Description
Book SynopsisIn
Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja shows how twentieth-century U.S. imperial expansion was dependent on controlling the spread of disease through the transformation of humans, animals, bacteria, and viruses into living theaters of warfare and securitization.
Trade Review"[T]he histories Ahuja offers in
Bioinsecurities can help us to move away from the default mode of racialized panic toward more critical discourses and practices of care in the context of epidemics that cross borders and harm unevenly." -- Martha Kenney * Feminist Formations *
"After decades of publications on biosecurity, Ahuja’s title—
Bioinsecurities—promises something different. . . . Ahuja has five or six analytic balls in the air at once. It is the genre that encourages and allows this, and the scholarly juggling should be applauded. The book is not and should not be read as a history of medicine, and yet it will profitably be read by medical historians." -- Alison Bashford * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *
“The book navigates wide-ranging cultural, scientific, and state archives with stunning clarity, all without compromising the complexity of its argument. As a result,
Bioinsecurities carves out fresh possibilities for the medical humanities, as novels and short stories, films and photographs, memoirs and epistles appear side-by-side with government reports, immigration acts, and lab research to document tensions and struggles inhering the biopolitical relations of a modern U.S. security state.” -- James Fitz Gerald * symploke *
“
Bioinsecurities is an important book that speaks to the intertwined racial projects of military, imperial securitization, and disease control, which is particularly timely.” -- Claire Laurier Decoteau * Technology and Culture *
"Incisive vivisection of the interspecies politics of American empire and global biosecurity. . . . 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. . . . 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." -- Shanon Fitzpatrick * Journal of American Studies *
"
Bioinsecurities describes with vivid detail how empire operates on a scale that is at once global and microscopic, stretching from the Hawai’ian territo-ries to the Panama Canal Zone to US-occupied Iraq." -- Russ Castronovo * American Literature *
“This is a theoretically ambitious project that draws on both biopolitics and posthumanism—two bodies of thought that have tended to sit somewhat uneasily together....
Bioinsecurities makes a valuable contribution to understanding the nexus of imperial power, species, and the human.” -- Courtney Addison * New Genetics and Society *
Table of ContentsPreface: Empire in Life vii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. Dread Life: Disease Interventions and the Intimacies of Empire 1
1. "An Atmosphere of Leprosy": Hansen's Disease, the Dependent Body, and the Transoceanic Politics of Hawaiian Annexation 29
2. Medicalized States of War: Venereal Disease and the Risks of Occupation in Wartime Panamá 71
3. Domesticating Immunity: The Polio Scare, Cold War Mobility, and the Vivisected Primate 101
4. Staging Smallpox: Reanimating Variola in the Iraq War 133
5. Refugee Medicine, HIV, and a "Humanitarian Camp" at Guantánamo 169
Epilogue. Species War and the Planetary Horizon of Security 195
Notes 207
Bibliography 231
Index 249
