A Deadly Embrace: Of Colony and Camp

This chapter argues that the concepts of “colony” and “camp” shared a joined history. They make up a conceptual matrix, twin formations that borrow and blend essential features of their protective, curative, and coercive architecture. Tracing a new genealogy of the famous nineteenth-century colonies agricoles (institutions for delinquent and abandoned youth in Europe) that Foucault identified as the signature sites of “the art of punishing that is still more or less our own,“ it looks to these colonies as part of the imperial history of the “managed mobilities” that manifested in recruitment, containment, violence, and settlement. Reimagining the imperial breadth of the “carceral archipelago” entails redrawing a virtual archive of imperial logics and their conceptual maps.