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 nativeand 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.More broadly, Asian American studies have always been invested in the dehumanizing rhetoric that casts Asian immigrants