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ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
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, Panamá, 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.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 22, 2016
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About the author
Neel Ahuja
5 books1 followerNeel Ahuja is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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August 2, 2020
US-Bashing, Anti-vax, Animalism
This book can be read as an anti-American tract, or an anti-vaccine manifesto, or as a justification of anti-speciesism, or as an attack on liberal ideas of democracy, equality, and scientific progress. Of course, this is not the intention of the author. Neel Ahuja didn’t write a tract or a manifesto, but an elaborate social science book with deep theoretical repercussions. He is more descriptive than prescriptive, and his political message is not spelled out in detail. He situates himself in a progressive movement that is unconditionally anti-racist, feminist, and anti-war. But he doesn’t take position on vaccines, on animal rights, or on speciesism. His goal is not to provide simple answers, but to complicate things and deepen our vision of mankind and its living environment as some truths long held to be self-evident are losing political traction. However, liberal arguments can be used for very illiberal ends. As I read it, Bioinsecurities gives credence to very nasty arguments which, taken to their extreme, articulate a very anti-liberal and regressive agenda. Of course, some readers, and the author with them, may argue that it is perfectly fine to be anti-American, anti-vaccine, or to stand for a radical vision of animal rights, especially considering the background of brutal imperialism, public health manipulations, and disregard for non-human animals that have marked our common history and still inform our present. We should work against the public amnesia and state-endorsed manipulation of truth that prevent the public to exercise democratic oversight and make informed decisions on matters of life and death that affect us most. But an author also has to give consideration to how a book might be read or perceived. For me, Bioinsecurities dangerously straddles the line between liberalism and illiberalism, humanism and anti-humanism, and progressivism and regression.
Settlers and immigrants
By using the word anti-American, I don’t intend to convey a political trial on academic activities that would represent a threat to the security and identity of the nation: I am certainly in no position to do so, and I feel only repulsion for this kind of political justice. But I would like to gesture toward a tension that often inhabits post-colonial literature when applied to the United States. Was America a nation of settlers or of immigrants? For most historians, this is a matter of chronology: settlers came first, then immigrants moved in. But at what moment should one draw the line between first movers and late arrivers? Were Apaches and Navajo Indians any less settlers than Spanish conquistadors when they arrived from their native lands of Alaska to the vast plains of the American South-West, at about the same time that Christopher Columbus discovered the new continent? Is there a fundamental difference between the four grand-parents of Donald Trump, who were all born outside the United States, and the father of Barak Obama, who was born in and returned to Kenya? Bostonians, who pride themselves to be descendants of John Winthrop, are not different from the Latino-Americans freshly arrived from their barrio to populate the periphery of Los Angeles. Who is the first American of America first? Seeing America as a settler nation reactivates the myth of autochtony that is so corrosive to the social fabric of old and new nations, from Ivory Coast to the Netherlands, from Marine Le Pen’s France to Donald Trump’s America. It calls for radical measures and deadly solutions: recall the Pan Africanist Congress’ rallying cry, “one settler, one bullet,” or Franz Fanon’s contention that “killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” The United States has long prided itself to be a nation of immigrants, welcoming the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It would be a pity if it modeled itself after the countries of racial apartheid and colonial exploitation.
Neel Ahuja sees America as an empire and its inhabitants as a settler society. For him, imperialism is a racial endeavor that exerts itself upon people, but also natural habitats and non-human species, including microbial ones. White privilege, the benefits that whites claim over non-white people, is inseparable from the privilege of man as opposed to woman and of humans as distinct from other species. Bioinsecurities explores empire as a project in the government of species and the management of biological life. The author explains the persistence of empire long after settler societies have given way to established communities by a phenomenon he calls “dread life”, or the turn from colonial occupation and settlement to the management of bodily vulnerability and diseases. Fear of contagion was an integral part of imperial expansion, and settlers were literally obsessed by disease. They tried to circumvent it, to quarantine it, to vaccinate against it, to weaponize it, or to use if for further expansion. The “smallpox blankets” that decimated the native American Indian population have their modern equivalent in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which six hundred African American men were used to study the progression of syphilis and denied proper medical information, informed consent, or the known effective treatments. For Neel Ahuja, disease interventions are a form of biopolitics, defined as the ongoing expansion of government into life itself. He studies the way settler colonialism intervened in the government of species and the domestication of bodies in five outposts of the American empire: the Hawaiian islands at the time of Hawaii’s annexation, Panama under military occupation of the Canal Zone between the two World Wars, Puerto Rico where a colony of rhesus monkeys was established during the Cold War, Iraq as seen from war planners in the corridors of power in Washington, and Guantanamo which harbored “the world’s first HIV concentration camp” during the Haitian refugee crisis in 1991-94. Race played a key role in the interventions of the US security state, which inherited the settler mentality and extended it to new terrains.
