The Bastille Effect

Front matter

C essea |] l

THE BASTILL

W POC Gee"

PART FIVE. PERFORMING MEMORY 11. Consecrate and Desecrate References Index

197 215

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

. “ESMA: Former Detention Space” On the top floors of the Casino at ESMA, the former detention space seems especially connected to its profane past. © retrowelch 2022 7

. “Memorial to Gerald McAuley’ In a Catholic community in Belfast, a memorial to Gerald McAuley, a victim of the Troubles, is open to the public. © retrowelch 2022 8

. “The Bastille, a model by Palloy” An original model (1790) of the Bastille made by Palloy with stone recovered from its ruins is on display at the Museum of the National Archives (Hótel de Soubise) in Paris. Maquette de la Bastille réalisée á partir d'une pierre de la forteresse par Palloy’, 1790, Archives nationales, AE VI a 79. O retrowelch 2022 17

. “Angela Davis Poster in Paris.” A vintage poster of Angela Davis decorates a café in Paris. The caption borrows from a quote in Davis’s autobiography: “Walls turned sideways are bridges” (2016a: 347). © retrowelch 2022 23

. “The Stonebreakers' Yard” At the Kilmainham Gaol (the “Bastille of Ireland”) in Dublin, a cross planted in the ground marks the spot where each Irish rebel was executed. The double doors, to the right, were opened to allow an ambulance to enter. The vehicle was transporting James Connolly, who was injured in the Rising. Unable to stand, he was shot while seated in a chair. © retrowelch 2022 35 . “Peace Walls in Belfast.” Barriers separating the Loyalist/Unionist communities from their Republican/Nationalist counterparts stretch for miles with restricted access. © retrowelch 2022 39

X

12,

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“ESMA” In Buenos Aries, ESMA was a major site for detention, torture, and extermination. Pictured is the Casino, where faces of the disappeared are arranged on the facade. © retrowelch 2022 50

“National Stadium.” The National Stadium in Santiago held thousands of detainees in the early phase of the Pinochet dictatorship. © retrowelch

2022 54

“Bathtub? In Asunción, the bathtub (pileta) used for waterboarding is on display at a former detention site currently open to the public as the Museo de las Memorias. © retrowelch 2022 56

“Shopping Mall” In Montevideo, the former prison Punta Carretas has been transformed into an upscale shopping mall. © retrowelch 2022 59 “Pied-du-Courant” In Montreal, the former prison, Pied-du-Courant, has been transformed into an exhibition space named La Prison-des-Patriotes. © retrowelch 2022 69

“La Casa Cañas” At Casa de José Domingo Cañas (Santiago, Chile), a mural featuring a vulture with a US flag is captioned: “La paz era una Paloma y alrededor los buitres oveja negra” (Peace was a dove and around the black sheep vultures). O retrowelch 2022 77

“The French Nuns.” Upon their detention at ESMA, Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet were photographed. Their images along with a concocted story about their involvement in a paramilitary group, Montoneros, was released to the press. © retrowelch 2022 91

“Plaza Padre Juan Alsina at Puente Bulnes” In Santiago, Plaza Padre Juan Alsina at Puente Bulnes preserves the memory of the victims of state violence with murals that include the famous words of Father Alsina.

© retrowelch 2022 94

“Hubert’s painting of the demolition of the Bastille” A popular postcard in Paris celebrates the painting of the Bastille by Robert Hubert. © retrowelch 2022 102

“The Atrium of Kilmainham.” At Kilmainham prison in Dublin, visitors are invited to explore the Victorian architecture. © retrowelch 2022 105 “Abduction.” A poster at memorial sites in Buenos Aires features a famous photograph (by Pablo Lasansky) capturing a moment of abduction.

