Journal articles on the topic 'Civil internment'

In early 1939, after retreat from Catalonia, more than 50 Latvians, former participants of the Spanish Civil War, crossed Spanish–French border and ended up in internment camps in France. The aim of the current article is to give an overview and analyse the experience of Latvian men in internment camps. The article focuses on social activities and mutual relations, living conditions and their differences in internment camps in Saint-Cyprien, Argelès-sur-Mer, Gurs, Le Vernet etc., considering the beginning of the Second World War and the establishment of Vichy regime. Furthermore, the attitude of Latvian authorities towards Latvian citizens and possibilities for Latvian men to depart from the internment camps in France have been considered.

The Portuguese Mental Health Law is complex, aiming to ensure patients liberties and basic civil rights are respected. A specific part of this law regards the compulsory internment and its criteria, being as protective as possible, in order to prevent wrongful internments for people against their will.The aim of this study is to analyze the mechanisms available to ensure liberty, in a law apparently about coercion.The methods used consisted in analyzing the law and interpreting its most important details, mentioning them so they can be read and used as examples.It can be concluded that the Portuguese law has a very strict list of mandatory criteria for the possibility of the compulsory internment, as a way of ensuring no people suffer it wrongfully. The most important being that no person can be interned compulsory if not considered to suffer from a severe mental disease, not being that enough and having to at least present risk for themselves or others, or to juridical goods of high value. Thus, revaluation of the patient is mandatory only five days after the internment by two different doctors, being the same process assured from then on every two months. Only possible flaw lays on the fact that there is no maximum amount of time predicted for internment, being that always dependent of the revaluations made. Although, the law is considered to be good and prevent abusive use of the compulsory internments.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Polo Beyris is a virtually unexplored example of internment under French and German authorities. From 1939 to 1947 the camp of Polo Beyris in Bayonne held successively: Spanish Civil War refugees, French colonial prisoners of war, suspected ‘collaborators’ and German prisoners of war. Despite having up to 8600 prisoners at one time, the large camp and its numerous satellite work detachments were literally ‘forgotten’ for decades. Although similar to other camps in its improvised nature, wretched living conditions, lack of food and constant movement of prisoners, Polo Beyris was also unique: located in a dense urban area, within the wartime Occupied Zone and close to the Spanish frontier. Its civil and military administrators were faced with constantly changing, and often chaotic, political and military circumstances. Not a waystation in the Holocaust, Polo Beyris has been lost from the sight of historians. It provides an additional dimension to the complex history of internment in twentieth century France.

The article considers an aspect of the history of civil captivity during World War I which, by itself, had not been previously studied — i.e., influence of the internment policy on the situation of “enemy foreigners” families. Until recently, the historiography addressed only the situation of civilian prisoners, men of military age, while the situation of their families was only mentioned. Drawing on documents from the Russian and German archives, as well as on the published sources, including legislative acts, petitions of individuals, memoirs and diaries, a comparative analysis has been carried out of the policy of the authorities in Russia and Germany towards hostile state citizens and their family members. It is concluded that, although the policy of internment in Russia and Germany was not directed strictly against this group of enemy subjects, its very course had a significant impact on their situation. The formation of legal foundations of internment in the Russian Empire is considered. The article shows the changed approaches to internment of enemy subjects under the influence of situation at the front and situation of the individual front-line territories. It has been established that in a number of cases, it was required to deport from front-line areas not only men liable for military service — citizens of states fighting with Russia, but also their family members. In Germany, the rules for internment were unclear, but the established practice also affected the situation of women and children. In both states, when interning men of military age, family members often followed them to camps and places of deportation. The proximity of cultural, economic, and family ties between the citizens of Russia and Germany on the brink of the First World War resulted in a conflict between nationality and citizenship. Russian citizens in Germany, despite being of German origin, became hostile foreigners. The article analyzes the situation of interned family members in German camps. In some cases, there were organized schools for children. A wide variety of reasons caused the breakdown of family ties: different citizenship of family members, loss of loved ones in displacement, internment of some family members, while other remained at their place of residence. It is concluded that there are similarities, as well as differences in the methods of internment in Russia and Germany, which in both cases negatively affected the situation of the families of hostile state citizens.

