Secret Police Targets Encounter Their Files

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: Soyuz-The Research Network for Post-Socialist Studies

Brief Description

There’s nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are. Page after page subjects all your activities, all your motives, to a reading from an alien position embodied in a logic different from anything you recognize. Reading your file compels a gradual transformation in your relation both to it and to yourself. Moreover, it offers the possibility of understanding the workings of the secret police through their tracks in your life and your reactions to those tracks. The three papers in this session, by or about people who have studied their files (two from Romania, one from Poland), approach one or another of these points.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology/Cultural Studies

Chair

• Katherine M. Verdery, CUNY Graduate Center

Papers

• Research and Security in Romania, 1960-1975 - Keith Hitchins, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Reading a Police File under the Force of Law - Saygun Gokariksel, CUNY Graduate Center

• 'What Is a Target?' Notes from a Secret Police Surveillance File - Katherine M. Verdery, CUNY Graduate Center

Discussants

• Gail Kligman, UCLA

• Neringa Klumbyte, Miami U