Viral/Species/Crossing: Border Panics and Zoonotic Vulnerabilities

Abstract

We are all in this together, and we will all get through this together. Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of World Health Organization, June 11, 2009 Immunity and invulnerability are intersecting concepts, a matter of consequence in a nuclear culture unable to accommodate experience of death and finitude within available liberal discourse on collective and personal individual. Life is a window of vulnerability. It seems a mistake to close it. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in World of Modern Science In April 2009, a novel strain of influenza, now understood to be composed of a recombination of genetic information associated with avian, human, and two viruses, made its debut in Mexico. Commonly referred to as swine flu, given initial concerns that virus had shifted from a strain infecting pigs to one affecting humans, strange permutation of novel influenza A (H1N1) was soon declared to have resulted in a viral pandemic by World Health Organization (WHO). Within six weeks of its emergence, close to thirty thousand confirmed cases in seventy-four countries had been identified (WHO 2009c). By September of 2009, nearly three thousand people had died and preparations for a second wave of pandemic were well under way. Despite swiftness of its transmission, flu did not deliver upon its catastrophic promise of massive infection and death on a scale. Indeed, in January 2010 WHO began to respond to allegations that it had produced, in cahoots with Big Pharma, a phony pandemic designed to bring economic benefit to industry. Countering this accusation, WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan responded with a reassurance that virus was, in fact, serious; as she put it, is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as fake is wrong and irresponsible (WHO 2010b). But after a further seven anticlimactic months coming down from H1N1 alertness, Dr. Chan, invoking a biopolitical population in process of address, reminded the world that pandemics, like viruses that cause them, are unpredictable. With that, H1N1 pandemic was deemed to have run its course, and August 2010 was marked as time of transition into an officiai post-pandemic period (WHO 2010a). This essay emerges in partial response to multiple border vulnerabilities (national, affective, species) illuminated by zoonoses, dis-eases that stealthily cross, via viral recombinations, heavily invested species border between human and nonhuman animals.1 Through two brief but exemplary cases drawn from Canadian institutional responses to flu pandemic, this essay aims to generate space to explore entanglements of biopolitics and pandemic governance, and, more specifically, what multiple border panics invoked by specter of unstoppable risk illuminates about state of nation-state under conditions of late capitalism. I critically examine seemingly paradoxical responses of Citizenship and Immigration Canada to problem of migrant agricultural laborers sourced from ground zero of pandemic, along with those of Health Canada to declaration of a swine flu state of emergency by chiefs of First Nations reservations in northern regions of province of Manitoba to offer a cartography of increasing convergence of bio- and necropolitics in shared spaces of nation (rather than spaces of exception). To do this, I proceed through an analytics of global apartheid, a referent that attempts to name ways that smoothed apparatuses of governing itself rely on endlessly intimate, intricate, and proximate geographies of striated difference, where subjects of life and those subjected to death jostle up against one another, cheek by jowl, but not higgledy-piggledy. Viruses, especially those that move across species boundaries, insistently reveal fundamental interdependency and vulnerability of all lives and thus illuminate very conditions upon which (affective) politics unfold today. …