Abstract:Generational tensions are one of the many forms that land conflicts take in northern Uganda. The convention in Acholiland was that young men gained land-use rights through their fathers and young women gained them through their husbands. This pattern of generational governance has become complicated in the wake of the civil war and decades of internment in IDP camps. Lacking husbands, young women are using land of their patrilateral kin, while young men who grew up with their mothers may use that of their matrilateral relatives. This article, based on fieldwork in the Acholi subregion between 2014 and 2016, explores classic anthropological concerns about gerontocracy and patriliny in a contemporary postconflict situation. It describes the discreet land access strategies of young men and women and the ways in which they seek to complement dependence on relatives by renting or buying land. The image of the “war generation” as morally spoiled is countered by an examination of the consequences of war and internment for young people’s claims to use land.

During the First World War, the German Australian community, the largest non-Anglo-Celtic group, became the target of a relentless campaign of persecution, internment and deportation that resulted in its dismemberment and the destruction of its socio-cultural infrastructure. Under the country’s belligerent Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes, the machinery of government was used to suspend basic civil rights and the rule of law, while Australian civilians were called upon to participate in the “homefront war” against an imagined internal enemy. The government’s aim was to serve the cause of Im- perial Britain and its commercial supremacy, and to secure the future of White Australia as the home of an imaginary, exclusive “British race.”

A recurring theme in American political discourse is how to strike the appropriate balance between protecting the nation against threats to its security without eroding the liberty that is at the heart of its democratic character. Civil liberties versus national security is a choice apparently to be made in every crisis and every war, whether hot or cold. We can trace the debate from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, to the Red Scares that followed both world wars. The classic case of going too far, and the most widely repudiated example, is the illegal mass internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, without charge, during World War II. Today, in what is commonly called the war on terrorism, hawks and doves take up their customary positions on opposing sides of the old argument as they debate the U.S.A Patriot Act, the imprisonment of foreigners at Camp Delta on Guantánamo Bay, and the indefinite detention of American citizens by presidential order.

Abstract Abe Fortas (1910–1982) has been best known for service during his legal career as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States for four years from 1965 to 1969. His supporters have characterized his life as a lawyer who supported and defended the American Civil Rights Movement during the tumultuous periods of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. However, observers of his career have paid little attention to the fact that Fortas was one of the few American bureaucrats who took the stand in defense of those of Japanese ancestry in the official hearings in the 1980sinvestigating the internment of Japanese Americans during World War ii. Fortas, as undersecretary in the Department of the Interior from 1942 to 1946, had a close relationship to key U.S. policies dealing with people of Japanese ancestry during the Asia-Pacific War, including the establishment of martial law in Hawai‘i and the ending of the Japanese internment. Fortas’s responses to and critiques of U.S. policy regarding the Japanese American question reveal the intertwined dynamics of how white racism developed and challenges against it at the governmental level.

The 1970s ushered in a new cinephilic culture for viewers. In reviewing the films of this era, columnist Amelie Hastie is struck by their resonance for our current political realities and concerns surrounding civil rights, governmental authority, and personal surveillance. To the author, revisiting or integrating the 1970s into contemporary film culture is a political act born out of resistance to both present-day politics and historical narratives. Through her discussion of films including Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree, Barbara Loden's Wanda, and Diane Kurys's Peppermint Soda, Hastie finds a welcome response to the current era of grotesque political nostalgia enamored with the “greatness” of oppression, including the slavery of African Americans, the internment of immigrants, and the stripping of women's power.

In September 1971 Congress repealed the Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. This act had authorized the President to apprehend and detain any person suspected as a threat to internal security during a national emergency. This article analyzes the Title II repeal campaign between 1967 and 1971, revealing that the public historical memories of Japanese American internment greatly influenced support for repeal in Congress and among the American public. Civil rights and antiwar protesters both feared that such a law might be used against them, but Japanese Americans had been interned during World War II. Their presence in the repeal campaign made the question of detention starkly real and the need for repeal persuasive. Conversely, their work for repeal allowed them to address a painful part of their American experience and speak publicly as a community.

Abstract Even though scholarship on music and exile under Franco has grown steadily for the past three decades, little attention has been paid thus far to exiled performers who were active primarily as members of orchestras and bands. This article makes an initial contribution to this field by focusing on the Banda Madrid as a case study. The Banda Madrid was founded in the spring of 1939 in the internment camp of Le Barcarès (France) by Rafael Oropesa. Its members went into exile in Mexico City and became a fixture of the Spanish exile community until 1947. I discuss how the Banda Madrid and the stories of some of its individual members expand our understanding of politics and modernity in the Spanish Republican exile. In order to do this, I follow the trajectories of Banda Madrid musicians before, during, and after the Civil War, and contrast them with those of left-wing composers in exile.

