Caught In-Between

Coerced Intermediaries in the Jails of Colonial India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9969403
AutoresMichaela Dimmers (0000-0002-1196-349X, South Asian University, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume68
FascículoS31
Páginas237-251
Data de publicação2023-02-22
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoInternational Review of Social History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0020-8590 • E-ISSN: 1469-512X
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0020859023000044
OpenAlexW4321496126
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas2
Referências citadas15

This article analyses the role coerced intermediaries had on colonial power and authority in the prisons of British India. Coerced intermediaries in this context were convicts placed in positions of control by the colonial prison administration as warders, overseers, and night watchmen and night watchwomen, summarized here under the term “convict officers”. These convict officers were employed by the colonial authorities to maintain a coercive order and became essential to the exercise of colonial authority and control in the prisons of British India. The article argues that with their employment, the colonial administration created a third group within its prisons, situated between the colonial administration and the inmates. This contradictory practice blurred the lines of colonial control and authority and raises larger questions about intermediation by unfree and coerced people in unfree and coerced colonial contexts. The focus here is not so much on what intermediation is but on what it does. At the same time, the article relates the system of convict officers as intermediaries to the theoretical concepts used by Foucault and Goffman and questions the binarity used in most of their theories

Archaeology · Business · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Convict · Criminology · Intermediary · Political science · Power (physics · Prison · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Law