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Islands Of The Abject: Absence, Trauma And Memory In The Cemetery Island., Emma A. Sheppard-Simms Ms

Landscapes of Violence

Cemetery islands–islands of death–are simultaneously real places as well as symbols of the ways in which death has been marginalized in the modern city. Since the nineteenth century, cemeteries on islands have tended to be quietly invisible places, reserved for the bodies of those who, in life, occupied the margins of human society: the deviants, the forgotten, the diseased and the insane.

Places such as Hart Island, the vast potter’s field of New York City and Poveglia, the island where Venice’s plague victims were sent to die, remain resolutely out of sight and mind, hidden behind the shiny …