Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950 by Jeannie Shinozuka

Abstract

In Biotic Borders, Shinozuka investigates how immigration exclusion affected both race and species during the rise of the U.S. nation-state. Drawing interdisciplinary methods and frameworks primarily from Asian American studies and histories of science, Shinozuka artfully demonstrates how national fears about Asian immigration not only concerned migrant human bodies but also folded nonhuman forms into racial and exclusionary policies. Although “open border” policies prior to the Page Act of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 applied to both human and nonhuman migrant species, xenophobia stoked by the rise of Asian immigration constructed new “categories of native- and invasive-defined groups as bio-invasions that must be regulated or somehow annihilated during American empire-building” (11, emphasis added). Thus, the management of species at the U.S. border, as Shinozuka demonstrates, was predicated on the racial logics of exclusion that governed immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Biotic Borders powerfully expands critiques of the history of U.S. immigration to encapsulate the transpacific movement of nonhuman insect and plant species, revealing how race and species have productively co-constituted one another as categories of social and political difference.In recent years, work in Asian American studies has productively engaged the theoretical and conceptual implications of the entwinement between race and species, such as in the work of Lee, Chen, Huang, and Ahuja, among others.1 More broadly, Asian American studies have always been invested in the dehumanizing rhetoric that casts Asian immigrants as infectious alien invaders, in what is commonly referred to as Yellow Peril discourse.2 More than merely revealing xenophobic rhetoric as dehumanizing, this work underscores the material and historical processes of Asian American racial formation as a political project contingent on U.S. nation-building—the consolidation of the U.S. empire through the degradation of Asian bodies at its borders. Within this genealogy of robust intellectual inquiry, Shinozuka reveals how the imaginaries of entomologists, botanists, and other scientists produced the social and political conditions for the Yellow Peril rhetoric, thus implicating scientific knowledge in the creation of racial meaning.Moving through different moments in entomological and botanical history that cast foreign plants and insects as racialized invaders threatening the biotic ecosystem of the United States, Biotic Borders insists that the regulation of plant and insect immigration was integral to the racial exclusion that contributed to building the U.S. empire. Science, as Bahng argues, is a cultural, not an objective, form of knowledge that “participate[s] in the construction of national and international ideas about modernity and futurity.”3 Shinozuka’s careful reading of immigration policy alongside intellectual exchanges between scientists aptly demonstrates the cultural and political force behind the intertwined formations of race and species as nodes of difference. By bringing these histories together, Biotic Borders is an important intervention into ideas about immigration and the function of race and species in nation-building. This book offers urgent contributions to Asian American studies, the history of science, environmental studies, and posthumanism. Its interdisciplinary engagement sheds new light on the histories of race, species, and immigration.