Abstract
Four times a week, New York’s unidentified and unclaimed dead were transported by truck to City Island, at the western end of Long Island Sound and part of Bronx Community District 10. The bodies, packed into unmarked pine boxes, were then loaded onto a ferry to be delivered to Hart Island a third of a mile away. People imprisoned at the nearby Rikers Island prison complex unloaded the boxes. Situated off the shore of New York City, 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 a psychiatric hospital, the island’s varied public use history has always primarily revolved around the containment and disposal of society’s most marginalized, both in life and in death. This chapter focuses on the spatial, political, and economic entwining of burial and imprisonment on Hart Island, in order to argue its specific landscape has lent itself particularly well to this weaponization—and that its troubled ownership pattern has rendered this weaponization all the more effective. It explores how landscapes can become implicated in challenging necropolitical processes and complicate and perpetuate cultural attitudes surrounding death, illness, and marginalization.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abel, Emily K. 1997. Taking the Cure to the Poor: Patients’ Responses to New York City’s Tuberculosis Program, 1894 to 1918. American Journal of Public Health 87 (11): 1808–1815.
Bashford, Alison. 2004. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Belcher, Ellen. 2021. New York Prisons and Jails: Historical Research. https://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/NYPrisons/NYCJails.
Bernstein, Nina. 2016. Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves. The New York Times, May 15, 2016, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html.
Boss, Pauline. 2000. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
City of New York Department of Corrections. n.d. Hart Island. Accessed 5 Jan 2022. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hartisland/index.page.
Cohen, Stanley. 2001. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Malden: Blackwell Publishers.
Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole, eds. 2004. The State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies. In Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
De Leon, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Translated from Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5: 46–49.
Freeman Gill John, 2020. Islands Created for Quarantines. The New York Times, 22 May 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/realestate/quarantine-hoffman-island-swinburne.html.
Kilgannon, Corey. 2018. Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field. The New York Times, 3 July.
Loorya, Alyssa, and Eileen Kao. 2017. ‘Documentary Study and Archaeological Assessment for the Hart Island, Bronx (Bronx County), New York – Shoreline Stabilization Project.’ http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/arch_reports/1773.pdf.
‘Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of Correction, the Parks Department, and the Department of Social Services.’ 2021.
Murdock, Sebastian. 2015. Island of the Dead Gets New Life As Mourners Visit Graves for First Time. Huffington Post, 21 July. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hart-island-visitors_n_55ad5328e4b065dfe89f1346.
Murray, Stuart J. 2006. Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life. Polygraph 18: 191–215.
New York City Council. n.d. Hart Island: The City Cemetery. New York City Council. Accessed 12 Jan 2022. https://council.nyc.gov/data/hart-island/.
New York Tribune. 1885. City of the Unknown Dead: Where Friendless Ones Are Buried—Scenes at Die Potter’s Field on Hart’s Island — 150 Bodies in a Grave. 12 July. https://www.proquest.com/docview/573235253/BB31223AD1354E5FPQ/1?accountid=12339.
Seitz, Sharon, and Stuart Miller. 1996. The Other Islands of New York City: A Historical Companion. Woodstock: The Woodstock Press.
The Hart Island Project. n.d. The Hart Island Project. Accessed 12 Jan 2022. https://www.hartisland.net/.
‘The Quarantine Question.’ The New York Times, 18 March 1859. https://www.proquest.com/hnpnewyorktimes/docview/91469435/238E013B0D7B4984PQ/1?accountid=12339.
Vural, Leyla. 2019. Potter’s Field as Heterotopia: Death and Mourning at New York City’s Edge. Oral History 47 (2): 106–116.
Walshe, Sadhbh. 2015. ‘Like a Prison for the Dead’: Welcome to Hart Island, Home to New York City’s Pauper Graves. The Guardian, 3 June 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/hart-island-new-york-city-mass-burial-graves.
Willis, Graham D. 2018. The Potter’s Field. Comparative Studies in Society and History 60 (3): 538–568.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kenney, F.L. (2024). ‘A Prison for the Dead’: Hart Island and Spatial Histories of Marginalization. In: Coleclough, S., Michael-Fox, B., Visser, R. (eds) Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40732-1_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-40731-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-40732-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)