The Unusual Story of the Pocket Veto Case, 1926–1929 by Jonathan Lurie

Abstract

Peril discourse. More than merely revealing xenophobic rhetoric as dehumanizing, this work underscores the material and historical processes of Asian American racial formation as a political project contingent on U.S. nation-building—the consolidation of the U.S. empire through the degradation of Asian bodies at its borders. Within this genealogy of robust intellectual inquiry, Shinozuka reveals how the imaginaries of entomologists, botanists, and other scientists produced the social and political conditions for the Yellow Peril rhetoric, thus implicating scientific knowledge in the creation of racial meaning. Moving through different moments in entomological and botanical history that cast foreign plants and insects as racialized invaders threatening the biotic ecosystem of the United States, Biotic Borders insists that the regulation of plant and insect immigration was integral to the racial exclusion that contributed to building the U.S. empire. Science, as Bahng argues, is a cultural, not an objective, form of knowledge that “participate[s] in the construction of national and international ideas about modernity and futurity.” Shinozuka’s careful reading of immigration policy alongside intellectual exchanges between scientists aptly demonstrates the cultural and political force behind the intertwined formations of race and species as nodes of difference. By bringing these histories together, Biotic Borders is an important intervention into ideas about immigration and the function of race and species in nationbuilding. This book offers urgent contributions to Asian American studies, the history of science, environmental studies, and posthumanism. Its interdisciplinary engagement sheds new light on the histories of race, species, and immigration.