The Morality of Revolution
Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique, 1968–1990
Seiten
2024
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-2583-1 (ISBN)
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-2583-1 (ISBN)
- Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Dezember 2024)
- Versandkostenfrei
- Auch auf Rechnung
- Artikel merken
This book foregrounds the contradictions between Frelimo’s socialist ambitions and the reality of its carceral regimen. Rather than rehabilitative institutions, the party’s camps were spaces of social abandonment where detainees suffered at the hands of overseers and endured wretched conditions in remote rural sites.
The Morality of Revolution offers the first historical examination of urban cleanup campaigns and reeducation camps in socialist Mozambique. The book presents the camps as the template for independent Mozambique’s punitive society under Frelimo. Individuals who transgressed the law and socialist normative codes of behavior were targeted by the revolutionary party, which obsessively pursued putative wrongdoers in an effort to build a new society from the ruins of Portuguese colonialism. Benedito Luís Machava argues that the socialist experiment, while ushering in an era of economic development and social progress, sought also to remake the moral fabric of Mozambican society. At play was the contradictory combination of high modernist, socialist aspirations and conservative anxieties rooted in a moralist reading of society.
From its inception in 1974 to its demise in the late 1980s, the reeducation program was a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Frelimo government, unable to finance and support the carceral regime, expected its agents and the detainees to carry out the ambitious project on their own. Without material and human resources to run the program, state officials compelled detainees to build their own detention facilities; to grow their own food; to enforce their own political education; and in many ways, to oversee their own incarceration. The state’s incapacity to translate the salvationist ideas of reeducation into planned action—a general feature of the socialist experiment in Mozambique—produced spaces of social neglect and castigation that negatively affected both the inmates and the personnel tasked with disciplining and reeducating them.
The Morality of Revolution offers the first historical examination of urban cleanup campaigns and reeducation camps in socialist Mozambique. The book presents the camps as the template for independent Mozambique’s punitive society under Frelimo. Individuals who transgressed the law and socialist normative codes of behavior were targeted by the revolutionary party, which obsessively pursued putative wrongdoers in an effort to build a new society from the ruins of Portuguese colonialism. Benedito Luís Machava argues that the socialist experiment, while ushering in an era of economic development and social progress, sought also to remake the moral fabric of Mozambican society. At play was the contradictory combination of high modernist, socialist aspirations and conservative anxieties rooted in a moralist reading of society.
From its inception in 1974 to its demise in the late 1980s, the reeducation program was a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Frelimo government, unable to finance and support the carceral regime, expected its agents and the detainees to carry out the ambitious project on their own. Without material and human resources to run the program, state officials compelled detainees to build their own detention facilities; to grow their own food; to enforce their own political education; and in many ways, to oversee their own incarceration. The state’s incapacity to translate the salvationist ideas of reeducation into planned action—a general feature of the socialist experiment in Mozambique—produced spaces of social neglect and castigation that negatively affected both the inmates and the personnel tasked with disciplining and reeducating them.
Benedito Luís Machava is an assistant professor of African history at Yale University, where his teaching and research interests include colonial and postcolonial Africa, Lusophone Africa, liberation struggles, decolonization, nation-state building, and socialism in Africa.
Erscheint lt. Verlag | 10.12.2024 |
---|---|
Reihe/Serie | New African Histories |
Zusatzinfo | 2 Maps |
Verlagsort | Athens |
Sprache | englisch |
Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte |
Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie | |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme | |
Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie | |
ISBN-10 | 0-8214-2583-8 / 0821425838 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-8214-2583-1 / 9780821425831 |
Zustand | Neuware |
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
aus dem Bereich
Erinnerungen
Buch | Softcover (2024)
Pantheon (Verlag)
CHF 22,40