Hundreds of Spanish volunteers who had ended up in the Soviet Union in various ways during or after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) took part in the Great Patriotic War. First, they were Spanish children, including teenagers. Secondly, several thousand members of the Spanish Communist Party and its leaders evacuated after the fall of the Republic. Thirdly, Spanish Republicans rescued by Soviet diplomats from French internment camps in 1939–1940. In addition, after the outbreak of war, the last of the pilots who had taken a pilot training course at the aviation school in Kirovabad remained in the USSR. The aim of this article is to systematise the information available in memoirs, archival sources and literature on the participation of Spanish volunteers in the war on the Soviet side and to draw conclusions as to the nature and forms of that participation. Soviet conscription centres did not have the authority to enrol Spaniards who did not have Soviet citizenship into the Red Army, and Spanish volunteers were allowed to go to the front thanks to several Soviet military officers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. It is for this reason that the most massive and effective military efforts of the Spaniards behind enemy lines were in partisan and sabotage groups, as well as in the air force. The Spanish volunteers wrote a glorious chapter both in the history of their country and in the annals of the Great Patriotic War.

When a failed military coup provoked civil war in Spain in July 1936, British Quakers were among the first t respond to the tremendous need for humanitarian aid among the civilian population. They distributed food and clothing, set up canteens and hospitals, provided schooling and workshops, and organized the evacuation of children from war zones. Then, in January 1939, when the Spanish Republic finally succumbed to the might of the rebel forces, the Quakers accompanied thousands of refugees in their flight towards the French border. This became known as ‘la retirada’ (the Retreat). Once in French territory, the refugees were herded into improvised internment camps. These were simply vast open spaces on the beaches encircled by barbed wire, with no shelter, no latrines and barely any food. Quakers were the first to obtain permits to access the camps in order to alleviate the suffering and deprivation found there. They distributed not only the most basic aid such as food and clothing, but also pencils and notebooks, as well as tools and materials of all kinds to work with. Thus, in characteristic fashion, they provided people with the means by which they could help themselves.

This article deals with the biography of the elite Jewish-German sprinter, sports writer and left-wing political activist Alex Natan, „the fastest Jew in Germany“ (Alfred Flechtheim) during the 1920s. Hailing from an assimilated family of the Berlin Jewish-German middle class, Natan was for most of his active career a member of the bürgerlich sport movement, running for SC Charlottenburg Berlin. He achieved his greatest athletic success as a member of the club’s world-record equalling 4x100-meter relay squad in 1929. In addition to Natan’s athletic achievements, the article pays particular attention to his career as a left-wing sports journalist; his participation in the anti-Nazi resistance of civil servants in the Reich Vice Chancellery in 1933/34; his emigration to Britain in 1933; his four-year internment during World War II; the resumption of his journalistic career in the postwar period; and his support for the 1972 Munich Olympics. By focusing on his confrontations with Carl Diem and Karl Ritter von Halt, the article also engages with Natan’s vocal opposition to the rehabilitation after 1945 of sport functionaries who had collaborated with the Nazi regime.

The fairer sex takes over and the campus becomes a woman's world. They step in and fill the shoes of the departing men and they reveal a wealth of undiscovered ability. The fate of the A.S.U.C. [Associated Students of the University of California] and its activities rests in their hands and they assume the responsibility of their new tasks with sincerity and confidence. —Blue and Gold, University of California, Berkeley, 1943During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley—then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education—made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for home-front employment in fields traditionally closed to them. Women also effectively opposed gendered restrictions on extracurricular participation, filling for the first time such influential campus leadership positions as the presidency of Berkeley's student government and editorship of the university's student newspaper. Female students at Berkeley also furthered activist causes during the war years, with the University Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) serving as one of the most popular outlets for their political engagement. Historically rooted in a mission of Christian fellowship, by the 1940s the University YWCA held progressive positions on many of the nation's central social, political, and economic issues. Throughout the war years, women dedicated to promoting civil liberties, racial equality, and international understanding led the organization in its response to two of the most egregious civil rights violations in U.S. history: racial segregation and Japanese internment.