O retrowelch 2022 122

“British Army” A poster archived at the Irish Republican History Museum combines themes of brutality and political imprisonment. O retrowelch 2022 131

“The Basement.” At ESMA (Buenos Aires), the basement, known as

“Sector 4, served as a torture chamber. © retrowelch 2022 140

“This Brit” At the Irish Republican History Museum (Belfast), a poster from the period of the Troubles is a reminder of how much suspicion pervaded certain communities. © retrowelch 2022 148

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi

“Exterminated Like Mice” In Santiago, on September 11, 2017,

protesters gathered in front La Moneda, where they dressed as mice

and held newspapers with the headline “Exterminados Como Ratones” (“Exterminated Like Mice”) in reference to Operation Colombo.

O retrowelch 2022 161

“The Selk'nam” On a street in Valparaiso, an artist tells the story of the Selknam people who were subjected to genocide by European settlers in the 19th century. © retrowelch 2022 163

“Sculpture of Pablo.’ At the Memorial Park in Buenos Aires, Claudia Fontes installed her work “Reconstruction of the Portrait of Pablo Miguez” just off the waterfront. © retrowelch 2022 177

“Soledad and Swastikas.” On display at the Museo de la Memoria in Montevideo is a photograph appearing in a newspaper article on the attack of Soledad Barrett Viedma, whose legs were disfigured with swastikas.

O retrowelch 2022 181

“Liberty Leading the People.” An Irish political poster borrows from a classical French masterpiece by Eugene Delacroix titled “Liberty Leading the People” that romanticizes the July Revolution of 1830. © retrowelch 2022 189

Preface

This book on the transformation of sites of political imprisonment has many beginnings. In 2014, I spent research time in Dublin and Belfast exploring the remnants of past conflicts as projected through various prison museums, historical collections, and memorial sites. Along the way, my observations deepened an appreciation for cultural sociology. The following year, that beginning got another start at a scholarly workshop sponsored by the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. It was then and there that my reflections on a “Troubled” Ireland began to take shape, prompting me to begin a new way of thinking and writing. For that opportunity I am grateful to Phil Smith, Jeffery Alexander, and the room full of enthusiastic graduate students who peppered my presentation with sharp and witty insights.

This book is the product of not just one but two sabbaticals supported by Rutgers University. At the London School of Economics, Department of Social Policy, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, Tim Newburn and David Lewis provided me with a productive academic home. Also at the LSE, Conor Gearty and Sean Boyle contributed another layer of collegiality. In Belfast, Kieran McEvoy, Shadd Maruna (Queens University), and Laura McAtackney (Aarhus University, Denmark) offered friendly research guidance.

Marking another beginning, the next sabbatical was based in the Facultad de Derecho, Instituto de Investigaciones, Juridicas y Sociales Ambrosio L. Gioja, Universidad de Buenos Aires. I extend enormous gratitude to Gabriel Ignacio Anitua, Diego Zysman, Leonardo Pitlevnik, and Bruno Napoli as well as Maximo Sozzo (Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina). Also in Buenos Aires, Maria [Maru] Mendizabal granted me special access to Ex Centro Clandestino de Detencion, Tortura y Extermino: “Olimpo” In Chile, several colleagues and friends opened their doors for vibrant xiv PREFACE intellectual discussion, most notably Silvio Cuneo, Nicole Selame, and Marcela Aedo Rivera at Universidad de Valparaiso, Escuela de Derecho, Centro de Investigaciones de Filosofía del Derecho y Derecho Penal, Núcleo de Estudios Penitenciarios. At the Facultad de Ciencas, Juridicas y Politicas, Universidad Arturo Prat (Iquique, Chile), Roberto Dufraix, Daniel Quinteros, Romina Ramos Rodriquez, and José A. Brandariz coordinated exciting seminars and social events.

