Overview

In Bioinsecurities Neel Ahuja argues that U.S. imperial expansion has been shaped by the attempts of health and military officials to control the interactions of humans, animals, viruses, and bacteria at the borders of U.S. influence, a phenomenon called the government of species. The book explores efforts to control the spread of Hansen's disease, venereal disease, polio, smallpox, and HIV through interventions linking the continental United States to Hawai'i, Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Congo, Iraq, and India in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ahuja argues that racial fears of contagion helped to produce public optimism concerning state uses of pharmaceuticals, medical experimentation, military intervention, and incarceration to regulate the immune capacities of the body. In the process, the security state made the biological structures of human and animal populations into sites of struggle in the politics of empire, unleashing new patient activisms and forms of resistance to medical and military authority across the increasingly global sphere of U.S. influence.

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9780822360483

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Reviews

Bioinsecurities unsettles human life in its most primal manifestations. Neel Ahuja chronicles the operations of U.S. empire through an exploration of catastrophic communicable diseases to show how 'the human' is produced and subjected by imperial governance as it circulates through an ecology of living and non-living organisms. Using 'dread life' to describe the racializing process that converts fear of infectious disease into hopeful embrace of the life preserving and life making possibilities of technology, he documents a planetary poetics that channels living forces into the relations of governance. Bioinsecurities is impressive for the scope of its vision and its meticulous attention to detail and nuance. In its careful articulation of the thoroughness of imperial world-making, it offers the possibility of and inspiration for change. -- Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative Bioinsecurities unravels the twentieth-century U.S. obsession with disease control, health security, and racialized suspicions. Adeptly harnessing law, fiction, film, and medical research, Neel Ahuja brilliantly tracks how militarized interventions and medical solutions to contain leprosy, smallpox, polio, and AIDS intensified interspecies entanglements between humans, animals, bacteria, and viruses. Ahuja boldly redirects studies of biocitizenship and empire towards a fresh approach to the political as a lively and viscous zone of embodied connection and affective friction. -- Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy and Contagious Divides

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 * [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 *

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 * 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 * 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 * [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 *

Bioinsecurities unravels the twentieth-century U.S. obsession with disease control, health security, and racialized suspicions. Adeptly harnessing law, fiction, film, and medical research, Neel Ahuja brilliantly tracks how militarized interventions and medical solutions to contain leprosy, smallpox, polio, and AIDS intensified interspecies entanglements between humans, animals, bacteria, and viruses. Ahuja boldly redirects studies of biocitizenship and empire towards a fresh approach to the political as a lively and viscous zone of embodied connection and affective friction. --Nayan Shah, author of Stranger Intimacy and Contagious Divides

Author Information

Neel Ahuja is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

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