Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 306 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$30.00, paper; US$30.00, ebook. ISBN 9780226817330.
Appearing amidst the recent easing of COVID-19 restrictions, Jeannie Shinozuka’s Biotic Borders poses as its central concern the question of inter-related human, animal, and plant border controls from the end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, primarily in the American West. An eclectic work, far-ranging in its sites and examples, Biotic Borders holds the edges of the American Empire to closer scrutiny, here meaning California, Hawai‘i, the Mexican border, and a select handful of related sites. Here the rich intersection of human migration, agricultural cultivation, and the corresponding movement of insect species first raised concerns for “native inhabitants,” those holding the power to define such boundaries. To translate this argument in other terms, the author posits that histories of racism, especially against Asian migration in the first half of the twentieth century, need to take into account comparable efforts to restrict the movements of plants and insects. Those creatures deemed “alien,” “foreign,” or “invasive,” whether plant or animal, frequently reflect, or are informed by, patterns of structural racism used to confine humans, and invoke similar methodologies when trying to limit mobility whether in its social, economic, or geographic forms. Ultimately, the work calls for a close examination of these inter-related trajectories, replacing isolation with biodiversity, and embracing an entangled version of history.
The work takes Japanese-American populations as its initial focus, especially those migrating during the Meiji era (1868–1912), and encountering fierce resistance as they settled in places like California and Hawai‘i. The work thus opens with Charles Marlatt, an American official with the Department of Agriculture, and the problematic import of cherry trees from Meiji Japan. Shinozuka touches on similar territory to that of the famous collection Yokohama, California, by Toshio Mori, published shortly after the war (1949), and now a major text in the field of Asian-American studies. Moreover, the work complements a prior generation of foundational Asian-American studies scholars, especially the work of Ronald Takaki. Recent histories of Meiji population policies, such as Sydney Xu Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Aya Homei’s Science for Governing Japan’s Population (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022), consider these themes primarily from the Japanese side (domestic), whereas Shinozuka focuses on the difficulties encountered during the diaspora process, the reception side of migration.
This last observation does not pose a direct challenge to Shuzuoka’s work, but rather, offers a careful qualification, a recognition that the restrictive policies on the American side merit additional context as to their intersection with migration policies deriving from Meiji Japan and Qing China. In the fomer case, if Lu’s argument holds, Japan deliberately sent members of its population abroad, pursuing what the author refers to as a policy of “Malthusian Expansionism.” If a site like Hawai‘i offers a prospective contact zone, and equally, a site of racialized contestation, it helps to recognize the multiple forces contributing to the making of these circumstances. From Lu’s perspective, these migrants actively pursue settler colonialism, a very different version of the story.
Moreover, for a work so closely focused on its subject matter, there remain questions about its applicability to other populations (human, plant, insect), although that issue is answered in part by Shinozuka’s references to the Chinese-American experience, along with members of these other groups migrating to these same types of spaces. The work thus remains a timely and powerful rejoinder to standard histories of eugenics or exclusion precisely by making this wider appeal to multiple species and forms of establishing barriers to their mobility. Drawing from Asian-American studies, migration studies, the history of science, and the history of biology, Biotic Borders is impressive in its range, even as it stands primarily as a new contribution to Asian-American studies, one responding specifically to the concerns raised by the recent pandemic experience, still ongoing, and the particular concerns underscored by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. In its individual chapters, the book tracks a series of meticulous cases studies—chestnut blight, citrus canker, San Jose scale, and the Japanese beetle—in building towards a cumulative inventory of empire and the impact made through the exchange of sample materials. In this sense, the volume rests easily with the work of historians of biology, even as the subject matter proves more diverse in its coverage.
In the end, the work is careful to extend its metaphors to material and regulatory practices, the ways in which the movements of insects and plants naturalized assumptions about race, ethnicity, and national origins. The records for documenting such creatures and life forms are rigorous, the author observes, allowing her to note the time and point of first entry, and with these bare facts, the rich set of practices surrounding protection of the indigenous or native from the “invasive” force deriving from overseas. For STS scholars, the emphasis on gardens and agricultural stations serves a dual purpose: it underscores themes of empire, and hints at Bruno Latour’s “centres of calculation,” the spaces in which scientific practice is not only explored, but also reified (e.g., research centres, royal gardens, tropical medical sites), before being disseminated. In this sense, although Biotic Borders should appeal primarily to scholars of Pacific history and Asian-American studies, it holds potential interest for historians of science, medicine, and biology.
John P. DiMoia
Seoul National University, Seoul