Almost 50 years ago, in the events that happened during the so-called Bloody Sunday (Derry 1972, 30th January), 13 Catholic civilians were killed because of the actions of the British army during a civil rights march against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Other 13 civilians were injured. While the circumstances were unclear, these civilians were considered to be terrorists, which seemed to justify the gunfire. The findings on Bloody Sunday from two Tribunals of Inquiry (1972 and 1998-2010), and the reactions that their resulting reports raised are an excellent example of cultural impregnation in law. In this regard, it is possible to find a general notion of justice as truth. Guaranteeing such notion (or, at least, the willingness to ensure it) seemed to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland. Under the light of these events, the following pages aim to analyse how that legal culture of justice as truth is displayed in the two Bloody Sunday Tribunals of Inquiry as well as its contribution to the contestation of the British legal system or its legitimacy. This paper starts by reviewing previous studies about the conceptual framework of the analysis — it examines the concept of “legal culture” and the understanding of justice as truth, as well as the definition of Tribunal of Inquiry. Next, it argues cultural perceptions regarding Bloody Sunday Inquiries. The conclusions exposed reveal that the legal culture of justice as truth is also embodied in legalism and colonialism.

In 1949, the world witnessed a tidal wave of involuntary migration out of China when the Chinese Communists came to power. Among this vast sea of human misery were tens of thousands of exiled Nationalist supporters in Hong Kong — common soldiers, low-ranking civil servants, and their families. In June 1950, a minor clash occurred between the Nationalist refugees and the pro-ccpelements in the colony. To prevent further political upheaval, the British authorities transported the former to a remote location called “Rennie’s Mill” or Tiu Keng Leng and built a temporary internment camp to house them. The initial plan was to gather the Nationalist supporters in the colony and shipped them to Taiwan as soon as possible. Yet Chiang Kai-shek’s government was reluctant to receive these people for both economic and security reasons. As the repatriation process dragged on, the Nationalists used the refugee camp as an international showcase in their propaganda war against the People’s Republic of China (prc) much to the chagrin of the British. Consequently, a considerable number of the Nationalist refugees were stranded in Hong Kong. They became victims of their own government under the pretense of humanitarian assistance. This paper examines the early history of Rennie’s Mill community with an emphasis on the interplay between humanitarian relief, propaganda war, and international politics. It sheds light on the actual lived experiences of Rennie’s Mill refugees against the conflicting ideological constructions and humanitarian discourse surrounding them.

In recent decades, there has been a growing worldwide interest in those events that marked the course of world history and that create divisions within a society. In Greece, the 1940s and the threefold Occupation-Resistance-Civil War are such events that give rise to intense controversy. At the same time, the methods of repression that the political dissidents of that period suffered, which were basically persecutions, displacement to distant locations (exile) and internment to maximum-security prisons have been consigned to oblivion. In Greece, dozens of islands were turned into places of exile and “disciplinary camps”, whilst many prisons were created for the state “enemies”. In their ma-jority, these sites of memory in Greece have been consigned to oblivion since there is no state support for their promotion. One of the most typical examples is the Prison of Aegina, which is also known as Kapodistrian Orphanage. The building was constructed by order of Ioannis Kapodistrias to house the orphans of the Revolution of 1821. In 1880, it was inaugurated as a prison for criminal inmates at first, while in 1920 it received the first political prisoners. The building operated as a prison for political prisoners up until 1974, during which time the Left was restored to legality in the country and hence, the persecutions ceased. In this article, we will study the term “difficult cultural heritage” together with the promotion and conversion of sites of memory to museums. The building of the Aegina Prison will be examined as a case study for its significance and his-torical importance, but also its emblematic architecture.

AbstractAlmost 5,000 Italians were interned in Australia during World War II, a high proportion of them Queensland residents. Internment was a pivotal experience for the Italian community, both locally and nationally, complicating Italian Australians’ sense of belonging to their adopted country. Through an examination of two migrant autobiographical narratives of internment, Osvaldo Bonutto's A Migrant's Story and Peter Dalseno's Sugar, Tears and Eyeties, this article explores the impact of internment on the experience and articulation of cultural and civic belonging to Australian society. It finds that internment was a ‘trial’ or ‘transitional’ phase for these internees’ personal and civic identities, and that the articulation of these identities and sense of belonging is historically contingent, influenced by the shift from assimilation to multiculturalism in settlement ideology, as well as Italian Australians’ changing place in Australian society throughout the twentieth century.

