Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood by Megan H. Glick (review)

Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood approaches one of the fundamental questions of the humanities—what does it mean to be human?—in new ways by investigating how the category of the human has been used to effect "nonpersonhood" not only through exclusion of the nonhuman but also by way of enforcing racial, sexual, and bodily inequalities. Glick notes that "while it is commonplace to imagine other categories of difference as culturally constructed (race, gender, sexuality, and so on), it is rare to imagine species difference, or the 'human,' as a concept relevant to the formulation of differential subjectivities" (23). By investigating how science and culture depict the liminally human—children, primates, aliens, colonized peoples—Infrahumanisms shows how processes of speciation are constructed as contingent on other forms of human difference.

Glick adapts the term "infrahuman" from the work of the psychobiologist and founder of modern primatology, Robert Mearns Yerkes. In 1916 Yerkes used the term to describe the proximity of primates to humans and to advocate for the use of primates in psychological research, where he believed they could serve as models of a human mind yet unhindered by technological and cultural influences (3). Glick repurposes Yerkes's historical term as a theoretical concept that hones in on the biological and cultural liminality of the human. Her book "reimagines the term infrahuman by using it as a framework from which to consider how the management of the human/nonhuman boundary has impacted a wide array of biopolitical phenomena" (3). The concept of the infrahuman enables Glick to think beyond established conceptual terms such as "the posthuman," which Glick understands as rejecting humanist ideals of the Enlightenment and querying the value of the human in a multispecies world while still holding firm to the category of the human itself. Instead, the book chronicles instances of infrahumanism(s) across the twentieth century—cases where the liminality of the human has been reconceptualized as ideology and has informed exclusionary thinking about embodiment, race, and nationhood. In short, Infrahumanisms investigates how the human is not a biological fact; instead, the human has been historically produced within various efforts to conceptualize race, sexuality, bodily integrity, and health.

In three broadly chronological parts, the book analyzes the infrahuman through a variety of scientific and cultural phenomena. Part 1, "Bioexpansionism, 1900s–1930s," discusses the emergence of biomedical and behavioral disciplines and investigates two examples of "'primitive' forms of life" (22): the child (chapter 1) and the primate (chapter 2). Part 2, "Extraterrestriality, 1940s–1970s," explores how the infrahuman was conceptualized through extraterrestrial life in the context of wartime memory (chapter 3) and extraterrestrial disease, as discussed in the emerging sciences of exobiology (now astrobiology) and molecular science (chapter 4). Part 3, "Interiority, 1980s–2010s," examines the infrahuman as it intersects with issues of disease and health: chapter 5 discusses HIV/AIDS as a zoonotic disease with consequences for understanding the intersection of sexual and dietary impropriety; and chapter 6 examines porcine hybridity in discussions of obesity and xenotransplantation. The conclusion imagines how infrahuman ontologies might shape future biopolitical projects through pluralization (with the human consisting of the reproductive, microbiotic, and transgenic self) and symbiosis, by which the author means the context of the relationship between the singular human and a pluralized bacterial world. Throughout the book, Glick's analysis of visual culture makes her argument particularly vivid and immediate.

Infrahumanisms is an ambitious book that shows the applicability of the term "infrahuman" to a wide range of historical contexts and highlights how these relate to constructions of sexual, racial, gender, and bodily difference. Chapter 2, for example, enriches existing scholarly discussions about the relationship between constructions of racial difference and species difference. Glick argues that early primatology research conceptualized nonhuman intraspecies difference along racial lines: whereas chimpanzees could be domesticated and become part of the white colonial household...