Carolyn Strange

SHADES OF DARK TOURISM Alcatraz and Robben Island

Abstract Former sites of punishment and incarceration have become a popular tourist experience as defunct prisons are converted into museums or heritage sites. Among the most prominent are Alcatraz in the United States, and Robben Island in South Africa. While some theorists might categorize such practices as “dark tourism,” this paper argues for an analysis that accounts for the multiple shades of penal history marketing and interpretation. Drawing on policy documents, onsite observations, tourist surveys, and interviews with museum staff, the paper explores how multi-hued forms of interpretation have been produced, not only through shifting priorities of memory managers, but also the expectations of tourists and the agendas of external interest groups.

Asylum–Seekers and National Histories of Detention

The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum–seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia’s race–based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory detention and protests against it. Quarantine–detention and the internment of “enemy aliens” in wartime are historic precedents for the current detention of asylum–seekers. Importantly, in both carceral practices, non–criminal and often non–citizen populations were held in custody en masse and without trial. Quarantine, internment and incarceration of asylum–seekers are substantively connected over the twentieth century, as questions of territory, security and citizenship have been played out in Australia’s histories of detention.

Thinking historically about public health

This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, explaining public health policy of the past purely in medical or epidemiological terms ignores evidence that it was rarely, if ever, designed solely on medical grounds at the time.

The Undercurrents of Penal Culture: Punishment of the Body in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada

In the wake of Foucaults provocative philosophical contributions to the study of discipline and punishment, social and legal historians no longer narrate penal history as a straightforward tale of moral and political progress. In its place is a schematic picture of a large-scale retreat from the body to the prison as the prime site of punishment. Historiographical proclivities perpetuate that image: early modernists tend to concentrate on the Bloody Code and similar regimes of terror, whereas historians of the twentieth century specialize in studies of regulatory modes of punishment and “normalization.” These latter works include histories of reformatories, family courts, social workers, psychiatric experts—in short the institutions and agents that best instantiate the reorientation toward disciplining the soul and governing the self. Scholars who study corporal and capital punishment in the twentieth century would seem to have nothing to add, other than to remark that there were exceptions in the wider history of penal change.

Transgressive Transnationalism: Griffith Taylor and Global Thinking

Abstract Griffith Taylors inflammatory role in Australian public debate over settlement, economic development and immigration policy has been viewed through a national historiographical lens. However a transnational perspective casts his career and ideas in a new light. His intellectual foundations in geology and natural history and his world travels inspired his global thinking. In a period of insular nationalism in the 1910s and 1920s his global perspective was transgressive, though far from progressive. Giving this figure of national import a transnational turn demonstrates the capacity of transnational analysis to invigorate, rather than supplant, national historiographies.

Hybrid history and the retrial of the painful past

If ‘the primary impetus’ of reality television is to entertain (Holmes and Jermyn, 2004: 2), what ethical implications flow from its inherently hybrid aesthetics? This article addresses this question by examining the 2002 televised ‘retrial’ of Louis Riel, a man executed by the Canadian government in 1885. The retrials producers encouraged viewers to vote (through a website) on the merits of Riels conviction ‘according to the laws of Canada today’. As an aesthetic form that diverted and informed the audience, the programme was a test of ‘post-documentarys’ ethical dimensions. In this case it was not hybridity of form and intent that undermined the programmes potential to effect corrective justice; rather the deliberate insertion of false information about the death penaltys application misrepresented the criminal justice past and present.

Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as art against torture

Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (ACO) has generated considerable debate over the effects of violence and its representation, but its depiction of torture has inspired little scholarly consideration of the film as art against torture. Produced in the early 1970s, it expressed the era’s wariness of liberal states’ potential to abuse power and to violate individual rights in the name of social good. The aversion therapy to which the main character is subjected was not the stuff of fantasy but was familiar to contemporary critics of the penal welfare complex and the covert tactics of the Cold War. ACO resonates anew in the early twenty-first century, as officially sanctioned torture, justified in the so-called Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), provides fresh cause to question what is sacrificed in the name of security.

Postcard from Plaguetown: SARS and the Exoticization of Toronto

‘“Bad news travels like the plague. Good news doesn’t travel well”’. While this epigram might have appeared in an advertising or marketing textbook, they were the words a Canadian politician chose to explain why the federal government sponsored a Toronto rock concert in the summer of 2003. As the Senator stated, 3.5 million dollars was a small price to pay for an event held to restore confidence in a city struck by SARS. The virus — first diagnosed in Toronto in March 2003 — had already claimed 42 lives; international media coverage of the outbreak had strangled the economy. While public health officials imposed quarantine and isolation measures to combat the spread of SARS bureaucrats and business leaders were equally active, treating the virus as an economic crisis caused by negative publicity. ‘SARSstock’, as locals dubbed the concert, was one of many events prescribed to repair and revitalize the city’s image post-SARS. By drawing close to half a million fans with big name musicians, including The Rolling Stones, it provided Canadian and US newspapers and television outlets with a splashy ‘good news’ item. Local media commented that the concert gave Torontonians a much-needed tonic. As the Toronto Star declared, it proved to the world that ‘life and business here rock on’.1

The battlefields of personal and public memory: Commemorating the Battle of Saratoga (1777) in the late nineteenth century

The commemoration of the Battle of Saratoga (1777) a century after the pivotal Revolutionary victory illuminates the imbrication of public and personal memory in the politics of late nineteenth-century patriotic commemoration. The fiscal challenges faced by the white elites who stewarded the project and the compromises they were forced to make expose the uncertainties of public commemorative projects, a theme overlooked in foundational scholarship on patriotic public memory. Given the frequent failure of monument projects in an era before governments led heritage planning, the significance of individuals to the fulfillment of ambitions warrants greater consideration. Using a microhistorical approach, this paper analyzes the Saratoga Monument Board members’ ambitions, promotional strategies, and improvisations, prompted in part by an issue unique to this Battle: how to deal with Benedict Arnolds significant role in the Americans’ victory over the English? The Boards sole female trustee, Ellen Hardin Walworth, confronted a similar challenge: how to remake her life after surviving a scandalous domestic tragedy? The interweaving of their stories and strategies highlights the ways in which the cultivation of Revolutionary memory served both political and personal attempts at reconstruction without fully managing to resolve the conflicted past. Thus, scholars must factor individuals’ unique connections to the past into the broader structural characteristics of patriotic commemoration in histories of public memory and its orchestration.

Adjusting the Lens of Honour-Based Violence: Perspectives from Euro-American History

There is nothing new about violence perpetrated in honour’s name, or prompted by its perceived loss. Historical and anthropological evidence, together with religious texts, indicate that honour’s association with violent action is widely shared (Muchembled, 2012; Welchman and Hossain, 2005). To acknowledge this does not lead to the bleak conclusion that this association is unbreakable, or that emotions and thoughts surrounding honour inevitably produce violent action. Honourable behaviour is also a pro-social attribute when it takes the form of selflessness and the protection of the vulnerable from harm (Appiah, 2011). So we see that peace-keepers who risk death to care for refugees are lauded; hospitals that achieve high rates of organ transplants are given medals of honour; and brave individuals who pull strangers from burning ]buildings are praised in state ceremonies (Becker and Eagly, 2004; Olsthoorn, 2005; Punch et al., 2007). In contrast, honour-based violence (HBV) involving harm to others or the self is morally labile: it can be condemned or revered, depending on its perpetrators, motivations and victims. These contextual elements point to HBV’s timefulness — that is, the meanings and values that individuals and collectivities attach to honour are bound in time: the forms, settings and appraisals of violent acts associated with honour are inherently historical, and are thus subject to change.