At Rutgers, my Canadian tutor Chelsea Rolin assisted the French translation of my work in Montreal. Not without some amusement, students in my classes patiently allowed me to test-drive some of my thoughts for the book. Correspondingly, segments of the project appeared in print in the following articles: Michael Welch (2020), “In the Sites of Operation Condor: Memory and Afterlives of Clandestine Detention Centers,” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order, 47(1-2), 1-38; Michael Welch (2019), “Signs of Trouble: Semiotics, Streetscapes, and the Republican Struggle in the North of Ireland” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 16(1), 7-32; and Michael Welch (2016), “Political Imprisonment and the Sanctity of Death: Performing Heritage in “Troubled’ Ireland,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 22, 664-678. In its final incarnation, this volume has benefited from the careful oversight of the good folks at the University of California Press, namely Maura Roessner, Madison Wetzell, Julie Van Pelt, and Matthew Kudelka, who sharpened the work with fine copy editing. The University of California Faculty Committee, in turn, provided excellent recommendations for revision. Of course, three cheers to the anonymous reviewers who suggested new directions and inroads into theory and interpretation.

My long-term friend and colleague, Lennox Hinds, continues to be a source of inspiration dating back to 1993 when I entered the faculty of the Administration of Justice at Rutgers. In 2016, Lennox retired, but not without a final show of force. Along with Edward Ramsamy (who has taught me and my students about life under South African apartheid), Lennox joined Angela Davis on stage for a riveting lecture on “Justice in Action” Thomas Sokolowski, Director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (at Rutgers) began planning the exhibition Angela Davis—Seize the Time. The retrospective is a tribute to Angela as a political activist and central figure in the campaign to “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.” Sadly, the Rutgers community, in 2020, was informed that had Tom passed away. In a small way, may this book serve the memory of Tom, as well as my colleague Patrick Carr (a fine Dubliner), Timothy Sean McSorley (a fellow troublemaker), and my kid sister Margaret (a fearless ginger), all of whom died within weeks of one another that same fateful year.

On the upbeat, for keeping my life in harmony, thanks a bunch to AB, PP, SH, MC, and WD.

MW Hoboken July 14, 2021

PART ONE The Sacred and the Profane

Renowned scholar Jacques Godechot is, indeed, correct in stating that by the end of the 18th century, the Bastille had emerged as more than just a prison. The infamous site had become a reminder of a feudal system that had grown increasingly obsolete, given its arbitrary power. The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, is regarded as decisive event in the French Revolution even though it was less a strategic loss for the monarchy than an emblematic victory for the people. “July 14 thus marks the culmination of two great currents, the uprising of the people of Paris, which was one aspect of the great national uprising that had been underway for several months, and the defection of the troops, another aspect of the same national insurrection. The capture of the Bastille served as a marvelous symbol, for France and the world, of the triumph of this insurrection” (Godechot, 1970: 249).

The afterlives of the Bastille set the stage for this study of former prisons and detention centers that have been reconfigured into symbolic sites so as to emit narratives on social upheaval and repressive control. In the pages that follow, those transformations are explored in post-conflict cities in diverse countries where memorialization relies on the power of place to reflect on the injustice of political imprisonment. With cultural sociology at our disposal, this book unveils the enduring dynamics that animate these varied places of confinement. At a universal level, remnants of political imprisonment reveal the ubiquity of socio-religious forces, most notably the sacred vis-a-vis the profane. Those potent social themes are deeply embedded in forms of identity and heritage at the local level—whether it be Belfast amid the Troubles or Buenos Aires during the last dictatorship. This opening chapter invites us to consider those developments by taking into account the significance of cultural afterlives. Notions of place will guide our understanding of what we shall refer to as the Bastille Effect whereby former carceral institutions undergo a dual transformation. Those sites shed their violent past while opening themselves for public scrutiny and thoughtful re-examination of state crimes that occurred on those same premises. Transformed sites activate a collective imagination in ways that cast a powerful light on human rights and the contemporary struggle for democratic equality.