Liberty is a fundamental marker of citizenship. During World War II, for Japanese Canadians in prisoner-of-war camps the stripping of their liberty was a sure sign of their loss of citizenship. However, for others the distinction between liberty and incarceration was not as clear. Despite the fact that many Japanese Canadians enjoyed the appearance of relative freedom during World War II, for many citizenship was uncertain and liberty was tenuous at best. Ambivalence infused discussions surrounding the relocation of Japanese Canadians to Alberta and Manitoba. This paper highlights the multiple and diverse processes of incarceration that took place amidst this ambivalence. I begin with Foucault’s (1995) definition of the ‘carceral’ as an incorporation of “institutions of supervision or constraint, of discreet surveillance and insistent coercion” (299). Using newspaper articles from a one year period, I apply this definition to Japanese Canadian ‘relocation’ to Alberta and Manitoba as part of the government sponsored Sugar Beet Programme. This program offers a unique perspective, as it was framed as a ‘self-support’ program, thus implying a greater range of freedoms. However, despite illusions of freedom, I argue that what made these sites carceral was a combination of state and civic mediations.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> From the time when its roots traced back all the way back in 1886, Little Tokyo has overcome numerous obstacles including the Great Depression, Japanese American internments in the Second World War, racial discrimination, transition into Bronxville, multinational redevelopment projects, and the demographic/ geographic dispersion of the Nikkei communities. Despite these numerous development, Little Tokyo remains the major historical, cultural, and civic center for Japanese Americans living in Southern California and has continued to be a historically and a culturally symbolic space for many.</p><p> This research strives to identify the trends of gentrification in the study area; Little Tokyo, through indicators or variables in 5 domains: (A) Housing, (B) Demography, (C) Income, (D) Education Level, and (E) Public Safety with the central focus on housing. To analyze the occurrence of these elements between the year 1990 and 2013, quantitative research including GIS groundworks were delivered. This research is aimed at becoming a tool to measure and potentially assist communities to make more robust development intervention and implementation by identifying the trends that emerge socio-economic problems like gentrification facing local communities around the world.</p>

Archivists have long recognized the inherent historical and social mandate in preserving stories of those who endured violence at the hands of the state. Examples of this responsibility include archivists who recorded public tribunals in post-apartheid South Africa, documented stories of Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II, and acquired collections of 1960s civil rights activists who experienced military intervention while fighting to end segregation. These endeavors align with the historian Howard Zinn's call for archivists to "compile a whole new world of documentary material" about the lived experiences of marginalized populations and communities. Drawing upon Zinn's charge as well as scholarly literature around community archives, social justice, and human rights, this article describes the joint effort of community organizers and professional archivists who collaborated to establish a community archive for victims of police violence in Cleveland, Ohio. The archive, A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, provides a sustainable, autonomous means for Cleveland residents to share their first-hand accounts of police violence in the region. The authors will narrate the archive's conception and development as well as advance the archive as a post-custodial model for other grassroots organizations protesting various forms of state violence.

Abstract Spain played an ambiguous and pragmatic role during the Second World War and its policy evolved as the war progressed. While Francoist Spain was friendly towards Nazi Germany, it never declared war on the Allies, even if it contributed Division Azul to the Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Spanish neutrality allowed its territory to become a temporary safe haven for refugees fleeing the Nazi terror in Europe. Miranda de Ebro concentration camp (1937–1947) saw the internment of soldiers from the International Brigades who had fought on the Republic’s side in the Spanish Civil War, and of European refugees escaping from the Nazis. After the French, Poles represented the second biggest national group at Miranda and it is the Polish doctors on whom I focus in this paper because of Poland’s situation during and after the war. Most of the Polish doctors held in Miranda were Jews who had come to France before the war, where they had studied while keeping Polish citizenship. After release from Miranda, many joined the Allied forces fighting against the German Reich. But when the war ended, Poland – though formally independent – became a satellite country of the Soviet Union. Only one of the physicians ever returned to Poland. The rest continued their careers in Great Britain or the USA despite all the difficulties this entailed.

“Korematsu v. United States” is one of the most important and precedential cases in the history of United States in terms of introducing new legal practices and approaches, as well as raising people's legal and cultural awareness. This is a case that is similar in content to other controversial and almost discriminatory rulings in recent U.S. jurisprudence, but differs substantially from most of them in its paradigmatic and historical significance. Korematsu v. United States has been viewed in the US history as a model of the opposition between the need to ensure national security and the individual rights of full-fledged citizen of the country. It can be said that today the decision is completely overcome in formally, however there is a big gap between the formal overcoming of the decision and the complete exhaustion of the disputed issue within the legal society (which can only be achieved by implementing new laws and moving to a new stage of legal development). The prelude to all this was the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Air Force launched an attack against the United States Pacific Fleet, based in the waters of Oahu Island, the capital of Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. It is safe to say that out of the losses incurred in one particular operation in the history of the United States, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan ended in the most tragic consequences for the United States. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order N9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to so called internment camps because they were a vulnerable group for the Japanese Intelligence Agencies, which the authorities claimed posed a potential threat to the national security. Fred Toyasaburo Korematsu was born is Oakland, California on January 30, 1919. He was a Japanese American civil rights activist, who actively resisted the execution of Order N9066 and, unlike his parents, refused to leave his place of residence and move to Internment camp, which later served as a reason for his arrest. It is still disputed whether the decision and the executive order N9066 on the relocation of Americans of Japanese descent were motivated by discrimination or the state acted simply out of a need to ensure National Security. As already mentioned, it all depends on which side we look at the overall picture from.

