fiona l. kenney

Situated off the coast of the Bronx, east of City Island, Hart Island is a mile long and has served as the site of numerous interventionist projects since the mid-nineteenth century. From quarantine stations to psychiatric hospitals to a homeless shelter, the island’s varied public use history has always primarily revolved around the disposal of liminal bodies both dead and alive. The island’s geography and constitutive border have allowed for the weaponization of the landscape, and its troubled ownership pattern has rendered this weaponization all the more effective. This paper focuses on three specific stages of its use history to argue that the island has consistently been a spatial embodiment of denial. As a quarantine site, as a prison and the sustained site of prison labour, and as a mass grave for unclaimed and unidentified bodies, it has allowed for dark moments in New York’s history to be denied. In each case, marginality and disposal as necessary to the effectiveness of its use. How has denial emerged as the primary tool for the maintenance of biopower on Hart Island? How have state narratives of public protection attempted to justify the spatial eradication of liminal populations, and thus the denial of these populations’ place in collective memory? Further, how has denial of access—both geographic and informational—served to maintain the illegibility of the populations marginalized on the island?

references

Abel, Emily K. “Taking the Cure to the Poor: Patients' Responses to New York City's Tuberculosis Program, 1894 to 1918.” American Journal of Public Health 87, no. 11 (1997): 1808-15.
Bashford, Alison. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Bernstein, Nina. “Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves.” The New York Times. 15 May 2016. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html
“City Cemetery Hart Island (Potter’s Field).” Corrections History. Accessed December 13, 2019. http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/hart.html
Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. 
Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole. “The State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies.” In Anthropology in the Margins of the State, edited by Veena Das and Deborah Poole, 3–33. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004.
De Leon, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
Foucault, Michel. “About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry.” Translated by Alain Baudot and Jane Couchman. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 1, no. 1 (1978a): 1-18. 
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Random House, 1978b. 
Foucault, Michel. "Society Must be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976. Translated by David Macey. New York, NY: Picador, 2003.
Gatti, Gabriel. “An Orderly Landscape of Remnants: Notes for Reflecting on the Spatiality of the Disappeared.” In Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance, and Exception, edited by Estela Schindel and Pamela Colombo, 176-87. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.
“Hart Island.” City of New York Department of Corrections. Accessed December 13, 2019. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doc/about/hart-island.page
Kilgannon, Corey. “Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field.” The New York Times, July 3, 2018.
Laqueur, Thomas W. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Mills, Catherine. Biopolitics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.
Murdock, Sebastian. “Island of the Dead Gets New Life as Mourners Visit Graves for First Time.” The Huffington Post. Last modified July 22, 2015. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hart-island-visitors_n_55ad5328e4b065dfe89f1346.
Murray, Stuart J. "Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life." Polygraph 18 (2006): 191-215.
Seitz, Sharon, and Stuart Miller. The Other Islands of New York City: A Historical Companion. Woodstock, VT: The Woodstock Press, 1996.
United States Census Bureau. “Population Estimates: New York City, New York; Bronx County (Bronx Borough), New York; Kings County (Brooklyn Borough), New York; New York County (Manhattan Borough), New York; Queens County (Queens Borough), New York; Richmond County (Staten Island Borough), New York.” Quick Facts Tables. Accessed December 10, 2019. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewyork.
Walshe, Sadhbh. “'Like a Prison for the Dead': Welcome to Hart Island, Home to New York City's Pauper Graves.” The Guardian. Last modified June 3, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/hart-island-new-york-city-mass-burial-graves.
Willis, Graham D. “The Potter’s Field.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 3 (2018): 538-568.