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Taking the specific example of Paco: Les Mains Rouges (2014; 2017) – a two-volumed sepia graphic novel by Fabien Vehlmann and Éric Sagot – this article explores the potential of the comic format to destabilize carceral histories via the trope of the convict tattoo. The creation of convict records (including the surveillance of tattoos) leaves a rich textual and visual archive that is steeped in power inequalities and absent voices, but also creative potential. By articulating the comic as a critical methodology, this article aims to explore the potential for the format to develop narratives that counter authorized archives and challenge dominant representations of incarceration whilst drawing creative inspiration from historical iconographies of punishment. In its consideration of creative interpretation and potential for engaging with new modes of collecting, it has applications for historical research, media, visual criminology and museum and heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After decades of collective forgetting, heritage initiatives have resulted in the restoration of sites linked to France's former penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia which operated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both territories, museums dedicated to the history of the 'bagne' have been created in buildings once used as kitchens and bakeries. However, as with other forms of penal heritage, the opportunity to create more nuanced and sustained narratives around the lived experience of food insecurity for those sent to the penal colonies remains subordinated to more sensationalist accounts of physical constraint and corporal punishment. This article analyses existing narratives and museography at the two sets of sites, identifying potential for further memory and interpretive work around food, nutrition, and sustainability. The article explores convict memoirs and correspondence that emphasise the 'slow violence' of malnutrition resulting from poorquality produce and unequal distributions of rations amongst convict populations. The wider intention is to consider how historical narratives of food insecurity can be developed at sites of former penal heritage to foster awareness and empathy around contemporary forms of food poverty, emphasising that food insecurity is still used as a form of control within spaces of confinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how purpose-built museums interpret the story of colonial imprisonment in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Prisons integral to the 100-year French colonial occupation, and the subsequent American War, have been re-purposed, destroyed, or obscured. In response, memorial museums have an important role presenting prison history to international tourists and local visitors alike. Our approach interprets artefacts relating to restraint and torture, the reconstruction of prison cells, and the use of photography in three museums in the city—the War Remnants Museum, the Ton Duc Thang Museum, and the Museum of Southern Vietnamese Women—each featuring recreations of the Tiger Cages from a further notorious prison site, some 200 kilometres southeast of HCMC on the Côn Đảo archipelago. Memoirs, photographs, objects, and plaques from prisons in HCMC and Côn Đảo offer domestic and international tourists narratives stories of Vietnamese resistance to imprisonment. Considering the way former prison sites and museums memorialising prisons can be taken together as a series, we use the concept of the "penalscape" to indicate the contextual links between prison, education, and political struggle in an abolitionist framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Green Hell" was the nickname frequently given to France's largest overseas penal colony in French Guiana. This essay explores the slow and difficult recognition of penal heritage in France and its former colonies via the notion of "grey" heritage adopted by Philippe Artières to identify heritage associated with imprisonment and detention. Drawing on the cross-disciplinary field of colour studies, we explore a series of different possible readings of "grey" in order to highlight different ways in which sites can be instrumentalised to both affirm and negate carceral continuities across history and transnationally. Focusing on locations in French Guiana and the Con Dao archipelago in Vietnam, the essay explores the materiality of these spaces, their presentation and their visitors, in order to suggest how "grey heritage" might be developed as a critical and reflexive approach to the carceral past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the establishment of slave plantations in French Guiana during the 17th century, the small island of Ilet la Mère, located 11 km from Cayenne, has functioned as site of confinement, refuge, and experimentation. These roles continued during and after the creation of France's largest penal colony across the territory (1852-1953). This article identifies different phases of Ilet la Mère's colonial and postcolonial histories, and argues that the island plays an integral role in the ongoing perception and administration of French Guiana as colonial outpost and underexploited natural resource. This involves frequent misconceptions that French Guiana itself is an island, and the metonymic evocation of its islands, notably Devil's Island (one of the Salvation Islands) and Cayenne, to denote the entire territory. Such perceptions, applied from outside the territory, alongside local engagement with lesser-known islands like Ilet la Mère, contribute to the creation of a 'toxic island ecology'. Toxicity, defined as more than contagion and contamination, incorporates other practices and discourses which work to draw attention away from environmental and human rights abuses taking place on the mainland. The article concludes with reflection on the island's current usage as a nature sanctuary where visitors can interact with overly tame squirrel monkeys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the specific example of Poulo Condor (the Con Dao archipelago in Vietnam) as colonial prison island in order to examine this persistence of colonial island imaginaries built around the imagined project of the prison island well into the middle of the 20th century. Such imaginaries appear to run counter to dominant political discourse of the period along with ongoing media campaigns calling for the end to penal transportation and overseas penal colonies. This article contends that closer attention needs to be paid to the disjuncts and gaps between the official discourse of the French colonial authorities located in France and the enactment of such discourse in the colonies themselves. The central focus of the article is a close analysis of correspondence between colonial officials stationed in French Indochina from 1925 onwards; these documents will be contextualised with reference to the longer histories of both the Con Dao archipelago and France's use of prison islands. An understanding of Poulo Condor as a complex extralegal space will be framed by Ann Laura Stoler's concept of the 'colony' as it develops Giorgio Agamben's notion of the 'state of exception' and Michel Foucault's concept of 'security'. What emerges is an ongoing colonial pathology which continues to fixate on the prison island as a key colonial stake even after such a stake has become increasing untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Martinican author and educator, Patrick Chamoiseau's evocation of the carceral ruin across his writing and, in particular, his novels. The notion of a 'carceral ruinology' at play in Chamoiseau's oeuvre is explored in the specific context of a 'penalscape' marked not only by today's prisons, camps and detention centres but equally and increasingly by the remnants of historical forms of imprisonment and internment. The article suggests that Chamoiseau's most sustained engagement with the ruins of the prison, his essay on France's former penal colony in French Guiana, Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne, published alongside photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi, provides a conceptual tool for thinking about the political stakes of these ruins. Such an approach also circumvents existing critiques of the photo-essay and its recent republication as an appendix to new images by Jean-Luc de Laguarigue. The article will argue that Chamoiseau's writing of the carceral ruin is both a writing against history and a writing against the prison. It will chart the movement from a reluctance to describe the slave dungeon in Texaco, to the use of the same space as a means of telling a different story in Un Dimanche au cachot before finally considering the shift that occurs in L'empreinte à Crusoé where the island in its totality is reimagined as prison. Where the presence of ruins allows different stories to be told, the prison that disappears without a trace enables the return of the carceral as much as the colonial via the myth of virgin territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of dark tourism in travel writing. Topics discussed include the book Nous n'irons pas voir Auschwitz by Jeremie Dres, documentation of heritage and tourism sites as a research practice echoing Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology project and the book Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley.

