Huddled Masses: Death and Citizenship in New York City
type: CreativeWork
description: How can citizenship survive death? At Hart Island, New York City’s ‘massed’ grave cemetery for its unclaimed, unknown, and poor, the dead have historically been excluded from the realm of ordinary posthumous citizenship expected by their fellow New Yorkers. However, activists, relatives, and politicians are currently attempting to pull the Hart Island dead back into that realm. Their efforts have been complicated by multiple processes, including trench burials, isolation, penal control, lack of visitor access, and an absence of memorialization, all of which mark those buried on Hart Island as belonging to particular categories of people, less than full citizens. The deliberate nature of these processes indicates that the dead do not simply fall outside the bounds of ordinary posthumous citizenship but must be methodically placed outside them. This thesis shows how Hart Island’s practices have been made ordinary through more than 150 years of systemized bureaucracy, so can appear unremarkable to those most familiar with them. Yet people often react with great discomfort when they learn about Hart Island because it says something powerful about their city and about New Yorkers. I argue that for many, it juxtaposes painfully with their city’s compelling mythology of exceptional inclusion and liberal values by recalling a history of brutal disparity. I examine how, motivated by the social anxiety that Hart Island provokes, several projects have begun to recover Hart Island’s dead from their non-citizenship and re-embed them into the realm of normal posthumous relations. This includes political moves such as replacing the government department that manages the island (switching from Correction to Parks), pledging to increase public access, and reclaiming the dead rhetorically as New Yorkers, a term locals use as a gloss for citizens. What do New Yorkers understand as normal posthumous relations, and how are Hart Island’s dead excluded from them? What can this exclusion e…
abstract: How can citizenship survive death? At Hart Island, New York City’s ‘massed’ grave cemetery for its unclaimed, unknown, and poor, the dead have historically been excluded from the realm of ordinary posthumous citizenship expected by their fellow New Yorkers. However, activists, relatives, and politicians are currently attempting to pull the Hart Island dead back into that realm. Their efforts have been complicated by multiple processes, including trench burials, isolation, penal control, lack of visitor access, and an absence of memorialization, all of which mark those buried on Hart Island as belonging to particular categories of people, less than full citizens. The deliberate nature of these processes indicates that the dead do not simply fall outside the bounds of ordinary posthumous citizenship but must be methodically placed outside them. This thesis shows how Hart Island’s practices have been made ordinary through more than 150 years of systemized bureaucracy, so can appear unremarkable to those most familiar with them. Yet people often react with great discomfort when they learn about Hart Island because it says something powerful about their city and about New Yorkers. I argue that for many, it juxtaposes painfully with their city’s compelling mythology of exceptional inclusion and liberal values by recalling a history of brutal disparity. I examine how, motivated by the social anxiety that Hart Island provokes, several projects have begun to recover Hart Island’s dead from their non-citizenship and re-embed them into the realm of normal posthumous relations. This includes political moves such as replacing the government department that manages the island (switching from Correction to Parks), pledging to increase public access, and reclaiming the dead rhetorically as New Yorkers, a term locals use as a gloss for citizens. What do New Yorkers understand as normal posthumous relations, and how are Hart Island’s dead excluded from them? What can this exclusion e…
author: Raudon, Natasha
language: eng
keywords: citizenship, Hart Island, massed graves, memorialization, New York, ordinary posthumous citizenship, stigma
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2022-10
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:03Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.94459