Microbes of Empire

Abstract

Microbes of Empire Priscilla Wald (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Anti-Asian hate crimes rose dramatically during the pandemic. This poster appeared in the New York subway in February 2021. Credit: STAR MAX file photo via AP. [End Page 706] In memory of Amy Kaplan We are living in a moment in which the natural world and the social world are manifesting dramatic chaos, beset with reminders of the precarity of human existence in the form of pandemics, climate catastrophes, and seemingly endless examples of structural racism. In the ancient world, plague spoke in the language of the gods: it was the natural—which is to say divine—world's way of manifesting a rupture in the social order. The ancients' understanding of the connection between these worlds has been severed over time, but perhaps the contemporary moment can return us to that sacred insight. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed a proliferation of devastating climate disasters in the form of record-setting temperatures, especially heat waves, and accompanying droughts, fires, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, monsoons, and landslides. Glaciers are melting, and air and water are becoming increasingly unhealthy to breathe or drink. Social tensions are escalating worldwide. The pandemic is at once a symptom and an accelerant, putting on display the inequities in the United States and abroad that find expression in discrepancies in morbidity and mortality rates from COVID-19 and other health disparities and from state violence at "home" and abroad, the embodiment of the racism of US imperialism that Amy Kaplan documents in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. If, as Kaplan suggests, the incorporation of colonial (or postcolonial) territories and populations posed a threat to the ostensible coherence of the national (American) body politic, the conventional story that circulates in science, the media, and popular fiction and film about the bodily threat of microbes materializes the threat to American bodies.1 COVID-19 is certainly not the first, but it is the most recent and perhaps most widespread of what epidemiologists and other medical professionals have dubbed "emerging infections." In the 1980s, the identification of a catastrophic communicable disease that had similarly circled the globe—AIDS—drew the [End Page 707] attention of medical science and epidemiology to what appeared to be a new phenomenon: the emergence of catastrophic communicable diseases that humanity had not previously encountered. In 1989, the epidemiologist Stephen S. Morse organized a meeting of medical professionals to discuss what they labeled "Emerging Viruses: The Evolution of Viruses and Viral Diseases." The eradication of naturally occurring smallpox and other dramatic developments in the identification and treatment of communicable diseases in the 1960s and 1970s had imparted an air of sanguinity to the medical community. The increasing control over communicable disease was hailed as an emblem of progress: human conquest over nature. AIDS and other emerging infections challenged that story. In the analysis that surfaced at the 1989 conference, the new viruses emerged as evidence of the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of that progress: the technological and other advances that contributed to increasing globalization and development practices, including improved transportation that moved people and goods more rapidly around the globe and the settlement of a growing population in previously sparsely inhabited or uninhabited areas around the world. Emerging infections, that is, were material expressions of the dangerous expansiveness and uncontrolled forces of what Kaplan—following W. E. B. Du Bois—called the "anarchy of empire." The message of the conference was clear: the world could not rely on scientific medicine alone to contain this new threat; humans had to change the way we inhabit the planet. As Morse explained in a postconference publication, the deadly outbreaks were the result of "ecological or demographic changes including deforestation, dam building, changes in agricultural products or in land use, and major demographic changes such as population migrations," and humans were the "major engineers of biological traffic."2 The biologist Rachel Carson had issued an analogous warning in her chilling 1962 account of how the "fanatic zeal" to dominate the nonhuman world—"the crusade to create a chemically sterile, insect-free world"—had turned...