| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, editors. Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion. (Routledge Studies in Modern History, volume 1.) New York: Routledge. 2003. Pp. xi, 240. $65.00.

The strength of collections of essays is partly derived from the quality of the writing and of the writers. This volume, edited by Carolyn Strange and Alison Bashford, certainly contains contributions from some excellent academics that provide important new perspectives. Mark Finnane returns to the issue of incarceration and mental illness that he first explored in the 1980s. He produces new evidence from Australia to support the argument that approaches to mental illness in colonial contexts in institutions of isolation were far more complex, ambitious, and sophisticated than was acknowledged by an earlier generation of writers. Clare Anderson's essay on the Andaman Islands views the way in which successive rulers of south Asia have constructed isolation on the islands and undermines their "imagined geographies" by referring to the experiences of those incarcerated there. The British viewed Indians as a superstitious lot who dreaded crossing the "black water" or "kala pani" to an offshore location, but Anderson shows that in reality many convicts opted for the islands for perfectly rational reasons. After independence, the islands were reinvented as a sacred site of Indian nationalism due to the imprisonment there of political prisoners during the struggle against the British. The irony of this is that the myth of "kala pani" has been revived by Indians eager to create a sense of suffering for their historical heroes, and this reinvention as a site of nationalist martyrdom has meant that many thousands of ordinary Indians detained there for criminal activities have been erased from the history of the place. Anderson's thoughts on this are particularly interesting given her recent work with the Mauritian Government, which is memorializing that island's convict past. Harriet Deacon's essay on spaces of isolation in South African history in the volume offers similarly acute reflections on this process of remembrance/reinvention of places of punitive isolation.

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