Fear of contagion
The case studies presented in Bioinsecurities all illustrate the fear of disease contagion and of racial intermingling that accompanied America’s expansion beyond its continental borders. Indigenous Hawaiians diagnosed with leprosy were segregated in quarantine camps on the island of Molokai and denied basic legal rights, while outbreaks of Hansen’s disease in the north central states of the United States (at times associated with Scandinavian immigrants) never attracted much public attention. Afro-Caribbean women involved in the sex trade in the Panama Canal Zone under US administration were arbitrarily arrested and tested for syphilis or gonorrhea and sentenced to hospitals for enforced treatment if tested positive, while US soldiers were only invited to “self-regulate” through moralizing and racially charged propaganda. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed a polio scare that led American scientists to import rhesus monkeys from India to Puerto Rico and harvest their bodies for vaccines, and the Iraq war had the US military prepare for a smallpox outbreak under the belief that Iraq had developed biological weapons and was ready to use them. Haitian refugees who tested HIV positive were segregated and imprisoned in Guantanamo during the years 1991-94. These are all shocking episodes, but should we read American history only through the lenses of “species wars”, “dread life”, and the “medicalized state of war” brought about by our modern bioinsecurities? The fact is that these cases rightfully provoke our moral indignation, as they did in the past when Jack London, who was both a socialist and a racist according to the author, visited “lepers’ island” and let the world know about the plight of Hansen disease patients in Hawaii. The history of the United States is by nature contested, and historians are right to point out sore spots and moral contradictions. But I don’t believe it can be reduced to the story of a security state bent on implanting settler exploitation in its imperial conquests.
In the wake of the animal rights movement and the development of animal studies as an academic field, new words have entered our vocabulary. “Speciesism” gives greater moral rights and value to human beings than to non-human animals. By contrast, “anti-speciesism” considers that this discrimination is unfounded and militates for its abolition. For animal rights advocates, speciesism is a prejudice similar to racism or sexism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. Their claim is that species membership has no moral significance. For their opponents, assigning the same moral value to all animal species is not just impractical, but ultimately absurd. Therefore, speciesism is unavoidable. Why, then, all the fuss about nonhuman animals and the moral obligations that we may have toward them? This shift reflects the influence of the radical critique of humanism and the rejection of anthropocentrism, voiced especially by the animal-rights movement and advocates of trans-humanism and post-humanism in popular culture since the 1990s. My point is not to discuss anti-humanism, animalism, or the rights of nonhuman animals. I know there are serious discussions out there, beyond the caricatures that each party draws of the opposing camp. Just because an animal is not a moral agent doesn’t mean that it cannot have rights or that moral agents can’t have duties towards them. Cruelty towards animals is clearly unacceptable; but so is violence condoned in the name of animal rights. And violence is a foregone conclusion for many animal rights advocates, who see the lack of public support for their cause as an added motivation to grab the headlines by spectacular action. Of course, supporting radical means and action is not the appanage of anti-speciesism, and one should not judge a cause by the violent actions of its most extreme elements. But comparing speciesism to racism or sexism—as many critics do in the name of intersectionality—or using words like “slavery” and “genocide” to describe the breeding and slaughtering of livestock, justifies in advance the most radical means. This slippery slope can only lead to hyperbolic conclusions.
Species wars
In effect, anti-speciesism or animalism usually concentrates its claims for right sharing to certain mammals, especially apes or non-human primates. On the book cover of Bioinsecurities, a rhesus macaque half soaked into water glances back at the viewer or the camera lens, with a gaze that can be read as angry, dissatisfied, or frustrated. This particular monkey is part of an imperial project: the import of 400 macaques from India to US-occupied territories in Puerto Rico to serve as guinea pigs for clinical research on poliomyelitis. In the name of producing polio vaccine, rhesus monkeys were, to use the author’s metaphor, “stabbed in the back” and inserted with spinal tap to extract polio serum. They were subjected to experimentations that would clearly fall outside what is now considered as proper and ethical laboratory norms. Could the antibiotic revolution have happened without animal experiments, and in particular primate vivisection? Before jumping to hasty conclusions, one should remember the crippling nature of polio disease, its devastating effects on children, and the public anxiety it generated. The argument made by the author that these fears of disease were themselves loaded with racial and class prejudice should in no way diminish the importance of biomedical research and vaccine production. In fact, Neel Ahuja shows that it is in the research labs and breeding stations that the modern categories of “almost human” primates and advanced sentient species originated. These categories “were less concerned with broadly questioning an anthropocentric hierarchy of species, and more involved with justifying vivisection on a mass scale.” They were the result of a complex history of Cold War politics, sovereignty claims, and ecological shifts that exceeded simple logics or science or profit. Rhesus monkeys imported from India to Puerto Rico for scientific use escaped their semi-free-ranging colonies and came to be viewed by many habitants as a pest. India protested the use of “sacred” species for biomedical research or nuclear testing and placed a moratorium on the primate trade. Regional primate research centers were established in many newly independent countries, giving rise to new disciplines such as ethology and primatology. Hollywood movies and urban legends fueled anxieties about interspecies intimacy and mad science experiments.