Al terminar en 1939 la Guerra Civil española, centenares de miles de republicanos se refugiaron en Francia, muchos de ellos lucharon después contra las tropas de ocupación nazis y contra el régimen de Vichy, muchos de ellos fueron detenidos y deportados a campos de concentración alemanes (caso de Max Aub, internado en Le Vernet primero y en Djelfa en Argelia después). Como hicieron otros republicanos españoles en esas circunstancias, Semprún reconstruyó su permanencia en Buchenwaid en varios de sus libros pero especialmente en Aquel domingo con el propósito de transmitir un testimonio histórico de la lucha contra el nazismo y de los horrores increíbles de esos campos a las nuevas generaciones. Max Aub, por su parte, también ha descrito en varias de sus obras sus atroces experiencias tanto en Le Vernet como en Djelfa, pero de forma especial en Diario de Djelfa, campo equiparable a los peores de exterminio nazi. Esas dos obras de Semprún y de Aub son una contribución de indudable valor histórico para reconstruir las inimaginables experiencias de los republicanos españoles en los campos de concentración de Alemania y Francia.At the end of the Spainsh Civil War in 1939, hundreds of thousands of republicans fled to France, many of them later fought against the nazi occupation forces and the Vichy regime, many of them were arrested and deported to German concentration camps (as was the case of Jorge Semprún, who was taken to Buchenwaid) or French internment camps (such as Max Aub, who was internad first at Le Vernet and later at Djelfa, Algeria). Like other republicans who lived through the same circumstances, Semprún revived the time he had to spent in Buchenwaid in several of his books, but especially in Aquel domingo with the aim of bearing testimony to the new generations of the struggle against nazism and the incredible horrors committed in those camps. Max Aub has described in several of his works the terrible experiencias he had both at Le Vernet and at Djelfa, but especially in Diario de Djelfa, a camp comparable to the worst nazi extermination camps. These two books of Semprún and Aub are a contribution of unquestionable historial value to keep alive the memory of the unimaginable sufferings Spainsh republicans had to live through in German and French concentration camps.

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that a shared reluctance to confront the causes and consequences of historical injustices endured by ethno-cultural minorities has hampered efforts by educators and activists in British Columbia to inform the public about Japanese Canadian internment during World War II. This reluctance was felt keenly by internment survivors, whose sense of trust in the wider civic community has not yet been re-established. Meanwhile, a desire to “turn the page” on past wrongs — for fear that drawing attention to such episodes generates inter-ethnic tension rather than promotes unity amongst Canada’s multicultural populace — has hindered federal and provincial involvement in educational activities related to WWII internment. Yet as this study suggests, refusal to participate in collective renegotiations of public memory about historical injustices does little to repair the relationship between the wronged group and wider public, or to prevent similar injustices from occurring again in the future.RÉSUMÉCet article décrit les efforts entrepris par des éducateurs et des activistes pour informer la population de la Colombie Britannique au sujet de l’internement des Canadiens d’origine japonaisependant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Ils durent faire face à une forte résistance du public qui refusait de confronter les causes et les conséquences des injustices subies par les minorités ethnoculturelles à cette époque. Les victimes de l’internement ont ressenti vivement cette dénégation d’autant plus qu’ils n’ont pas réussi à rétablir complètement la confiance au sein de la collectivité. En même temps, l’envie de « tourner la page » sur les maux du passé — motivée par la crainte que le fait d’attirer l’attention sur de tels épisodes génère de la tension interethnique au lieu de promouvoir l’unité dans une population multiculturelle — a fait obstacle aux activités éducatives mises en place par les gouvernements provincial et fédéral quant à l’internement. Mais, comme le suggère cette étude, le refus collectif d’affronter ces injustices historiques nepeut que nuire au rapprochement entre le groupe lésé et la société toute entière ainsi qu’à la prévention de telles injustices dans l’avenir.

Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. 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