THE BASTILLE AND ITS AFTERLIVES

To chronicle the afterlives of the Bastille, sociologist Philip Smith (1999) delves into how the cultural meaning of place has changed over the course of history. The Bastille was a fortress prison where the monarchy had long disposed of political opponents and other nuisances. Durkheim would have considered the Bastille a profane symbol, or as Smith puts it, “a polluted place” (1999: 23). The Revolution with its patriotic heroes and blood sacrifice altered not only the nation but also the Bastille itself, allowing myth to transform it from a profane to a sacred place. Decades later, however, the site fell into neglect as its moats filled with stagnant water and patches of wild grass. That particular afterlife lost its capacity to evoke the sacred; the Bastille had become an ill-defined and desolate place (Lemoine, 1930).

Enter Napoleon, who was determined to reverse the Bastille’s symbolic dysfunction. To commemorate his military adventures in the Orient, in 1806 he ordered that a giant fountain in the shape of an elephant be built on the site. Architects and other cultural advisers failed utterly to convince him that an elephant was not a fitting—let alone elegant—image for the tribute. “Project Elephant” moved forward, but instead of a fountain it would be a wooden and plaster model standing 24 meters tall. From 1817 to 1847, that behemoth occupied the place de la Bastille, where it decayed physically and aesthetically. “In 1847, the sad history of the elephant came to an appropriate end. It was finally thrown into the canal/sewer on the order of Prefect Rumbuteau. Crowds watched as rats escaped from the sinking monument” (Smith, 1999: 28).

Political campaigns aimed at scouring the site of its pollution and restoring its sacredness now gained considerable traction. In 1830, lawmakers approved a plan to erect the Colonne de Juillet. This memorial would be dedicated to the patriots who had sacrificed themselves on July 14 (1789) as well as to those who had perished during the “Three Glorious Days” in July 1830. The 50-meter column in center of the place de la Bastille rises from a tomb in which the remains of 504 fighters are buried. Their names engraved on the foundation make a clear cultural statement about its appropriateness as a sacred place. “The monument is both a shrine to fallen heroes and a demonstration that liberty rises from the sacrifices of the fallen. . . . It is a monument whose aesthetic resonates past against present, drawing intertextually upon the narrative of the Bastille, tuning into, configuring and amplifying the popular mythologies of the site” (Smith, 1999: 29). The sculpture is topped by the Genie de la Bastille (or Genie de la Liberté), who hoists a torch in one hand and a broken chain in the other. Hence, the site of a former prison now embodies the revolutionary spirit. Themes of ascent are evident: the memorial now serves as an expression of the sovereignty of the people and a rallying point for revolutionary activity. In 1848, the bodies of 52 protesters shot by the military were arranged around the column to the cries of “Vengence! Aux barricades.” The solemn procession was capped by an act of profane purification: the throne of Louis-Phillipe was torched. Rituals of revolution again were ignited at the place de la Bastille in 1871 when the Communards erected their own barricades there (Sewell, 1996). To appreciate the importance of cultural afterlives, we turn to a sociology of place.

PLACE, SPACE, AND GHOSTS

Smith (1999) recognizes that the iconography—or representation—of space has caught the interest of scholars from an array of perspectives: cultural, postmodern, and ideological. Taking a decidedly Durkheimian stance, Smith insists that place is formed by myths and narratives that become institutionalized through monuments, the mass media, and various other routines. Such rituals, however, hold differing meanings for different observers. As we will discuss in greater depth, the Troubles in Northern Ireland illustrate that “divergent typifications can lead violent and symbolic struggles over the meaning of places” (Smith, 1999: 16; Welch, 2019). As a way forward, Smith offers a template for discerning how identities of place are transformed and preserved through action. Accordingly, place identity is constructed in four basic domains: the sacred, the profane, the liminal, and the mundane.

