2023/12/01 by Lisa Onaga · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #History of Science and Medicine #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s10739-023-09759-z
openalex publication_date 2023/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Biotic Borders reconstructs the history of the formation of ideas of race by examining the consequences of human, plant, and insect movements across the Pacific Ocean and North America between the late 19th century and the 1940s.Jeannie Shinozuka shows that US anxieties about the end of the colonial frontier and limitations of resources led white settler colonists to seek out and import exotic, that is, "transpacific" plants (p.9), which invited a cascade of events that simultaneously led to the racialization of plants, along with their diseases, insect pests, and human plant propagators.Shinozuka's book introduces a new perspective toward the analysis of sources concerning the history of entomology in the US, especially in the context of the institutionalizing field of economic entomology in the USDA and Federal Horticultural Board.The book accomplishes this by detailing the development of US settler colonial scientific responses to the pests and diseases associated with plants shipped from Asia alongside analyses of a rich trove of published sources, manuscripts, as well as oral histories normally limited to Asian American studies scholarship.In doing so, this revisionist history of gardens, floriculture, and horticulture shows the historical emergence of a discernible pattern, wherein different tripartite units of plants, insects, and humans became contentiously interconnected in the policing and deliberation of national borders.The book contributes a long-awaited historical analysis of the interrelationship of science and the production of fear that surrounded the dehumanization of people of Asian-Pacific descent during the early decades of the 20th century, which was integral to the expansion of nativist sentiments and policies in the US.Through a series of chapters organized around key institutional and disciplinary developments and controversial cases of plant introductions, Biotic Borders shows how local US demand for exotic plants and developments in floriculture and horticul-