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“Thisdescription,”saysdaCunhaofhismapsofrubberestates,“isthemonstrousimage
of a tormented society.” Maps articulate many different, subtle iconographies of power:
the power “over” the map exerted by patrons and politics, the power expressed “with”
the map—the administrative and military dimensions, including the extensions of “jur-
idical powers” and symbolic icons and naming. The third arena of power in maps re-
volvesaroundwhatJ.B.Harleycallsthepower“internal”totheknowledgesystemsthat
go into maps, their relation to other scientific practices of production of maps—what is
included and what isn't, the hierarchies of importance, and so on—and how these ex-
press control over the way the world is imagined through cartographic “conditions of
maps work as social metaphors and descriptions of the means of control, is relatively
clear because he kindly provides us with texts for reading them, first as a spatial techno-
logy and next as a kind of social death.
MichelFoucault'sdiscussionin
Discipline andPunish
remainsoneofthebenchmarks
forunderstandingthesocialandspatialmechanismsofJeremyBentham'sprisondesign,
the Panopticon, and remains among the most powerful metaphors and analogues for ex-
plaining the nature of power and control through surveillance. The character and ubi-
quity of surveillance involve an extension of “carceral cultures” into the realm of every-
day production and social management, a continuum including the microphysics of
powerinmoderninstitutionsandbureaucracies.Indeed,Benthamhimselfsawtheutility
of his architecture for hospitals, workhouses, factories, and schools as well as for penit-
entiaries.
Whilemodernsocialtheoristsemphasizeddisciplineexertedbythebuiltenvironment
and the controlling “gaze,” practitioners of the punitive in the late eighteenth and espe-
cially the nineteenth centuries were concerned with quite a different form for control of
deviant populations: the tropical penal colony. Studies of colonialism and slavery gener-
ally have not been particularly interested in what seemed overall to be small-scale and
minor variations on much grander forms of imperial integration, but the idea of trans-
portingconvictstodistanttropicalplacesasforcedlaborwasanappealingideaifslavery
orfreecolonistsettlementwerenotpossibleforwhateverreason.Thepenalcolonyitself
resonated with colonial powers because they could address the problems of deviance in
themetropoleandthelaborproblemsofthetropicswithonegriminstitution,aswehave
seen in the case of French Guiana.
While convicts were the intended population for Europe's tropical penal colonies, it
is useful to remember that not every a prisoner was a criminal. The structural changes
implied in emerging capitalist relations and enclosure in rural areas and the rise of ag-
gressive urban industrialization created a class of migrants and the dispossessed, who
thronged cities and were caught up in and survived in the economic marginalia now
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