This thesis is a microhistorical investigation of the dynamics of control and resistance in Pollsmoor Prison and Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital’s Maximum Security section from 1964 to 1994 in South Africa. It examines the evolution of daily life inside these institutions, both situated in the Western Cape, and the extent to which these institutions were part of the security apparatus developed by the apartheid state. The permeability of Pollsmoor and Valkenberg shed light on the connections between repression, resistance, collaboration and survival inside and outside closed institutions. The division of incarcerated populations according to race, gender, age and behaviour reflected wider logics of governance of the South African society. Similarly, the modalities of resistance and collaboration adopted by ‘political’, ‘common law’ and ‘insane’ prisoners on the inside echoed the processes of popular mobilisation on the outside. The construction of a ‘healthy nation’ through the production and control of deviances was hence far from being a smooth process. The thesis is divided into three parts, each composed of three chapters. The first part analyses the way a system of law and order, based on delineation, the bestowal of privileges and violent repression, was imposed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals’ Maximum Security sections and how this evolved according to the changing social and political imperatives of the apartheid state. The second part shifts the gaze to the level of the courts, where psychiatric and criminological discourses became increasingly entangled throughout the period. The operating modalities of the judicial system reflected the fears and expectatives of the white minority, while providing a racialised image of black populations as both dangerous and childlike. Finally, the third part analyses the links between outside and inside resistances and adaptations to the regime of apartheid. It focuses on the 1994 prison revolts as prisms to understand the processes of subjectivation and politicisation which had emerged in closed institutions during apartheid.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:604492 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Filippi, N. F. |
| Contributors | Deutsch, J.-G. D. |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:730c12b2-2e52-4290-b5f9-5a5e557f8b45 |
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