10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17349
application/pdf
2038-3460
17349
1
en
Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species, Duke University Press, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2017-07-20
2023-06-22
2017-07-20
2023-08-21
148-150
TS
Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia
2017/07/20
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17349
148
York University
2038-3460
1
en
150
Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species, Duke University Press, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17349/16198
8
148                                                        Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)


   S. Tosoni with T. Pinch
Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Traces of Science,
Technology, and Sound, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2017, pp. 200
   by Mariacristina Sciannnamblo

    T. Zuiderent-Jerak
Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Health Care,
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2015, pp. 248
   by Stefano Crabu




                                   ***



    Neel Ahuja
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of
Species, Durham, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 288

Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia York University

    The book cover of Bioinsecurities arouses the curiosity of the reader
with an exceptional black and white picture of a lonely rhesus macaque,
in an introspective emotional state, in the midst of an undulating sea. It
was one of the 409 monkeys that the US brought from India to Puerto
Rico in the 1930s to start the first colony of free-ranging rhesus macaques
in US-occupied territories for biomedical research on poliomyelitis. The
image is troubling, perplexing and surprising. It condenses the kind of
evidence and interspecies relations Neel Ahuja is interested in – visual
and literary materials showing the entanglement of human, animal, bacte-
rial and viral bodies in the US project of imperial expansion over the
course of the long twentieth century (1870 – present). Ahuja’s interdisci-
plinary work combines methodological approaches that are, for the most
part, rooted in historiography and cultural studies, paying as much atten-
tion to archival materials as to photographs, films and literary works.
    Through historical accounts of state intervention episodes involving
interspecies contact, disease, and medical technologies, Bioinsecurities
provides a genealogical understanding of the ways in which the US, as an
Book Review                                                              149
imperialistic machine, has sought to expand its dominance and control
not only over territories and economies but also over varied domains of
life. Based on this distinctive interspecies – bodily and material – ap-
proach to the history of US empire history, Neel Ahuja argues that dis-
ease interventions over interspecies relations have been crucial for the
imperial project of US economic, territorial and military expansion, and
also for the production of inequality in the distribution of life and death
across the planet.
     Two concepts are transversal to Ahuja’s book and his overall argu-
ment. The government of species is the term he uses to refer to the ways
in which “empire takes on life as a field of potential intervention” (p. 11).
It is a double-way concept that comprises not only the modernizing – and
more conventional – perspective that sees science and medicine as tech-
nologies used by states to control and dominate disease and human and
non-human lives. This concept also encompasses the multiple ways in
which species “govern the normatively anthropomorphized space of poli-
tics” (p. 11) and successfully challenge human-made dreams of species
extermination and disease eradication. Dread life is the second concept
Ahuja has crafted in order to capture the racialization of disease and con-
tagion and the fears and anxieties towards foreign black and brown bod-
ies as a means to channel optimism towards life-enabling medical tech-
nologies and state interventions.
     Each of the five chapters of the book tackles one disease intervention,
at a certain moment of US twentieth-century history, dictated by a specif-
ic racialization process of contagion, infectious risk and deviant behav-
iours through their association to foreign – constructed as alien, feared
and even monstrous – populations and environments. The first two chap-
ters provide examples of state interventions in US-occupied territories
that employed spatial technologies, such as quarantine and incarceration,
to disrupt interspecies contacts between settler bodies and viral and bac-
terial contagions. The first one explores the segregation of Hawaiians af-
fected by Hansen’s disease (leprosy) at a time when Hawaii’s annexation
to the US was at the centre of a polemic debate. The second chapter
delves into the high incidence of venereal diseases among US soldiers de-
ployed at the Panamá Canal Zone during the two world wars. It discusses
the offensive strategy against Panamanian women who came to embody
the threat of gonorrhoea and syphilis to the vulnerable bodies of white
servicemen, with innate and uncontainable sexual desires, making women
targets of criminalization, incarceration, forced medicalization and sur-
veillance.
     The third chapter moves away from the classic spatial battles of public
health to one against infectious diseases by means of pharmaceuticals.
Here, what matters is the management of time rather than space through
the introduction of technologies used before (vaccines) or during the in-
fection (antibiotics) to tackle the risk of bacterial and viral contact. This
150                                                         Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

strategy is explored through the importation of rhesus macaques from
India to Puerto Rico and the use of these and other primates’ bodies as
“almost-but-not-quite-human models for testing drug safety and efficacy”
(p. 20). This is, in my view, the chapter where the concept of dread life is
at its most graspable state in Ahuja’s work. Thinking along these concep-
tual lines, the author shows how primate trade and subsequent domesti-
cation in US-based institutionalized settings raised fears and concerns
about human/animal and first/third-world contacts that were gradually
appeased by fashioning primates into national subjects, “almost, but not
quite, humans” (p. 117). The extraction of primates from
(neo)colonialized regions and their exploitation as strategic resources for
biomedical research made primates into dread life, provoking – ambigu-
ously and simultaneously – anxiety towards their foreign bodies and op-
timism about their nationalization process and their use in the develop-
ment of biomedical technologies. Ahuja argues that this episode in the
history of the government of species was key in achieving public em-
bracement and acceptance of biomedical interventions.
    The fourth chapter of Bioinsecurities draws on the establishment of
the international health movement during the Cold War and the efforts of
scaling up public health interventions throughout the planet. Smallpox,
the first disease to be worldwide eradicated in 1977, is the focus of this
chapter. It explores the Smallpox Vaccination Program during the Iraq
war and the fictitious idea of smallpox reemergence and weaponisation
by Saddam Hussein as a pervasive incitement to war at the end of the
twentieth century. In the fifth and last chapter of the book, time, space
and scale strategies to manage an infectious threat converge in the case of
HIV-positive Haitian refugees who were incarcerated in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, in early 1991. Ahuja explores how the deployment of sover-
eign power – the right to kill – over the bodies of Haitian refugees was
articulated through imperialist discourses that combine the threat of
emerging diseases with biosecurity demands.
    Neel Ahuja’s work is a great example of the kind of ground-breaking
interpretations of the political and historical consequences of imperialism
and governance when seen through the prism of interspecies and decolo-
nial epistemologies. They reveal the shortcomings of dominant anthro-
pomorphic, white narratives of imperialism, science, health and diseases.
They open up a wide field of inquiry to rewrite and re-account the myths
behind these processes, as witnessed by Ahuja’s study of episodes that
question linear considerations of scientific progress or reductionist eco-
nomic interpretations of imperialism and capitalism. Sometimes these ef-
forts in departing from already explored angles come at a price: they de-
mand very intricate arguments and interpretations, at times challenging
for the reader for the number of aspects and consideration they involve in
each case. Yet, the reader will be satisfied with the final outcome after
reading Bioinsecurities.
