carzel [sic]": Colonial Textile Mills as punishment...132
Chapter Five: The Missing Link: Convict Transportation and the Specter of Modernity...181
Epilogue...218
Bibliography...232
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