The sacred lends purity to special places, enabling close contact with the transcendental and producing emotional reactions such as awe and reverence. Its opposite, the profane, contains pollution and evil so that the psychic register migrates toward revulsion. Everyday places are best understood as mundane; in these, ordinary behavior goes on without much reflection. As a departure from the mundane, liminal places thrive in suspending everyday rules and traditional moralities. In such places, narratives of the quasi-ritualized carnivalesque add cultural energy to the out-of-the-ordinary. “They are often comedic in character, offering a ludic conception of place, or else ‘absurd’ in the sense that they are fragmented and defy any easy classification or ontological grounding except that they are “other” to the everyday” (Smith, 1999: 20). This fourfold framework is not static since places have the dynamic capacity to morph into other types depending on a mobilizing action or event. Once that rupture occurs, a new place identity is reinforced by rituals and monuments that serve as cultural markers, in this way institutionalizing the narratives of place (see Bell, 1997; Sewell, 1996).

It is easy to use the terms space and place interchangeably. Nonetheless, there are some distinctions to make, as Michael Mayerfeld Bell suggests: “Space refers to the three-dimensional coordinates of things. A place is a particular space that has meaning” (1997: 833). Bell is quick to caution that such distinctions ought not to be reified because, like many categories, they tend to dissolve at the margins. Therefore, according to Bell, “when I speak of place I am emphasizing issues of meaning more than I would be if I were speaking about space” (1997: 833; see also Agnew and Duncan, 1989). For Bell, place is rife with meaning. More to his point, places are occupied not only by objects, images, and people but also by ghosts. Without resorting to superstition, ghosts can be defined as imaginary entities that inhabit places. They cannot be seen yet their presence is felt. For example, a somewhat mystical experience occurs when we revisit an old “haunt” of our youth: ghosts emerge as memories of people who are no longer around. That moment is likely to deliver an emotional charge, be it positive or negative. With respect to historical sites, ghosts contribute to the specificity of places. “Places are, in a word, personed—even when there is no one there” (Bell, 1997: 813; see also Mayerfield and Murray, 2001).

Ghosts are ubiquitous in places in ways that give them life, Bell insists, making space a place. The Bastille, even after its demolition, remained haunted by the ghosts of its many colorful prisoners, including de Sade, Voltaire, and the “Man in the Iron Mask” (BnF, 2010). Visitors to the place de la Bastille activate the social relations of memory by imagining the physical site as it might have appeared during its tenure as a prison. Many observers are keenly aware that the boulevards surrounding the Colonne de Juillet are paved with the Bastilles original stones, and this enables them to connect with history. As Bell further notes, “the ghosts of place are not only ghosts of the past; they can as well be of the present, and even the future” (1997: 816). With profound sadness and sacredness, many of these places become memorials to those who were sacrificed in a place that had been profoundly profane. As a place, ESMA in Buenos Aires was transformed from a rather mundane institution for training naval cadets into a profane place of state terror where victims were detained, tortured, and exterminated. The compound retains the ghosts of its polluted past while forging ahead as a sacred place of memory. The top floors of the site seem especially haunted. In some areas, placards and storyboards steer visitors through spaces where detainees were confined; other areas are devoid of any narration. Empty sectors of a larger place are more likely to be “personed”—or seemingly inhabited by ghosts and spirits (see figure 1). Bell reminds us that we experience places as having ghosts because those sites are engaged socially. Simply put, we experience places as we do people. “Through ghosts, we re-encounter the aura of social life in the aura of place” (1997: 821).

A sociology of place, space, and ghosts extends beyond sites to encompass entire communities. In his ethnography of Belfast during the Troubles, Feldman encountered the saturation of death, or what he calls “symbolic genocide,” the “erasure of ethnicity and ethnic spaces,’ and “the cartography of death events—

FIGURE 1. “ESMA: Former Detention Space.” On the top floors of the Casino at ESMA, the former detention space seems especially connected to its profane past. © retrowelch 2022.

the spaces of the dead” (1991: 65). Below, that sense of collective defilement is accumulated into an Irish death-warning tale, followed by a ghost story:

The night before Francie Legget got dead, a girl from this area was coming from her friend’s house. . . . She seen a banshee sitting on the wall... . [I]t was a wee small withered woman crying with tears and mourning. . . . [T]he following Friday morning Francie Leggett was shot dead on the spot.

