a weaponized landscape: access, memory, and denial on hart island

for 11.238J ethics of intervention: anthropological approaches completed
at MIT department of urban studies and planning in fall 2019

 

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?

 
 
 

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