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.

 

"[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."

"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."

“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.”

“Bioinsecurities is an important book that speaks to the intertwined racial projects of military, imperial securitization, and disease control, which is particularly timely.”

"Incisive vivisection of the interspecies politics of American empire and global biosecurity. . . . Ahuja’s work offers trenchant and timely political diagnoses that should attract a wide readership, particularly as it spans (and highlights the linkages between) the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields. . . . With its comparative, multi-cited, and interdisciplinary analysis, Bioinsecurities offers an important and timely contribution to our understanding of the interspecies dimension of US empire and its possible futures."

"Bioinsecurities describes with vivid detail how empire operates on a scale that is at once global and microscopic, stretching from the Hawai’ian territo-ries to the Panama Canal Zone to US-occupied Iraq."

“This is a theoretically ambitious project that draws on both biopolitics and posthumanism—two bodies of thought that have tended to sit somewhat uneasily together.... Bioinsecurities makes a valuable contribution to understanding the nexus of imperial power, species, and the human.”