In place of the polio scare, new legends are emerging today about the proper role and effect of vaccines. The anti-vaccination (“anti-vax”) movement is a global phenomenon that has received a great deal of media attention. Anti-vaxxers usually don’t read or write social science dissertations and history books: they rely on word-of-mouth and social media to spread the message that the government and “Big Pharma” are colluding in a massive cover-up regarding the hidden dangers of vaccines. This has very serious public health consequences, as outbreaks of highly contagious diseases such as measles put vulnerable people, including newborn babies and people who have weakened immune systems, at great risk. My point here is not to discuss the positions of anti-vax propagandists (or “vaccine-hesitant parents,” as they prefer to describe themselves): I think that they are a menace to society, and that compulsory vaccine policies should be enforced. Any argument that reinforces their misinformation and conspiracy theories should be dealt with suspicion and care. This is why Neel Ahuja’s book is a matter of concern: he gives credence to arguments that identify vaccination policies with the police state, imperial endeavors, and neoconservative plots. Bioinsecurities’ introduction opens with two quotes relating to vaccine controversies: a 1905 legal opinion on Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a case of vaccine refusal that led to a well-publicized lawsuit, and an interview with Donald Rumsfeld in which the Defense Secretary assesses the risk of a smallpox epidemic in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Both cases are controversial: the Jacobson precedent was used to justify forced sterilization programs, and Donald Rumsfeld’s argument that Iraqis had developed biological weapons, including the variola virus that causes smallpox, proved to be unfounded. Although the author doesn’t make the link with modern vaccine controversies, the tainted nature of past “disease interventions” justifies skepticism (...)
This book can be read as an anti-American tract, or an anti-vaccine manifesto, or as a justification of anti-speciesism, or as an attack on liberal ideas of democracy, equality, and scientific progress. Of course, this is not the intention of the author. Neel Ahuja didn’t write a tract or a manifesto, but an elaborate social science book with deep theoretical repercussions. He is more descriptive than prescriptive, and his political message is not spelled out in detail. He situates himself in a progressive movement that is unconditionally anti-racist, feminist, and anti-war. But he doesn’t take position on vaccines, on animal rights, or on speciesism. His goal is not to provide simple answers, but to complicate things and deepen our vision of mankind and its living environment as some truths long held to be self-evident are losing political traction. However, liberal arguments can be used for very illiberal ends. As I read it, Bioinsecurities gives credence to very nasty arguments which, taken to their extreme, articulate a very anti-liberal and regressive agenda. Of course, some readers, and the author with them, may argue that it is perfectly fine to be anti-American, anti-vaccine, or to stand for a radical vision of animal rights, especially considering the background of brutal imperialism, public health manipulations, and disregard for non-human animals that have marked our common history and still inform our present. We should work against the public amnesia and state-endorsed manipulation of truth that prevent the public to exercise democratic oversight and make informed decisions on matters of life and death that affect us most. But an author also has to give consideration to how a book might be read or perceived. For me, Bioinsecurities dangerously straddles the line between liberalism and illiberalism, humanism and anti-humanism, and progressivism and regression.
Settlers and immigrants
By using the word anti-American, I don’t intend to convey a political trial on academic activities that would represent a threat to the security and identity of the nation: I am certainly in no position to do so, and I feel only repulsion for this kind of political justice. But I would like to gesture toward a tension that often inhabits post-colonial literature when applied to the United States. Was America a nation of settlers or of immigrants? For most historians, this is a matter of chronology: settlers came first, then immigrants moved in. But at what moment should one draw the line between first movers and late arrivers? Were Apaches and Navajo Indians any less settlers than Spanish conquistadors when they arrived from their native lands of Alaska to the vast plains of the American South-West, at about the same time that Christopher Columbus discovered the new continent? Is there a fundamental difference between the four grand-parents of Donald Trump, who were all born outside the United States, and the father of Barak Obama, who was born in and returned to Kenya? Bostonians, who pride themselves to be descendants of John Winthrop, are not different from the Latino-Americans freshly arrived from their barrio to populate the periphery of Los Angeles. Who is the first American of America first? Seeing America as a settler nation reactivates the myth of autochtony that is so corrosive to the social fabric of old and new nations, from Ivory Coast to the Netherlands, from Marine Le Pen’s France to Donald Trump’s America. It calls for radical measures and deadly solutions: recall the Pan Africanist Congress’ rallying cry, “one settler, one bullet,” or Franz Fanon’s contention that “killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” The United States has long prided itself to be a nation of immigrants, welcoming the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It would be a pity if it modeled itself after the countries of racial apartheid and colonial exploitation.
