Isolation

Places and Practices of Exclusion

Alison Bashford, Carolyn Strange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134391127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book examines the coercive and legally sanctioned strategies of exclusion and segregation undertaken over the last two centuries in a wide range of contexts. The political and cultural history of this period raises a number of questions about coercive exclusion. The essays in this collection examine why isolation has been such a persistent strategy in liberal and non-liberal nations, in colonial and post-colonial states and why practices of exclusion proliferated over the modern period, precisely when legal and political concepts of 'freedom' were invented. In addition to offering new perspectives on the continuum of medico-penal sites of isolation from the asylum to the penitentiary, Isolation looks at less well-known sites, from leper villages to refugee camps to Native reserves.

1

Isolation and Exclusion in the Modern World

An Introductory Essay

Alison Bashford and Carolyn Strange

From the transportation of convicts to the moral therapy of the insane, the techniques, rationales, targets and sites of exclusionary practices proliferated over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over this period state agencies and expert authorities refined their efforts to classify and coercively segregate people deemed to be undesirable or dangerous. As a critical project of modern government, ‘problem populations’ (those categorised as the mad, the infectious, the deviant or the unfit) were confined to specific isolated places, and were subjected to and subjectified by treatments that spanned correction, care and control.

Isolation and exclusion are issues that have inspired a rich tradition of scholarship particularly in sociological and anthropological literature, which examines rituals of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the drawing, maintenance and policing of boundaries between the desirable and undesirable. Exclusion is also examined in psychoanalytic, philosophical and literary studies that explore expressions of self/other, of alterity, difference and identity ¹ This collection of essays draws upon this multi-disciplinary literature but approaches isolation as an historical exercise of state power. First the chapters concentrate on coercive and legally sanctioned exclusionary strategies as well as the official and unofficial tactics of segregation within places of mandated isolation. Second, the essays focus on the ways in which a range of modern states have implemented and justified multiple means of isolation over the last two centuries.

The political and cultural history of this period raises a number of questions about coercive exclusion. Why has spatial isolation been such a persistent strategy for the management of problem populations in liberal and non-liberal nations, in colonial and post-colonial states? Why did practices of exclusion proliferate over the modern period, precisely when legal and political concepts of ‘freedom of movement’ and ‘liberty’ were invented and inscribed? What do places of coerced confinement mean for the authorities that build them and fund them, and for the communities in whose name they are maintained? Finally, how have the isolated themselves reconstituted places of exclusion through contestation and resistance? Moving beyond the conventional historiographical approach of studying only one form of coerced isolation, or one jurisdiction or a short span of time, this collection of essays, ranging from early modern Japanese leprosaria to contemporary ‘special colonies’ for Spanish Gitanos, provides a wider empirically textured canvas of inquiry.

Practices of exclusion emerged well before the modern period, and are far from limited to Western cultures, as historians and anthropologists have documented. As a result, we know a great deal about the exclusion of lepers outside town walls in medieval Europe,² as well as Indian spatial and bodily separations, for example.³ Other forms of isolation, notably the Jewish ghetto, spanned many centuries, the measures of regulation and restriction refining and changing within local legal systems. Nevertheless, the post-Enlightenment era was a watershed. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries definitively modern institutions of confinement emerged: the penitentiary, the asylum, the concentration camp, the training institute.⁴

Scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives have acknowledged the architectural, geographical and micro-managerial continuities between these different institutions of isolation: this is Foucault’s famous ‘carceral archipelago’, the modern reconstitution of the ‘Great Confinement’.⁵ Yet historians tend to study tactics and sites of coercive exclusion discretely, as though they were separate ‘islands’ for analysis.⁶ Moving beyond this generally compartmentalised approach requires the consideration of carceral institutions (the penitentiary, for example), in concert with other forms of coerced segregation that confine without walls or buildings (such as the Native reserve). Furthermore it requires analysing practices meant to punish and segregate, as well as techniques designed to cure and reintegrate in places of isolation. This is what the articles in this collection do: they leave aside questions about the historical origins of confinement to explore instead how modes of enforced isolation operated, proliferated and hybridised in the modern era, not just in Europe and North America but also in the colonial and non-Western world.

