Reversing Criminology’s White Gaze: as Lombroso’s Disembodied Head Peers through a Glass Jar in a Museum foreshadowed by Sara Baartman’s Ghost

• In Event: Wanted (For Display), Dead or Alive: Interrogating the Ethics of Touring Prisons, Penal Museums and Captured Bodies

Abstract

In this paper I illustrate how assessing “White gaze” (Fanon, 1967) contributes well to scholarship on penal tourism. First I present colonialism’s founding dogmas to articulate the exploitative touristic relationships they construct between penal sites of punishment and their audiences or “penal spectators” (Brown, 2011) who consume revisionist stories and colonizing narratives put forth at these sites. Second I address how White gaze is institutionalized and institutionalizing in the power it receives when enacted through positivist criminology’s paradigm of conquest. Third I correlate this to criminology’s self-professed objective powers of dissection and address the evolutionary framework that biases all interpretations of colonialism’s conditions. I present three carceral sites to highlight these three points. The first is Saartjie Baartman. I discuss how her body was transformed into a carceral site consumed by penal tourists in the last 4 years of her life. Second is Cesare Lombroso’s museum in Turin, Italy. Inside is Lombroso’s disembodied head preserved inside a glass jar surrounded by the dismembered bodies of the victims of his research. The third carceral site is the discipline of criminology - a penal tourism of ideas, as they are practiced in positivist criminology’s discourses on race, crime, age, gender, and class.

Author

• Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth