Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja (review)

In late 2002, on the eve of the Iraq War, U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld led a campaign to convince military leaders, first responders, and the general public of the need for a nationwide smallpox vaccination. Arguing that Saddam Hussein had the means to weaponize the virus, Rumsfeld linked smallpox to western geopolitical narratives of a rogue, volatile Iraqi state by characterizing it as a kind of microbial terrorist, an unpredictable foreign agent against which Americans would preemptively need to defend themselves. However, as Neel Ahuja recounts in the introduction to Bioinsecurities, this "fearful rendering of smallpox as a nefarious, intentional enemy" ran up against a complication: namely, that smallpox had been eradicated in the 1970s, and thus had not existed in a natural environment for over two decades (4). Rather than signaling solutions to a real and present danger, Rumsfeld's appeal to vaccination instead conjured a specter of outbreak in order to convince a skeptical public to support an impending invasion of Iraq. In Ahuja's words, vaccination had been "transformed from a medical defense into a weapon" through a "spectacle of physical vulnerability that could be mobilized for the cause of war" (4).

Born out of entanglements between microbial species, non-human animals, and human populations drawn across various degrees of precarity, contexts of health securitization like this make up a complex physics of imperial force shaped around what Ahuja calls dread life: a "racialized channeling of the fear of infectious disease into optimism regarding the remaking of life through technical intervention" (6). In Bioinsecurities, dread life crafts intersecting articulations of race and species around imperial conditions of medical intervention and U.S. economic and territorial expansion throughout the long twentieth century (1870–present). Caught between the life-making and -taking enterprises of disciplinary and sovereign power, dread life negotiates the tensions between liberal humanist logics of disease prevention and the "capitalist geographies of racial differentiation" across which these logics were deployed by American empire in various Pacific, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and domestic theatres (6). Ahuja skillfully brings critical race theory and disability studies to bear on current post- and decolonial conversations to construct a rigorous analysis of U.S. expansion of lands, markets, and institutions in Hawaii, Panamá, Puerto Rico, Iraq, and Cuba. To do this, Ahuja unpacks the intimate exchanges biomedical power forges between nonhuman animals and human populations across time and space, as "the figures of the vivisected, the farmed, and the wild animal all [begin to] conjure the gothic risks of interspecies contact" (10). By genealogically reconstructing this "government of species," Bioinsecurities broadens the horizons of emerging animal studies scholarship to catalogue contact zones between human and non-human agents, such as mosquitoes penetrating the skin, microbial species nesting in the body, and primates resisting confinement in labs and research facilities. In so doing, the book overturns anthropocentric assumptions about relations between (non)human bodies and their environments.

Much of Bioinsecurities centers around carceral contexts of racialized medical intervention. From quarantine measures against Hansen's disease (leprosy) in late nineteenth-century Hawaii to the internment of Haitian refugees in 1990s Guantanamo, Ahuja uncovers how technologies of biomedical control have merged strategies of repression and humanitarianism to secure U.S. political and economic influence across the globe. Chapters on the prevention of venereal disease in U.S.-occupied Panamá, vivisection of macaques in Cold War Puerto Rico, and threats of weaponized smallpox during the War on Terror further portray human agents within transnational and transspecies circuits of biopower, with microscopic bodies of viruses and bacteria rounding out a menagerie of nonhuman species—primates, mosquitoes, rats—to paint a more complete picture of U.S. public health policy. Throughout each of these critiques, routes of medical power constitutively figure alongside narratives of resistance to imperial medicalization and environmental destruction. By evoking the stories of hunger-striking refugees, anti-imperial sex workers, and recalcitrant rhesus macaques (to name a few), Ahuja exposes variously connected racial, gender, and...