BARBED WIRE: A Political History

"Barbed wire excludes and includes. Its function is always to magnify the difference between the inside and the outside," writes historian and philosopher Razac in his brief but startling study of an emblematic innovation. First introduced in 1874 as an inexpensive means of fencing off U.S. prairie land, barbed wire quickly became not only a way to manage livestock but a means to contain Native Americans on reservations. Because of its mobility, low cost and extreme effectiveness, barbed wire was transformed—literally and metaphorically—into a staple of social regulation. Arguing that barbed wire is "the political management of space," Razac traces how it radicalized trench warfare during WWI (making trenches safer, but rendering the battle field far more dangerous) and, electrified, literally defined the space of Nazi concentration camps (later, it became "the symbol of the worst catastrophe of the century"). Used for more than just imprisonment or physical separation, barbed wire, Razac says, helped make "men's deaths... indistinguishable from their humiliation and their dehumanization." While he uses the American West, trench warfare and concentration camps as his most salient examples of the effect that barbed wire had on contemporary life and imagination, he also considers its "brutal, authoritarian" uses by the Allies in Japanese POW camps and in refugee camps from the Middle East to Kosovar. The simplicity and clarity of Razac's prose reinforces the enormous power and originality of his ideas, making this a vital work of cultural criticism. B&w photos. (July)