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  • Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja
  • Sarah D. Wald
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species, by Neel Ahuja. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. Xix + 228 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-6063-6.

Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species argues that disease control in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries extends the reach of U.S. empire into the control of biological life. Ahuja blends literary and visual analysis, archival research, and a spatial approach to power in an interdisciplinary tour de force that exemplifies the best of American studies [End Page 474] scholarship. Geographically, the monograph moves across multiple sites of empire from Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay and from Panama City to Cayo Santiago in Puerto Rico. In promoting both a transborder and transspecies approach to the relations between public health and empire, Bioinsecurities not only furthers our understanding of each, but also adds a nuanced attention to race and empire to contemporary scholarship in animal studies and the environmental humanities, in this way recalling recent monographs by Mel Chen and Claire Jean Kim.1

Foundational to this work is a concept the author terms "the government of species." This phrase conveys the ways that states intervene to manage life as well as how the agency of various species and their adaptations and entanglements with other species shapes and governs the world of politics. Ahuja advances at least three claims related to the concept of "the government of species." First, U.S. empire has been molded by the interactions of microbial species, nonhuman animals, and human populations in uneven and unequal interactions. Second, the imperial state gains public acceptance and support by advancing a sense of bodily risk through racialized epidemics. In this way, racialized disease vectors, managed through "the government of species," are central to the justification, maintenance, and expansion of U.S. empire. Ahuja coins the term dread life to capture the "racialized channeling of fear of infectious disease into optimism regarding the remaking of life through technological intervention" (6).

Finally, Ahuja suggests that attending to microbial and nonhuman life through this framework provides an antidote to the concepts of the universal that increasingly appear in the environmental humanities, especially the new materialism and discussions of the Anthropocene. As Ajuha explains, "As the idealism of the global is transcended by figurations of planetary crises of human security in the form of extinctions, resource depletion, climate change, and epidemic disease, postcolonial critique is confronted with new holisms (the human as species, the Anthropocene, planetary) that risk masking the precarious grip of empire's reproduction of contained forms of life" (202). It is precisely the work of scholarship like Ahuja's to unmask the "government of species" that so profoundly shapes planetary crises, its uneven effects, and the resultant logics of security through which empire justifies and expands itself.

Ahuja's argument develops through five case studies that attend to entangled ecologies justified by the racialized motivations of the security state. For those readers who find themselves less captivated by the discussion of biopolitics, necropolitics, and new materialism in the preface and introduction, I urge you to continue into the case studies, which are well-grounded in their historical and geographical contexts. Each chapter could easily act as a stand-alone reading in an undergraduate course. [End Page 475]

The first two chapters of the book concern the transmission of bacteria and viruses in the context of territorial expansion in which the United States attempts to segregate racialized populations within occupied territories operated as a strategy of empire. The first chapter focuses on Hansen's disease (leprosy) in Hawaii. Ahuja examines the enforcement of segregation and treatment (without informed consent) of "lepers" at Moloka'i as an example of ways that claims to a benevolent empire that promoted universal health relied on racialized fears of contagion and operated through a strategy of quarantine. The resistance by those at Moloka'i and those whom the settler state attempted to segregate at Moloka'i suggests that medical noncompliance operated as a form of resistance and survival in the face of settler colonialism...

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