Carceral Archipelago and Gulag of Grief

Abstract

This chapter explores the contemporary politics of death during the COVID-19 crisis through a discussion of Hart Island – New York City’s public cemetery. The state-owned graveyard on Hart Island, located in Long Island Sound, New York, is a graveyard for New York’s poor, unclaimed or unknown dead – what is commonly known as a ‘potter’s field’. Hart Island is the ninth potter’s field in New York; its location on the outskirts of the city echoes the state history of public burials that situates graveyards on the fringe and removed to the edges of New York. Since the state acquired the island in 1869, it has accommodated penal, welfare and healthcare programs, which established various buildings, whose ruins and traces remain as carceral scars on the island’s landscape. The chapter explores the contemporary tensions around managing the island in the face of mass death and accompanying grief that echoes a difficult past. It discusses this challenging new terrain in the context of Hart Island’s history, and how the glut of death in the city has been navigated, as well as reflecting concerns about ritualistic mourning, funeral rites, access to public cemeteries, memorialization of the dead and building preservation. The chapter argues that, far from being a novel post-pandemic landscape, what is central to Hart Island is the enduring politics of death and the dead that lie at the heart of both the COVID-19 crisis and the tradition of public burials in potter’s fields.