Insect Humanities

 
Erinn Campbell (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) ‘Frank and honest’? The politics of international plant pest reporting, 1952–1994.
 
From 1952 to 1994, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published the FAO Plant Protection Bulletin as an ‘official’ outlet for reporting outbreaks of plant pests and pathogens. Like other scientific serials, the Bulletin served not only as an informational service but also as a site for developing a scientific community—in this case, a global community of plant protection researchers, united (in theory) by a shared commitment to transparency, interdisciplinarity, and transnational cooperation. The benefits of being seen to be a member of this community (complementing other conspicuous displays of post-war internationalism) were necessary to counter the economic disincentives to pest reporting; announcing outbreaks could prompt a nation’s trading partners to quarantine or ban its exports. This paper examines this tension to illuminate the politics of international pest reportingin the Bulletin. In practice, pest reporting was geographically patchy, reflecting both exploitative colonial knowledge networks and Cold War geopolitics. European nations’ reporting declined sharply over the 1950s and remained low until pest reporting became politically expedient in the late 1980s, even as European plant protection experts surveilled pests in colonised territories and newly independent states. On the other hand, many ‘developing’ countries also worked on their own terms (through various forms of collaboration among corporations, government agencies, universities, and non-governmental organisations) to participate in pest reporting and thus establish their place in modern global agriculture.

 
Jeannie Shinozuka (Visiting Assistant Professor of History in International Studies, Soka University) will present a book talk on Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950, followed by a discussion. Here is the abstract:

In the late nineteenth century, increasing traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a “biological yellow peril” when nursery stock and other agricultural products shipped from Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Over the next fifty years, these crossings transformed conceptions of race and migration, played a central role in the establishment of the US empire and its government agencies, and shaped the fields of horticulture, invasion biology, entomology, and plant pathology. In Biotic Borders, Jeannie N. Shinozuka uncovers the emergence of biological nativism that fueled American imperialism and spurred anti-Asian racism that remains with us today.

Shinozuka provides an eye-opening look at biotic exchanges that not only altered the lives of Japanese in America but transformed American society more broadly. She shows how the modern fixation on panic about foreign species created a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia inspired concerns about biodiversity, prompting new categories of “native” and “invasive” species that defined groups as bio-invasions to be regulated—or annihilated. By highlighting these connections, Shinozuka shows us that this story cannot be told about humans alone—the plants and animals that crossed with them were central to Japanese American and Asian American history. The rise of economic entomology and plant pathology in concert with public health and anti-immigration movements demonstrate these entangled histories of xenophobia, racism, and species invasions.
Please see attached excerpt.
Excerpted with permission from Biotic Borders by Jeannie N. Shinozuka, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2022 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
 
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