Incarceration as a Tool For Shaping National Identity: Romania, 1947–1989
Open Access
- Author:
- Pelini, Jake Anthony
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Robert D. Hume, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Xiaoye You, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- prison
incarceration
Ceausescu
nation building
nationalism
gulag
identity - Abstract:
- This essay examines how a regime can employ its carceral system to help reshape the national identity of its subjects, taking for a case study communist Romania between 1947 and 1989). Historians have studied in detail the Romanian communist regime’s secret police, the securitate, as well the 1989 revolution that violently overthrew the regime. However, a paucity of scholarship exists on the prison spaces themselves. This study places the Romanian carceral system—both as a whole and through the examination of select individual prisons—at its center. Using the spatial theories of Henry Lefebvre and Robert Whiting, as well as the nationalist theories of Georgio Agamben and Kenneth Jowitt, this essay shows that prisons functioned within Romania’s national and local frameworks to terrorize Romanians into complicity with the communist regime. Romanians who continued in their dissent were incarcerated by the regime, and this essay details the carceral program that the regime employed to brainwash prisoners according to communist doctrine. As a result of the communists’ imposition of the carceral program upon the Romanian people, the prison retains a presence in the Romanian cultural landscape, even thirty years after the regime’s fall. I hope that upon its conclusion this essay will have clear implications for rethinking how not only a Stalinist regime but any state employs its carceral system to consolidate its power.