Neel Ahuja sees America as an empire and its inhabitants as a settler society. For him, imperialism is a racial endeavor that exerts itself upon people, but also natural habitats and non-human species, including microbial ones. White privilege, the benefits that whites claim over non-white people, is inseparable from the privilege of man as opposed to woman and of humans as distinct from other species. Bioinsecurities explores empire as a project in the government of species and the management of biological life. The author explains the persistence of empire long after settler societies have given way to established communities by a phenomenon he calls “dread life”, or the turn from colonial occupation and settlement to the management of bodily vulnerability and diseases. Fear of contagion was an integral part of imperial expansion, and settlers were literally obsessed by disease. They tried to circumvent it, to quarantine it, to vaccinate against it, to weaponize it, or to use if for further expansion. The “smallpox blankets” that decimated the native American Indian population have their modern equivalent in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which six hundred African American men were used to study the progression of syphilis and denied proper medical information, informed consent, or the known effective treatments. For Neel Ahuja, disease interventions are a form of biopolitics, defined as the ongoing expansion of government into life itself. He studies the way settler colonialism intervened in the government of species and the domestication of bodies in five outposts of the American empire: the Hawaiian islands at the time of Hawaii’s annexation, Panama under military occupation of the Canal Zone between the two World Wars, Puerto Rico where a colony of rhesus monkeys was established during the Cold War, Iraq as seen from war planners in the corridors of power in Washington, and Guantanamo which harbored “the world’s first HIV concentration camp” during the Haitian refugee crisis in 1991-94. Race played a key role in the interventions of the US security state, which inherited the settler mentality and extended it to new terrains.
Fear of contagion
The case studies presented in Bioinsecurities all illustrate the fear of disease contagion and of racial intermingling that accompanied America’s expansion beyond its continental borders. Indigenous Hawaiians diagnosed with leprosy were segregated in quarantine camps on the island of Molokai and denied basic legal rights, while outbreaks of Hansen’s disease in the north central states of the United States (at times associated with Scandinavian immigrants) never attracted much public attention. Afro-Caribbean women involved in the sex trade in the Panama Canal Zone under US administration were arbitrarily arrested and tested for syphilis or gonorrhea and sentenced to hospitals for enforced treatment if tested positive, while US soldiers were only invited to “self-regulate” through moralizing and racially charged propaganda. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed a polio scare that led American scientists to import rhesus monkeys from India to Puerto Rico and harvest their bodies for vaccines, and the Iraq war had the US military prepare for a smallpox outbreak under the belief that Iraq had developed biological weapons and was ready to use them. Haitian refugees who tested HIV positive were segregated and imprisoned in Guantanamo during the years 1991-94. These are all shocking episodes, but should we read American history only through the lenses of “species wars”, “dread life”, and the “medicalized state of war” brought about by our modern bioinsecurities? The fact is that these cases rightfully provoke our moral indignation, as they did in the past when Jack London, who was both a socialist and a racist according to the author, visited “lepers’ island” and let the world know about the plight of Hansen disease patients in Hawaii. The history of the United States is by nature contested, and historians are right to point out sore spots and moral contradictions. But I don’t believe it can be reduced to the story of a security state bent on implanting settler exploitation in its imperial conquests.
