Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species begins with an arresting black-and-white photograph of a lone rhesus macaque, half submerged in the sea, staring intently at the viewer. The wet monkey seems both very far from shore and jarringly close to the camera – an impression compounded by the absence of other visible life forms and the animal's evocatively anthropomorphic gaze. The scene, which depicts an escapee from a primate medical research colony established by the United States in Puerto Rico in 1939, feels simultaneously captivating and unsettling. This affect sets the right tone for Neel Ahuja's incisive vivisection of the interspecies politics of American empire and global biosecurity.
Scholars who study US empire – and those who live within it – have long noted how discourses of American exceptionalism and benevolence have produced adaptive relations of domination and entanglement. Decades of research on biopolitical governmentality inform our understandings about how imperial power is naturalized through regimes of population management that promise health and security to some while doling out death and destruction to others. Ahuja builds on this corpus of work, but directs our attention to the “interspecies zone of the political” (x), a lively, ever-morphing, and multi-scalar arena where biosocial exchanges between humans and other species (especially microbes) have given impetus and shape to American empire. In this arena, extraterritorial sovereignty is not merely enforced, defended, and defied; instead, it is where imperialism metastasizes and regenerates through processes of bio–necro collaboration that seek to racially order interspecies entanglements and the “field of life itself” (ix).
After a complex introduction (that may require rereading), Bioinsecurities unfolds roughly chronologically across five chapters that track the growth of US power from the late nineteenth century to the present by centering important disease interventions. Setting up comparisons across the time and space of American empire with a focus on Asia and the Americas, the case studies move between Hawaii and the Panama Canal Zone to Puerto Rico, Guantánamo Bay, Iraq, and beyond. In each instance, the work foregrounds “transborder and transspecies routes” (17) of contact and exchange where intercultural and interspecies intimacies converged and produced “outbreaks.” Ahuja analyzes how these outbreaks, which range from disease epidemics to the literal breaking out of animal and human bodies from sites of containment, were mobilized for specific political ends. To do so, the author draws together interdisciplinary theoretical and historical scholarship, and some original archival research, on various public-health interventions, systems of profiling and surveillance, and episodes of viral and vital warfare.
Ahuja's historical narrative is intertwined with close analysis of literary and media texts, which are framed as sites of intensification for anxieties about globalization as well as incitements to governing the human species and its ecologies through gendered technologies of race. In the early twentieth century, strategies of legal quarantine and military containment (e.g. the creation of a “leper colony” on Moloka'i, venereal-disease programs that targeted women in occupied Panama) were justified through representations of epidemiological risk that figured Indigenous and “native” bodies as Gothic threats to sanitized settler populations. Later, the antibiotic revolution of the early Cold War, which sought to engineer national immunity, produced different political and cultural configurations. Fighting diseases like polio required bioprospecting strategic animal resources from abroad and domesticating them, as well as conducting clinical trials on vulnerable human populations. The author argues convincingly that Hollywood cycles of mad-scientist and ape films were just as important as National Institute of Health policies in allaying anxieties about human–animal hybridity, medical vampirism, and the integration of foreign matter into the body politic. Another compelling chapter analyzes the poetics of staged bioterrorism response exercises, highlighting how media coverage of viral threats (e.g. from biological WMDs) justified policy outcomes of preemptive warfare and occupation.
In tracking these developments, Ahuja underscores the enormous asymmetries in power created by American empire's government of species; however, the chapters also show that racialized medical interventions and biosecurity politics gave rise to modes of resisting imperialism and rechanneling the workings of biopower from within its systems. In the early 1990s, for instance, Haitian refugees incarcerated at Guantánamo because they tested positive for HIV challenged medicalized defenses of their detainment and exclusion by writing affectively about vermin infestations and staging risky hunger strikes. Such examples show how both tactical and unintentional permutations and representations of interspecies contact can work to queer and reconfigure technologies of racial governance. Overall, however, Bioinsecurities reveals a scaling-up trend in the government of species. This insight helps explain the ongoing expansion of the US security state and its global institutions and circulations even during moments of purported decolonization and territorial contraction. Indeed, the epilogue forces readers to reflect on how empire in our contemporary moment “can retreat into the apparently neutral domain of life to flexibly regenerate forms of expansion” and new technologies of race, which are in turn bolstered by neoliberal capitalist markets; structured inequalities; and logics of austerity, immunology, and risk management (205).
Ultimately, Ahuja's work offers trenchant and timely political diagnoses that should attract a wide readership, particularly as it spans (and highlights the linkages between) the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields. While the book's prose anticipates an expert reader familiar with postcolonial theory, feminist science studies, critical race theory, cultural studies, and modern US history, Ahuja's case studies and close readings could certainly be incorporated into graduate instruction – and perhaps even advanced undergraduate courses if coupled with appropriate supplementary texts or primary sources – in and beyond American studies courses. With its comparative, multi-cited, and interdisciplinary analysis, Bioinsecurities offers an important and timely contribution to our understanding of the interspecies dimension of US empire and its possible futures.
