Abstract
The academic field of criminology is implicitly colonizing. Criminology’s positivism in particular was founded through Western Europe’s colonizing empires and has, for hundreds of years, been growing and instituting the legacies of white supremacy through which these empires gain strength (Agozino 2003). The nature of criminology is one whereby colonizing knowledges are produced through a process of conquest: conquest of the colonized (now named “criminal,” “antisocial,” or “at risk” by criminologists) and the communities in which we reside, conquest of conceptions of oneself and “the other,” and, finally, conquest of the definitions and expectations we have of justice. Implicit to Western Europe’s colonization and criminology’s research on who is at risk of becoming “criminal,” is the colonial gaze (Fanon 1967), a violent process of voyeurism that requires captivity enabling colonial subjects accessible for dissection (literally and figuratively) in search of Western Europe’s justification for the bloodshed of its conquests.
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Notes
- 1.
There are many variations in the English spelling of Sara Baartman. Her first name, Saartjie was given to her by Dutch captors: “Saar” meaning servant and “tjie” a suffix used by the Afrikaners as a diminutive. Her first name translates into “little servant.” Her last name Bartman, Baartman, and Bartmaan means bearded man, and within the context of Afrikaners politics and phonetics is synonymous with savage. She was named the little servant savage by her captors, and for these reasons many who write about her drop the “tjie” suffix and simply refer to her as Sara or Sarah. (Willis 2010). The number of “a”s in her last name is fluid as the Dutch translation into English has been interpreted in varying manners. In this chapter, I refer to her as Sara Baartman in my writing, but maintain the spellings used in direct quotes from other publications.
- 2.
Carrier and Walby (2015) published a strong critique of biosocial theories of crime that generated a published response from biosocial criminologists (Heylen et al. 2015). In this paper, I extend Carrier and Walby’s rebuttal to that response through a larger critique of positivist criminology as an implicitly colonizing enterprise.
- 3.
Lombroso’s student Raffaele Garofalo coined the term “criminologia” in Italian, which translates into “criminology” in English (Garofalo 1914).
- 4.
Williams and McShane (2013) highlight the transition from biological into positivist criminology as a revolutionary break in theory but fail to point to the similarities that tie all positivist theory together. They also fail to articulate the racial science foundations of all positivist theories and instead suggest that the original works of the Chicago School of Thought, Anomie Theory (and its corollary in the USA, strain theory), Subcultural Theories of Crime and Differential Association theorists, regardless of their being written at the height of apartheid in the USA did not speak directly to racial segregation. This is endemic in the hundreds of Introduction to Criminology Theory textbooks I have read over the course of teaching criminological theory for the past 9 years.
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Saleh-Hanna, V. (2017). 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: Wilson, J., Hodgkinson, S., Piché, J., Walby, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Tourism. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56135-0_33
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