Connecting the “Inside” and the “Outside” World: Convict Labour and Mobile Penal Camps in Colonial Senegal (1930s–1950s)
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: In the late 1930s, three mobile penal camps were established in the French colony of Senegal in order to assemble convicts with long sentences and compel them to work outside the prison. Senegalese penal camps were thus a place both of confinement and of circulation for convicts who constantly moved out of the prison to work on the roads. This article argues that the penal camps were spaces of multiple and antagonistic forms of mobility that blurred the divide between the “inside” and the “outside” world. The mobility of penal camps played a key role in the hazardous living and working conditions that penal labourers experienced. However, convict labourers were not unresponsive and a range of protests emerged, from breakout to self-mutilation. These individual and intentional forms of mobility and immobility threw a spanner in the works of the day-to-day functioning of Senegalese penal camps and, more broadly, in the colonial project ofmise en valeur.
Author: Romain Tiquet
Institutions: University of Geneva, Swiss National Science Foundation
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: European Commission
OpenAlex ID: W2954036720