The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political ImprisonmentIt is, in the words of the noted Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, "a passionate, heroic effort to fathom the nature of a phenomenon that all too often drains us emotionally and incapacitates us intellectually." Millett analyzes the individual's monumental fear of the state through the rich literature of its expression--a mixture of literary text (Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Mathabane's Kaffir Boy, Bharadwaj's film Closet Land), the reports of witnesses, legal theory, and historical account. The literary version of their experience is the most arresting; it prevails and persuades with the greatest effect: the reality of the victim, the social and psychological climate of life under dictatorship, the moment of capture when one is "disappeared," that pivotal electronic second after which nothing is ever the same. |
Contents
Preface | 11 |
PART | 21 |
PART | 135 |
Authority | 168 |
PART THREE | 223 |
The Death of a Guatemalan Village | 253 |
State Torture and Religion The Torture | 280 |
Conclusion | 296 |
Acknowledgments | 315 |
Other editions - View all
The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment Kate Millett No preview available - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
accused Alicia Alicia Partnoy Alleg Amnesty Amnesty International apartheid army arrest Auschwitz authority Bataille beaten become blindfolded body brutality camps cell child citizens Closet Land confession counter-insurgency crime criminal cruelty culture death despair detained detention disappeared door El Salvador endure erotic everything execution experience extracts that follow eyes face fact falaka fear feel female finally force gas chambers guards Guatemala Gulag hands hear Henri Alleg imagined imprisonment innocent interrogator killed labor Little School live Mark Mathabane ment merely military mind murder naked Nazi never Ngũgĩ Nien Cheng once pain Partnoy perhaps persons photograph police political prisoners politics of cruelty punishment regime resistance Robben Island Sartre screams secret sexual Sharashka shock smile Soweto squad Suchomel suffering terrible terror thing thousand tion torment torture Treblinka trial victim voice Volodin woman women