This article returns to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish in order to consider its continued relevance for thinking about the representation of incarceration today beyond categories of 'spectacle' and 'surveillance'. In order to rethink the text in relation to contemporary scholarship on visual criminology, it will explore the visual elements of Discipline and Punish in more detail via the concepts of the 'tableau' and the 'diagram' found in Gilles Deleuze's Foucault. These concepts will be supplemented by the notion of the 'calligram', drawing on Foucault's 1968 essay 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' in order to explore what is at stake in current representations of incarceration via a specific engagement with offender art. Evoking Jacques Rancière's notion of curiosity as a critique of the 'intolerable image', the article will suggest ways in which the relationship between the academic scholar qua 'penal spectator' and the 'represented' incarcerated subject can be reconfigured to produce a more critical, empathetic and socially responsible engagement with such representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursuing the call made by Fredric Jameson, in his writing on utopia, to break back into History, this article writes against a popular imaginary which presents the postapocalyptic world as heavily marked by varying forms of incarceration. It assumes as its starting point the possibility of a world without prison, focusing on the conceptual leaps required to more effectively imagine such a world. Drawing on Félix Guattari's The Three Ecologies, the article suggests how the notion of ecology as mapped out by Guattari provides a more useful approach to contesting the role of incarceration than existing critiques focused on prison as economy. Adapting Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion of time as a project, the article goes on to explore the conceptual steps required to work backwards from a future moment in which today's prisons are rendered incomprehensible ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This series of reflections on the contemporary experience and consciousness of time calls for a radical rethinking to confront the present and future threat of climate-led disaster. Focusing on the pocketwatch and smartwatch, the article will consider Paul Virilio's critique of contemporary forms of alienation and the ever-increasing disjuncture between human experience and the instruments that measure and analyze time in the service of the global, financial market. Jean-Pierre Dupuy's 'enlightened catastrophism' is proposed as opening up possibilities for a politics of time which can reposition the present in the service of a future threatened by the vicissitudes of late capitalism. The paper goes on to argue that Dupuy needs to be reread alongside Virilio, taking into account the latter's notion of 'time pollution' and critique of forecasting. The conceptual framings proposed are elucidated with reference to a cinematic tradition that takes the multiple temporalities shaping human existence as its object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pixel and the technique of pixelating faces belong to a politics of fear and a digital aesthetics of truth that shapes public perceptions of criminality and the threat of otherness. This article draws on Paul Virilio's account of the pixel in The Lost Dimension to analyze its specific role and operation in relation to contemporary representations of incarceration. In particular, the article considers the figure of the incarcerated informant. The incarcerated criminal or informant plays a complex role as both subversive other and purveyor of truth and as such constitutes an important example of the ways pixelation functions as a visible signifier of a dangerous truth while blurring, erasing, and ultimately dehumanizing those "speaking" this truth. The discussion forms part of a larger analysis of the production, framing, and circulation of images of otherness, identifying Virilio as key to debates around the violence of the screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the development of certain Foucauldian concepts and themes within the work of the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben. Where Agamben is well-known for his critique of biopower in Homo Sacer, his recent work a more complex engagement with Foucault both in terms of his subject matter, governmentality and economy (oikonomia), and his critical methodology, most notably, his reaffirmation of the value of Foucault's archaeological method. Focusing on three of Agamben's recent publications, Signatura Rerum: Sul Metodo, Il regno e la gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell'economia e del governo and What is an Apparatus?, the article looks first at Agamben's development of Foucault's archaeological method within his own concept of the signature. It then goes on to consider Agamben's identification of an economic theology in contradistinction to Schmitt's political theology and how Agamben's discussion of collateral damage might be related to Foucault's notion of security as developed in Security, Territory, Population. Finally, the article considers how Agamben links Foucault's notion of 'dispositif' *apparatus+ to an economic theology of government, calling for the development of counter-apparatuses in a similar way to Foucault's call for 'resistances.' The article concludes by considering both the benefits and the limitations of Agamben's engagement with Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses conference on theories of incarceration at the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham, England on September 10-12, 2015.