Abstract
My dissertation, The Committee's Report, analyses punishment, power and subject formation in three historical settings in twentieth-century Panamá. Instead of an omniscient narrator, I use fictional narrators, who interpret the archival documents, and debate their meaning. The text as a whole is therefore a pastiche, combining fictional and historical narrative. Chapter One, below, analyzes the construction of the penal colony on the Island of Coiba and its first years (1919–1930). The narrators disagree about the most appropriate historical framework with which to explain this project, and the historical depiction the reader encounters is therefore one of conflict.