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

Neel Ahuja's Bioinsecurities expertly weaves together a series of historical cases to provide evidence of his analysis that the international policing of interspecies relations is a central feature of the biopolitical governmentality of empire. As such, he brings together critical posthumanism, bio/necropolitics, and global studies of empire. While this particular theoretical fusion defines the book series in which Bioinsecurities is featured, Ahuja's contribution to this field is unique. In the name of disease control and health security, empires (and in this book, the U.S. empire in particular) have defended not only the boundaries of a nationalized biopolitical community but an idealized, autonomous human body. As Foucault argued so cogently, race (and the defense of the racialized species body) is how death is inscribed within the biopolitical operations of the state (2003). Ahuja argues that the construction and protection of the white, settler body motivates the militarized "government of species." Ahuja explains: "Disease interventions at the borders of expanding US influence deployed models of territorial warfare to defend the body in space, but also transformed the body's actual biological processes into a site of management and optimization using advanced biosciences and animal research subjects" (p. 5). The racialized fear of infectious disease and interspecies interpenetration propels the investment in technological interventions aimed at optimization, purification, and the remaking of life itself—an affective, temporal process Ahuja labels "dread life."

Ahuja's historical cases are well chosen and illustrate various features of the government of species. Chapter 1 argues that the management of Hansen's disease reflects broader imperial imperatives for the annexation and incorporation of Hawai'i. The desire to contain and control disease through quarantine was part and parcel of the United States' imperial agenda, but it worked in tension with its own "exceptionalist myth" of a "benevolent" (p. 19) and civilizing empire, thus instigating a shift from segregation to contingent incorporation (a form of exclusionary inclusion). Chapter 2 discusses the gendered control of venereal disease in the Panama Canal Zone during the world wars. Rather than quarantine, here we see the militarized production of sanitized zones in which soldiers could operate free of disease. Ahuja labels this a "medicalized state of war" in which soldiers could move disease-free across the borders of occupation once local women's sexualities were policed and controlled, thereby transplanting the boundary of occupation onto the very bodies of local women. In Chapter 3, Ahuja explores the trade and sale of rhesus macaques for the development of the polio vaccine. He argues that the development of high-tech pharmaceuticals facilitated a move away from large-scale military projects to eradicate disease toward the micro-politics associated with attuning the bodies' internal systems—thus eradicating the need to control the environment in order to safeguard the survival of the species (p. 103). And yet, the procurement of monkeys for research and vivisection relied upon colonial relations and as those were destabilized, the United States was forced to domesticate primate research. As a result, the monkey became a cultural figure, representing scientific progress and a shared kinship. Chapter 4 explores how fears of weaponized smallpox became the rationale and justification for the invasion of Iraq because it capitalized upon dormant fears of the reemergence of the only fully eradicated disease in human history. Ironically, these fears were ignited by a resurrection of the mythic "vanishing American Indian" and the role genocidal disease played in U.S. colonial settler history. The return of smallpox, Ahuja argues, reflected anxieties about the "changing territorializations of US empire" (p. 134) in the post-Soviet era, where the "Islamic terrorist" is imagined as ubiquitous and uncontrollable. Chapter 5 analyzes the confinement of HIV-infected Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay from 1991–94. Ahuja argues that the exceptional carceral control of populations in the name of global health is part and parcel of a liberal, humanitarian logic of "relief" (170). [End Page 481...