Boven Digoel and Terezin: Camps at the Time of Triumphant Technology

摘要

This is not a comparison between the colonial isolation camp for the Indonesian Communists and Nationalists at Boven Digoel, New Guinea, and the Nazi concentration camp for the European (including Dutch) Jews in Terezin,Bohemia. It is an effort to place both camps, as two working apparatuses, on the scale of development and refinement of modern technologies of belonging (and destruction); thus, the scale may be more clearly understood. Subchapters—on body and clothing, on hearing, on seeing, and on the urban—suggest that this is an epilogue never written for my 2002 book Engineers of Happy Land: technology and nationalism in a colony.