Disciplinary spaces: spatial control, forced assimilation and narratives of progress since the 19th century

Cover -- Table of Content -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Spatial Control, Disciplinary Power and Assimilation: the Inevitable Side-Effects of ›Progress‹ and Capitalist ›Modernity‹ -- Chapter One: Into the West, into the East: Spatial Control and Property Relations -- Law into the Far West: Territorial Rights, Indigenous Peoples and Spatial Imagination in the Baptism of the Brazilian Nation-State (1930s-1940s) -- Land, People and Development Interventions: the Case of Rangelands and Mobile Pastoralists in Central Asia -- Re-ordering American Indians' Spatial Practices: The 1887 Dawes Act -- Chapter Two: Settlement Schemes and Development Dreams -- Villagization and the Ambivalent Production of Rural Space in Tanzania -- From Agrarian Experiments to Population Displacement: Iraqi Kurdish Collective Towns in the Context of Socialist ›Villagization‹ in the 1970s -- Spatial Control, ›Modernization‹ and Assimilation: Large Dams in Nubia and the Arabization of Northern Sudan -- Chapter Three: Spatial Control, Knowledge, and the ›Other‹ -- Prevailing Paradigms: Enforced Settlement, Control and Fear in Australian National Discourse -- Disciplining the ›Other‹: Frictions and Continuations in Conceptualizing the ›Zigeuner‹ in the 18th and 19th Century -- Chapter Four: Disciplinary Spaces as Counterinsurgency - Encountered and Countering -- Scorched Earth Campaigns, Forced Resettlement and Ethnic Engineering: Guatemala in the 1980s -- Appropriating and Transforming a Space of Violence and Destruction into one of Social Reconstruction: Survivors of the Anfal Campaign (1988) in the Collective Towns of Kurdistan

This volume looks at territories such as reservations, model villages and collective towns as the spatial materialization of forced assimilation and "progress". These disciplinary spaces were created in order to disempower and alter radically the behavior of people who were perceived as ill-suited "to fit" into hegemonic imaginations of "the nation" since the 19th century.Comparing examples from the Americas, Australia, North and East Africa, Central Europe as well as West and Central Asia, the book not only considers the acts and legitimizing narrations of ruling actors, but highlights the agency of the subaltern who are often misrepresented as passive victims of violent assimilation strategies.