Oe

AGAIN]

YO

NEVER

Gerald Mc Auley

FIGURE 2. “Memorial to Gerald McAuley” In a Catholic community in Belfast, a memorial to Gerald McAuley, a victim of the Troubles, is open to the public. O retrowelch 2022.

There have been so many horrendous deaths in this district over the years that there has to be ghosts. (Catholic housewife, St. James district; Feldman, 1991: 66)

Feldman writes that the presence of ghosts in such communities is attributed to the sheer magnitude and randomness of death within a limited space and time. “In folk explanation, ghosts are the inevitable excess of the defilement which emerges from the flooding of social space with death” (1991: 67). The banshee and the ghost become free-floating signifiers within a liminal place where the conventional order of time and space no longer governs. Places of death often spawn places of resistance where forces of the sacred, the profane, and the mundane not only intersect but also interact. In Belfast, special gardens memorialize the victims of political violence. In 1969, Loyalist rioters targeted the Catholic community, burning down homes, most notably on Bombay Street. The “onslaught entered nationalist folk history as the ‘pogrom” (Taylor, 1997: 52). Among those who perished was Gerald McAuley, a 15-year-old who was shot dead by a Loyalist gunman. The tragedy was deepened as it become known that McAuley was helping residents flee their homes on Bombay Street (Coogan, 2002; Quinn, 2019). At the neighborhood memorial site, a large billboard reenacts those events. The space marks a cultural transformation from the profanity of sectarian violence to a sacred place. It is dedicated to the memory of Gerald McAuley (see McKittrick, Kelters, Feeney, and Thornton, 2001; figure 2).

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS

The afterlives of place are informed by historical thought and concepts of memory. Pierre Nora reminds us that history tends to attach itself to events whereas memory clings to places. Given that power of place, it is within “les lieux de memoire where memory crystalizes and secretes itself” (1989: 7). History remains a representation of the past; memory is affective and nourishes recollections that may be out of focus, thereby “tying us to the present” (8). Nora deepens our insights by casting history as prosaic, particularly against the rich dynamics of memory, which bind certain people together since “memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces . . . [becoming] sites for anchoring its memory” (1989: 9). That cultural transformation is evident in sites of political imprisonment, which have the potential to be reinvented for contemporary remembrance.

Such transformation, by design, produces reflection. For our purposes here, reflection has two meanings: first, contemplation; and second, the mirroring of something else. Former prisons and detention centers have been rebuilt as memorial spaces that encourage visitors to reflect on past atrocities. To facilitate that experience, those sites often contain artifacts intended to represent other things. Instruments of torture, for example, are commonly displayed in memorial spaces. Once on display, those objects attain special meaning as something worthy to consider since they represent the suffering experienced by prisoners. For that transformation to occur, the torture device must pass from use-value to signifying-value (Welch, 2015; Williams, 2007). In its previous incarnation the device was used to inflict pain; having undergone cultural conversion, the same object has become a symbol of state repression. Indeed, entire sites pass through a similar form of cultural transformation in ways that demonstrate how signifying-value can facilitate use-value—for example, by offering lessons from the past. At the ESMA memorial space, visitors are frequently reminded that they are entering a reconstruction of the detention, torture, and extermination center administered by the last dictatorship. In this way, visitors are able to experience “safe contact” with a site that no longer harms people. The site then offers enough evidence of pain to prompt reflection. Whereas dark tourism often delivers cheap thrills, the Bastille Effect aims at a higher degree of enlightenment (Lennon and Foley, 2010; Welch, 2020). Through cultural maneuvering, profane places are transformed into sacred spaces as well as places for learning. It is the reconceptualization of sites that has inspired this book. Allow me to explain how we go from here to there.

