Preface: Empire in Life  vii

Acknowledgments  xvii

Introduction. Dread Life: Disease Interventions and the Intimacies of Empire  1

1. "An Atmosphere of Leprosy": Hansen's Disease, the Dependent Body, and the Transoceanic Politics of Hawaiian Annexation  29

2. Medicalized States of War: Venereal Disease and the Risks of Occupation in Wartime Panamá  71

3. Domesticating Immunity: The Polio Scare, Cold War Mobility, and the Vivisected Primate  101

4. Staging Smallpox: Reanimating Variola in the Iraq War  133

5. Refugee Medicine, HIV, and a "Humanitarian Camp" at Guantánamo  169

Epilogue. Species War and the Planetary Horizon of Security  195

Notes   207

Bibliography  231

Index  249

"[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

"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 decolonial epistemologies." — Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia, Tecnoscienza

"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

“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

"In promoting both a transborder and transspecies approach to the relations between public health and empire, Bioinsecurities not only furthers our understanding of each, but also adds a nuanced attention to race and empire to contemporary scholarship in animal studies and the environmental humanities." — Sarah D. Wald, Journal of Asian American Studies

"Bioinsecurities not only adds to an important and growing body of work focused on imperial medicine and technologies of surveillance, but also represents a considerable contribution to conversations within the ANIMA series that work to reconceptualize the parameters of life." — Christopher Perreira, English Language Notes

“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

"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." — Shanon Fitzpatrick, Journal of American Studies

"[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

"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 decolonial epistemologies." —Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia, Tecnoscienza

"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

“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

"In promoting both a transborder and transspecies approach to the relations between public health and empire, Bioinsecurities not only furthers our understanding of each, but also adds a nuanced attention to race and empire to contemporary scholarship in animal studies and the environmental humanities." —Sarah D. Wald, Journal of Asian American Studies

"Bioinsecurities not only adds to an important and growing body of work focused on imperial medicine and technologies of surveillance, but also represents a considerable contribution to conversations within the ANIMA series that work to reconceptualize the parameters of life." —Christopher Perreira, English Language Notes

“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

"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." —Shanon Fitzpatrick, Journal of American Studies

"Bioinsecurities unsettles human life in its most primal manifestations. 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, Neel Ahuja 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 Hansen's disease, smallpox, polio, and AIDS intensified interspecies entanglements between humans, animals, bacteria, and viruses. Ahuja boldly redirects studies of biocitizenship and empire toward 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

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