This introductory chapter works at two levels. First, it sets out the political and philosophical context in which practices of exclusions operated in modern polities, and liberal democracies in particular. Second, it shows how the essays in this collection instantiate and elaborate this connection. As social theorist Joel Kahn argues, ‘the modern must be understood to be embedded in particular cultural and historical circumstances’, neither purely nor exclusively Western.⁷ Cutting across modernity’s pluralities, however, are three key characteristics of enforced isolation in the modern era: the flexibility of rationales for segregation or confinement, which often move seamlessly between punishment, protection and prevention; the careful consideration of isolation’s architectural and spatial dimensions; and the subjectification of the isolated, both the official project of modern exclusion and a crucible for the cultivation of selfhood.

Isolation, Modernity and Liberalism

What separates moderns from their earlier counterparts or postmodern inheritors is not the impulse to classify and order, but the expectation, will and concerted attempt to order everything.⁸ That this utopic vision produced the dystopic Stalinist Soviet system and the Nazi Reich, which segregated and annihilated in the name of political and racial purity, casts a shadow over the study of coercive isolation. While the atrocities of totalitarian regimes have rightly commanded historians’ attention, the intellectual association between coercive isolation and authoritarian states can sometimes obscure the history of democratic liberal governments’ capacity to rationalise and implement exclusionary places and practices. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced the Gulag and the concentration camp, but they also gave us the sanatorium and the refugee camp—places dedicated to protecting and curing, yet employing oppressive measures and restricting movement in order to do so. Alongside the codification and expansion of rights and freedoms in the modern period, liberal democratic states funded more and different ways to isolate people considered a danger to themselves or to others.⁹ By the twentieth century, an array of legally mandated exclusionary practices classified and contained not only the bad, the sick and the mad but those deemed racially inferior, the intellectually unfit and, importantiy, the potentially dangerous.

In the post-Enlightenment West new political imaginings of ‘freedom’—the invention of ‘liberty’ as an inalienable right—created the very possibility of its denial as a new form of punishment. Historians of punishment have established that innovations in exclusionary practices and the proliferation of places of isolation occurred in the nation-states where political philosophies of democratic rights and freedoms first emerged.¹⁰ So, for instance, Philadelphia, the city that preserved the famed Liberty Bell, was also the city that established the model for penitentiaries in the midst of the American Revolution.¹¹ Confinement became not simply exclusion but the deprivation of newly enshrined freedoms-of movement, association, religion, expression and thought.¹² Precious rights, won through revolutionary struggles, could be stripped away if miscreants failed to obey the law. Once confined in ‘laboratories of virtue’, it was hoped, criminals would transform into law-abiding citizens.¹³ Thus, while methods of coerced isolation have long histories in many cultures, exclusionary practices took on new architectural forms and weighty new meanings in countries where ideals of individual freedom were extolled and where they were constitutionally inscribed.

Historiography on the rise of the welfare state in the West recounts the nowfamiliar story of governing authorities’ unprecedented commitment to the management of individuals and groups identified and classified as requiring care, correction and control. As government agencies assumed responsibility over sectors of life such as education and health, previously the responsibility of families, charities or parishes, isolation was not an aberration from liberal governance but central to its internal logic.¹⁴ Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries public monies were spent on costly building projects, and the staffing and maintenance of institutions dedicated to long-term isolation of populations requiring reform. As schemes of ‘normalisation’ were implemented, experts in the new human sciences and the emergent disciplines of psychiatry state medicine and criminology took on authoritative roles on the basis of their professed abilities to distinguish between the normal and the abnormal or the dangerous, and to classify and isolate people according to novel diagnoses of illness, immorality, criminality and deviance. The ‘dangerous’ became those who did not deserve, or those who could not be trusted with, the freedoms that responsible and healthy citizens enjoyed. In both liberal and totalitarian regimes, experts and government bureaucrats stretched the definition of ‘dangerousness’ to capture individuals who had not yet committed offences. Everyone from the disease carrier to the ‘pre-delinquent’ came to be confinable.

While medical and penal historiography rarely intersect, historical practices of correctionalism within prisons and the punitiveness of medical isolation in modern democracies are often difficult to distinguish. Public health, itself a modern enterprise closely tied to governance of populations was, and in certain contexts still is, an inherently spatialised set of practices. From early quarantine to the eighteenth-century ‘medical police’ to the health regulation of immigrants at national borders over the twentieth century,¹⁵ the medical and the penal have dovetailed as tactics to define and manage problem populations and as spatial strategies, involving precise geographies of isolation, similar imperatives towards internal segregation, and shared histories of the policing of boundaries of exile and enclosure. Geographically and coercively separating the ‘clean’ from the ‘unclean’ in pursuit of the greater health of nations was one formative site where emerging liberal states practised their new and sometimes effectively disputed powers of detention. As a result of what Nikolas Rose has called ‘the liberal vocation of medicine’,¹⁶ the modern liberal subject emerged in part through the contestation of governments’ capacity and right to detain and compulsorily treat the infected separately from the community.

Coerced exclusion is intricately connected with modernity, with citizenship, with territory, with biopolitical governance of national, colonial and postcolonial populations.¹⁷ The proliferation of prisons, asylums, isolation hospitals and racially segregated zones over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bears witness to the modern state’s ambition to track, know and manage populations. In liberal polities this socio-political ordering impulse was tied to the differential distribution of rights: restrictions on the freedom of some were justified by the protection of many others.¹⁸ Thus, as a tool for the improvement and management of irresponsible or undesirable populations, state-implemented isolation sits squarely inside classic liberal problematics of rights and obligations, wherein personal liberties and public benefits are constantly calibrated.

How were these governing objectives balanced and implemented, not only in the West but in those parts of the globe that fell under its expansionist desires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Political theorists note that from its origins, liberalism allowed for despotic rule over individuals and sub-populations deemed to be inadequate or irresponsible, thus either wilfully or not, forfeiting the rights of the liberal subject.¹⁹ As Mitchell Dean argues: ‘Liberal rule is completely consistent…with authoritarian rule of colonial societies in which populations are yet to attain the maturity required of the liberal subject.’²⁰ These general features of legally enforced isolation took on distinct characteristics as modern institutional practices of isolation emerged in Europe and North America and spread to their colonial ‘possessions’. In colonies that imagined themselves as ‘settler societies’, such as nineteenth-century Australia and Canada, modern developments in penal, medical and psychiatric institutional design and management were reproduced along metropolitan models. In African, Asian and South American spheres of colonisation, imperial experts and government agents selected outlying posts for the containment of both indigenous and home countries’ problem populations.²¹ Western techniques and rationales of exclusion were exported throughout the world, encountering, transforming and accommodating different populations, cultures and histories of isolation in the process. Hybrid practices of exclusion evolved in places with their own cultures of punishment and cure and their own histories of isolation techniques.²²

The explosion of post-colonial studies and critical race scholarship in recent decades has sharpened criticism of liberal democracies’ historic tendency to exclude and spatially contain. As David Goldberg puts it, drawing on the work of Bauman, Balibar and others, race is one of the ‘central conceptual inventions of modernity’.²³ The liberal paradox here is that as ‘modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality and fraternity…there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain’.²⁴ Access to rights and citizenship status were routinely denied in avowedly democratic states on the ground of race, both in colonial and metropolitan centres.

The Jewish ghetto or the indigenous reservation provide well-known strategies of coercive ordering of ‘others’ in the modern era.²⁵ As medical, psychiatric and penal historians have shown, rationales for exclusion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also encompassed concepts of mental or physical ‘unfitness’ and new notions of ‘dangerousness’.²⁶ Eugenically informed social government was embraced by British Fabians, North American liberals and Swedish social democrats enamoured with the rational project of social engineering. The modern fantasy of ultimate perfection, shared by authorities across political divides, was ‘necessarily asymmetrical and thereby dichotomising’, Peter Beilharz observes.²⁷ The institutional and geographical isolation of problem populations was a solution that modern totalitarian, socialist and social welfare states implemented in pursuit of that illusory goal.

To connect isolation strategies under liberal and totalitaria...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Isolation and Exclusion in the Modern World An Introductory Essay
• Part I Punitive Isolation Geographies and Subjectivities
• Part II Therapeutic and Preventive Isolation
• Part III Banishment, Exile and Exclusion
• Index