In the wake of the animal rights movement and the development of animal studies as an academic field, new words have entered our vocabulary. “Speciesism” gives greater moral rights and value to human beings than to non-human animals. By contrast, “anti-speciesism” considers that this discrimination is unfounded and militates for its abolition. For animal rights advocates, speciesism is a prejudice similar to racism or sexism, in that the treatment of individuals is predicated on group membership and morally irrelevant physical differences. Their claim is that species membership has no moral significance. For their opponents, assigning the same moral value to all animal species is not just impractical, but ultimately absurd. Therefore, speciesism is unavoidable. Why, then, all the fuss about nonhuman animals and the moral obligations that we may have toward them? This shift reflects the influence of the radical critique of humanism and the rejection of anthropocentrism, voiced especially by the animal-rights movement and advocates of trans-humanism and post-humanism in popular culture since the 1990s. My point is not to discuss anti-humanism, animalism, or the rights of nonhuman animals. I know there are serious discussions out there, beyond the caricatures that each party draws of the opposing camp. Just because an animal is not a moral agent doesn’t mean that it cannot have rights or that moral agents can’t have duties towards them. Cruelty towards animals is clearly unacceptable; but so is violence condoned in the name of animal rights. And violence is a foregone conclusion for many animal rights advocates, who see the lack of public support for their cause as an added motivation to grab the headlines by spectacular action. Of course, supporting radical means and action is not the appanage of anti-speciesism, and one should not judge a cause by the violent actions of its most extreme elements. But comparing speciesism to racism or sexism—as many critics do in the name of intersectionality—or using words like “slavery” and “genocide” to describe the breeding and slaughtering of livestock, justifies in advance the most radical means. This slippery slope can only lead to hyperbolic conclusions.
Species wars
In effect, anti-speciesism or animalism usually concentrates its claims for right sharing to certain mammals, especially apes or non-human primates. On the book cover of Bioinsecurities, a rhesus macaque half soaked into water glances back at the viewer or the camera lens, with a gaze that can be read as angry, dissatisfied, or frustrated. This particular monkey is part of an imperial project: the import of 400 macaques from India to US-occupied territories in Puerto Rico to serve as guinea pigs for clinical research on poliomyelitis. In the name of producing polio vaccine, rhesus monkeys were, to use the author’s metaphor, “stabbed in the back” and inserted with spinal tap to extract polio serum. They were subjected to experimentations that would clearly fall outside what is now considered as proper and ethical laboratory norms. Could the antibiotic revolution have happened without animal experiments, and in particular primate vivisection? Before jumping to hasty conclusions, one should remember the crippling nature of polio disease, its devastating effects on children, and the public anxiety it generated. The argument made by the author that these fears of disease were themselves loaded with racial and class prejudice should in no way diminish the importance of biomedical research and vaccine production. In fact, Neel Ahuja shows that it is in the research labs and breeding stations that the modern categories of “almost human” primates and advanced sentient species originated. These categories “were less concerned with broadly questioning an anthropocentric hierarchy of species, and more involved with justifying vivisection on a mass scale.” They were the result of a complex history of Cold War politics, sovereignty claims, and ecological shifts that exceeded simple logics or science or profit. Rhesus monkeys imported from India to Puerto Rico for scientific use escaped their semi-free-ranging colonies and came to be viewed by many habitants as a pest. India protested the use of “sacred” species for biomedical research or nuclear testing and placed a moratorium on the primate trade. Regional primate research centers were established in many newly independent countries, giving rise to new disciplines such as ethology and primatology. Hollywood movies and urban legends fueled anxieties about interspecies intimacy and mad science experiments.
In place of the polio scare, new legends are emerging today about the proper role and effect of vaccines. The anti-vaccination (“anti-vax”) movement is a global phenomenon that has received a great deal of media attention. Anti-vaxxers usually don’t read or write social science dissertations and history books: they rely on word-of-mouth and social media to spread the message that the government and “Big Pharma” are colluding in a massive cover-up regarding the hidden dangers of vaccines. This has very serious public health consequences, as outbreaks of highly contagious diseases such as measles put vulnerable people, including newborn babies and people who have weakened immune systems, at great risk. My point here is not to discuss the positions of anti-vax propagandists (or “vaccine-hesitant parents,” as they prefer to describe themselves): I think that they are a menace to society, and that compulsory vaccine policies should be enforced. Any argument that reinforces their misinformation and conspiracy theories should be dealt with suspicion and care. This is why Neel Ahuja’s book is a matter of concern: he gives credence to arguments that identify vaccination policies with the police state, imperial endeavors, and neoconservative plots. Bioinsecurities’ introduction opens with two quotes relating to vaccine controversies: a 1905 legal opinion on Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a case of vaccine refusal that led to a well-publicized lawsuit, and an interview with Donald Rumsfeld in which the Defense Secretary assesses the risk of a smallpox epidemic in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Both cases are controversial: the Jacobson precedent was used to justify forced sterilization programs, and Donald Rumsfeld’s argument that Iraqis had developed biological weapons, including the variola virus that causes smallpox, proved to be unfounded. Although the author doesn’t make the link with modern vaccine controversies, the tainted nature of past “disease interventions” justifies skepticism (...)
November 13, 2017
If you are turned off by all the jargon in the introduction, keep reading. The case studies are strong.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews