Recasting the technologies of the carceral empire: India, South Africa, and the political paradoxes of post-colonial citizenship

If India in the 19th century was the global laboratory for enduring Utilitarian experiments in carceral government, South Africa played the same role – informed by the racist priorities of Atlantic Progressivism – in the 20th. The intellectual and institutional histories of these two sites of imperial government have strongly shaped each other, and – over the last decade – they have converged on an apparently similar model of biometric citizenship. The administrative, intellectual and political histories of the two countries are, however, also very different.

• Keith Breckenridge
• Carceral State
• Science Technology and Public Policy
• Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program
• STPP
• Behind Walls, Beyond Discipline: Science, Technology, and the Carceral State