CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Khurtsydze, Tamara |
|---|---|
| Title | Political Prisoner As An Agent Of Modernity: Critical Reading Of The Soviet Political Prisoners` Memoirs |
| Summary | In the memoirs about imprisonment in USSR, the subject of a political prisoner is constructed as an opposition to the criminal inmate, and this criminal-political binary is a structuring discursive element in the analyzed memoirs. In this thesis, I aim to analyze the autobiographical texts produced by Soviet political prisoners using critical discourse analysis as a methodological approach. I also use a theoretical framework constructed from the frameworks of Foucault, Agamben and Bourdieu, as well as decolonial theory. With those tools, I analyze the textual production of a point of view of a political prisoner, a political prisoner as “socially-situated identity” or a type of subject that the author aims to be (Gee, 1999, p. 13). I also conceptualize the penitentiary system as a representative space produced by modernity/coloniality – in particular, by addressing the penal colony legacy of the Soviet prison system and the reflection of that in the memoirs of political prisoners. Building on the work of such scholars as Kuntsman (2009) who writes on affective politics of disgust in the Gulag memoirs and about politics of class and sexuality in the memoirs of political prisoners, I approach the issue from a different angle – by exploring, how political prisoners within the camp can be viewed as agents of Soviet modernity/coloniality. I define four pillars of coloniality/modernity in the analyzed memoirs: sexuality (meaning the reproduction of heterosexist colonial logic in the analyzed memoirs), knowledge (addressing the production of political prisoners` habitus through educational practices in the camp directed towards other prisoners), the ethnographic encounter (addressing the ways in which the authors of the memoirs document the othered spaces and subjects they encounter during the time of imprisonment), and the carceral logic (exploring the ways of reproduction and resistance to the logic that normalizes imprisonment, which is also an effort to approach the context of Soviet penitentiary system and the knowledge on political imprisonment with the prison abolitionist agenda). |
| Supervisor | Eszter Timar, Adriana Qubaiova |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/khurtsydze_tamara.pdf |
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