Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility

by Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis

Overview

Bio-Imperialism focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978814783
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	12/18/2020
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gwen Shuni D’Arcangelis is an associate professor of gender studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction: Bio-Imperialism and the Entanglement of Bioscience, Public Health, and National Security 1

1 The Making of the Technoscientific Other: Tales of Terrorism, Development, and Third World Morality 26

2 From Practicing Safe Science to Keeping Science out of "Dangerous Hands": The Resurgence of U.S "Biodefense" 53

3 Co-opting Caregiving: Softening Militarism, Feminizing the Nation 82

4 Preparedness Migrates: Pandemics, Germ Extraction, and "Global Health Security" 106

Epilogue: Repurposing Science and Public Health 132

Acknowledgments 141

Notes 143

References 179

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

"A concise and powerful book on the injustices and asymmetries of global health security....The book makes two important contributions to the critique of global health. As regards method, it concerns itself with the strategic use of language, through a close reading of policy, legislative, medical and scientific sources. This analytical work is given an ethical edge through the technique of ‘rhetorical re-description’ or ‘paradiastole.’"

New Genetics and Society

"D’Arcangelis provides a rich, timely, must-read account of the United States’ 'bioterror imaginary' and its role in the construction of national fragility. Bio-Imperialism recounts tales of terrorism, technoscience, caregiving, and preparedness that are entangled in a nationalism conflating public health and national security. In so doing, the book provides impressive insight into the racialized and gendered dynamics underlying the United States’ representation and repurposing of science and health, and the dangers therein."

 

co-author of International Relations' Last Synthesis? - Laura Sjoberg

"In this astute and timely study, D’Arcangelis tracks the rise of a racialized and gendered 'bioterror imaginary' in the U.S. through science, politics, journalism, social media, and popular culture that facilitated the conversion of warnings of bioterror into a strategy for U.S. imperialism. Bio-Imperialism offers an urgent analysis of how the US produces the threats to the health of a population it ostensibly seeks to address."

author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative - Priscilla Wald