Picturing Hart Island

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.During COVID lockdown, many became transfixed by drone footage of a mass grave on Hart Island, the U.S.’s largest potter’s field, which over 150+ years has absorbed more than 1 million burials, including Confederate POWs, the city’s unclaimed or ‘indigent’ poor, and victims of pandemics past. This essay interrogates pivotal acts of representational violence that have contributed to Hart Island’s profound stigmatization, focusing on early reportage, which was shaped by racial and class bigotries of nineteenth-century reform journalism. Establishing these ‘negative heritage’ logics and associations, it turns to recent work by journalists and affiliates of the island Hart Island Project (HIP) who have pursued more positive visual and social imaginaries. While haunted by these older logics, and inherited feelings of dread and shame, their activism has become an important locus of recuperative memory and even restorative justice, and may yet reshape the public imagination of the infamous “island of the dead.”

Political science · Intellectual Property Law