Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950

Biotic Borders is the long-awaited monograph that expands upon Jeannie N. Shinozuka's 2013 essay in American Quarterly, "Deadly Perils: Japanese Beetles and the Pestilential Immigrant, 1920s–1930s," with which many readers are no doubt familiar and (perhaps like this reviewer) may have assigned in their courses on immigration and Asian American history. The book goes both wider and deeper, covering a broader range of species (San José scale, chestnut blight, citrus canker, Mexican cotton boll weevil, white termite) in more diverse settings (Mexico, Philadelphia, Hawai'i). Together, they service Shinozuka's central argument that "the origins of foreign species and their categorization as either invasive or native served to advance the larger goals of an emergent US empire" (p. 208) and its immigration regime. Biotic Borders explains why and how animus against and exclusion of Asian bodies as well as plants and insects from Asia came of age concurrently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States.Shinozuka documents the history of US biological nativism, exclusion, and empire-building over eight succinct and richly illustrated chapters. Chapter 1 establishes the book's parameters by examining the responses of entomologists and government officials to San José scale, which attacked fruit trees in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 2 focuses on the chestnut and citrus tree cankers that led to the passage of Plant Quarantine Number (PQN) 37 in 1919, the first policy to exclude entire horticultural and floricultural stocks. Although scientists and officials often regarded Asian plants and flowers as carriers for pests and pathogens, Shinozuka emphasizes that public demand sustained their importation into the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, because natural exotica helped Americans see themselves as "international and sophisticated citizens" (p. 149). Next, three geographically specific case studies illuminate struggles over Asian plant invasions and disease at the US–Mexico border, in Southern California, and in Hawai'i, respectively.Shinozuka's discussions about Mexico and Hawai'i in chapters 3 and 5 advance her argument about the far-reaching influence of US racial ideologies that led to the expropriation of Japanese farmland in Mexico, for example, and the regulation of insect pests by the Hawaiian Kingdom. Chapter 4 recounts how local officials in Los Angeles disparaged Japanese farming and fishing practices during the 1910s as unsanitary. Their accusations offer an example of "how easily the human and more-than-human worlds mutually constituted one another" (p. 106). The Japanese beetle and its devastation of the eastern United States beginning in the 1920s, and the perception that Japanese farmers endangered American consumers through their use of pesticides form the focus of chapters 6 and 7. The eighth and final chapter reconsiders the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II as a "new mechanism of control" that rendered them "nonthreatening to the native biota" (p. 199), and explores its extension into Latin America through the tragic story of the Kudo family from Peru. The book's conclusion appropriately situates the book within the COVID-19 pandemic, and advocates for greater consideration of "how science fundamentally and historically shaped the way we understand immigration today" (p. 219).While historians have written extensively about the relationship between US imperialism and the environment, Shinozuka's insights about the native-invasive binary are especially eye-opening for scholars of race and migration, and add to recent work by Connie Chiang, Brian McCammack, and others. Employing inter-imperial and hemispheric approaches enables Shinozuka to offer a textured analysis of larger power structures, which she balances with keen attention to the ways that Japanese American agriculturalists resisted denigration and marginalization. At the same time, the book raises important questions for further exploration. I wish to offer two here. First, despite its claim to historicize the "rise of anti-Asian racism in America," Biotic Borders deals primarily with anti-Japanese feeling and discourse. To what extent did other Asians in the United States experience biological nativism (especially after World War II), and what made the Japanese case distinctive? Second, Shinozuka's notion of plants and insects as "immigrants" invites readers to grapple with their agency as part of what Emily O'Gorman and Andrea Gaynor call "more-than-human histories." (Environmental History 25, no. 4 October 2020). How might questioning the field's fundamental speciesism yield more complex and surprising histories of immigration? These questions speak to the ways that Shinozuka's expansive, timely, and original intervention in Biotic Borders invites engagement not only by scholars of migration and Asian American history, but also those studying the United States in the world; science, technology, and society; and the environment.