FROM HERE TO THERE

This journey through various cities requires some signposting in order to clarify where we are going and why. As we transit from place to place, it is important for us to realize that these sites are selective, based on my own scholarly interests in post-conflict societies. In particular, Belfast and Buenos Aires: two very different cities that were plunged into turmoil under very different circumstances. From the 1960s until the late 1990s, a low-level war—the Troubles—in Northern Ireland divided a country and its cities, where political violence was a daily event. In the 1970s, Buenos Aires became the focal point of a dictatorship that would consume Argentina well into the 1980s. It is difficult to compare the two societies in terms of the sheer magnitude of the human rights atrocities they faced; we can, though, say they shared a common and openly expressed sense of loss and memory. Visitors to Belfast and Buenos Aires who are willing to take notice encounter significant manifestations of past injustice. This book examines the sites and symbols of those conflicts in Belfast and Buenos Aires, and in other cities as well. What follows is my story, which contains many stories. Those stories offer narratives about the Bastille Effect as former prisons and detention centers undergo cultural transformations in ways that enhance the pursuit of justice.

This book represents a deliberate effort to build on my previous book, Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment (2015). Among many things, that volume offered an in-depth analysis of Robben Island and the Old Fort in Cape Town, and Johannesburg, respectively. Those former prisons—and their cities— are synonymous with Nelson Mandela, who served 27 years in captivity, becoming one of the world’s most famous political prisoners. Escape to Prison also includes my experience at a comparable institution in Seoul, South Korea, the Seodaemun Prison History Hall. The afterlife of that site remembers the fate of thousands of Korean political prisoners persecuted by Japanese imperialists before and during the Second World War. Having finished that book, it was time for me to move on to other things, or so I thought. As it turns out, the idea of political imprisonment would take hold as my next major undertaking, though I would not neglect the lessons of penal tourism and the pull of punishment.

To concentrate more fully on the historical and cultural implications of political imprisonment, I adopted Paris as a summer research home for five years. During that stretch of time, the meaning of the Bastille captured my attention, especially in light of its mythic presence in the popular imagination. Moreover, I realized that its representation as a sign of repression was rivaled by the triumphant forms of resistance it embodied. That yin-and-yang dualism might be better interpreted sociologically by way of the sacred versus the profane, especially in post-conflict societies. With the benefit of what I learned in Paris about the Bastille, I moved on to a series of cities to study other sites and symbols of political confinement. In Dublin, the Kilmainham Gaol is widely regarded as the “Bastille of Ireland.” The former prison, with its striking Victorian architecture, has reopened its gates to loads of tourists interested in expanding their knowledge of Irish political history against the backdrop of British colonialism. Heading north on the Emerald Isle, the Crumlin Road Gaol in Belfast offers more Victorian narratives on empire. That site, and various historical collections scattered around the city, paved the way for an informed interpretation of the Troubles, thus demonstrating how political imprisonment has contributed to a heritage that is cherished as well as contested by Irish and British identities (Welch, 2019).

In 2017, I relocated (again) to Buenos Aires, where several former detention, torture, and extermination centers have been resurrected as memorial spaces. For months, I scoured the city for the afterlives of places of confinement, finding clear patterns of profanity overcome by the sacred. Those sites in turn joined a vast network of memorial spaces in neighboring nations also ravaged by repressive regimes. To immerse myself in those post-conflict societies, I moved to Santiago (Chile) to examine the various places where victims of Pinochet were confined, including the National Stadium, where sectors of the concourse have been preserved as they existed during the coup of September 11, 1973 (known as the Chilean 9/11). Since the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships had formed coalitions with other military despots, I spent considerable time visiting similar sites in Asunción (Paraguay) and Montevideo (Uruguay) as they projected a collective memory of pain and anguish (Welch, 2020).