The Committee's Report: Punishment, Power and Subject in 20th Century Panam

This work covers three historical contexts as it explores punishment, power and subject-formation in Panamanian history. To discuss these historical problems, the dissertation develops a new critical language.;Part I discusses the construction and first decades of the penal colony on the Island of Coiba (1919-1939). In analyzing this key element in the Liberal state-building project, the text asks what kind of subject the Liberals wanted to create, and what historically took place in the penal colony. Part II looks at the rule of strongman President Jose Remon Cantera (1947-55) and the epic public trial that followed his assassination (1955-58). The trial, which was supposed to restore justice and calm the public, ended up as a theatrical show of the corruption and ineptitude of the state. The work uncovers the formation of a legal consciousness during this period, and suggests that it fueled the anti-imperialist struggle as well as the anti-oligarchic fight. The last part of the work looks at the peasant movement Father Hector Gallego founded in a mountainous district of Veraguas between 1967 and 1971. The movement read its own struggle against the rural elite in light of the Bible, and used a radical interpretation of the past to fuel its cadre and orient its members.;None of these issues have received any serious scholarly attention, so this work opens up subjects in Panamanian history that have been unexplored. The main concern, however, is that in the three cases, the question of what really happened in the past is complicated by a whole set of problems of form and interpretative procedure. The thesis shows that these methodological problems were crucial to the historical actors themselves. It argues that social order depends on form---in social activity as well as in writing---and that historical struggles turn radical precisely when they challenge the social order's interpretative procedures.;More broadly, the work explores the implications of Michel Foucault's claims about the relation between power and knowledge. For Foucault, knowledge does not limit power. Rather, it produces certain kinds of power, directing its operation and enabling it to work more efficiently. Foucault's critique goes almost unquestioned in academia today. But if he is correct, is not every criticism, including Foucault's own work, always intertwined with the very institutions it analyzes?;In order to deal with this order of questioning, this dissertation takes a radical methodological approach. The historical and theoretical analyses are developed within a fictional framework, making the work a pastiche. Fictional characters, who struggle to determine which interpretation of the documents is correct, show that formal questions are at the heart of the processes of social organization, disciplining and subject-formation. Footnotes are used to signal which assertions in the text are based on sources, and which are part of the fictional apparatus. But the reader is nonetheless challenged to stay alert to various levels of meaning in a text that deconstructs itself, showing its own limitations, silences and fictions, at every turn.