PDF Infrahumanisms Science Culture and the Making of Modern Non/personhood ANIMA Critical Race Studies Otherwise Megan H Glick 9781478001164 Books

Product details Series ANIMA Critical Race Studies Otherwise Hardcover 288 pages Publisher Duke University Press Books (December 14, 2018) Language English ISBN-10 147800116X

Infrahumanisms Science Culture and the Making of Modern Non/personhood ANIMA Critical Race Studies Otherwise Megan H Glick 9781478001164 Books Reviews

• Infrahumanisms directs a multidisciplinary gaze on what it means to be human or less-than-human in twentieth century America. The author, who teaches American Studies at Wesleyan University, combines the approaches of historiography, animal studies, science studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and other strands of cultural studies, to build new analytical tools and to apply them to a range of issues that have marked the United States’ recent history children and primates caught in a process of bioexpansionism from the 1900s to the 1930s; extraterrestriality or the pursuit of posthuman life in outer space from the 1940s to the 1970s; and the interiority of cross-species contagion and hybridity from the 1980s to the 2010s. Judged by historiography’s standards, the book lacks the recourse to previously unexploited archives and new textual documents that most historians consider as essential for original contributions to their field. The empirical base of Infrahumanisms is composed of published books and articles, secondary analyses drawn from various disciplines, and theories offered by various authors. There are no interviews or testimonies drawn from oral history or direct observations from ethnographic fieldwork, no unearthing of new documents or unexploited archives, and no attempt to quantify or to measure statistical correlations. This piece of scholarship is firmly grounded in the qualitative methodologies and humanistic viewpoints that define American Studies on US campuses. The only novel approach proposed by the book is to use a range of photographies and visual sources as primary material and to complement textual commentary with the tools of visual analysis borrowed from media studies. But what Infrahumanities lacks in methodological originality is more than compensated by its theoretical deftness. Megan Glick innovates in the research questions that she applies to her sample of empirical data and in the theory that she builds out of her constant back-and-forth between facts and abstraction. She does conceptual work as other social scientists do fieldwork, and offers experience-near concepts or mid-range theorizing as a way to contribute to the expansion of her research field. In particular, her use of animal studies is very novel just like minority studies gave birth to white studies within the framework of ethnic studies, or feminism led to masculinism in the field of gender analysis, Megan Glick complements animal studies with the cultural analysis of humans as a species. Exit the old humanities that once defined American studies or literary criticism; welcome to the post-humanities of human studies that patrol the liminalities and borderings of the human species.
  
  The whitening of the chimpanzee
  
  What is the infrahuman contained in Infrahumanisms? A straightforward answer is to start with the book cover representing the simian body of a young baboon (sculpted by artist Kendra Haste) seen from behind monkeys, particularly great apes, are infrahuman. This, at least, was how the word was first introduced in the English language the first use of the term “infrahuman” was made in 1916 by Robert Mearns Yerkes, a psychobiologist now remembered as the founding father of primatology. By modern criteria, Yerkes was a eugenicist and a racist he saw his work as assisting in the process of natural selection by promoting the success and propagation of “superior” models of the human race. Through the Pasteur Institute in Paris, he was able to import primates from French Guinea and to apply to them various tests of mental and physical capacities that were first conceived for the measurement of the intelligence and characteristics of various “races”. Thus, writes Megan Glick, “while the terms of dehumanization and radicalization are often understood to be familiar bedfellows, (…) the process of humanization is equally as important in the construction of racial difference and inequality.” In particular, she shows that the chimpanzee appeared in these early primatology studies and in popular discourse as akin to the white race, while the gorilla was identified with black Africans. The “whitening of the chimpanzee” and “blackening of the gorilla” manifested itself in the early photographs of primates in human company or in the first episodes of the Tarzan series, where Cheeta is part of Tarzan and Jane’s composite family in the jungle, while gorillas are imagined as “the deadly enemies of Tarzan’s tribe.” The jungle trope is also applied to early twentieth-century children who were involved in animalistic rituals and identities from “jungle gym” equipments in public playgrounds to the totems and wild outdoor activities of the Boy Scouts movement, the development of a childhood culture in close contact with the natural world marked a new moment in the lives of US children at the beginning of the century. The child was imagined as a distinct species, a proto-evolutionary figure providing the missing link between animals and humans. Neither primates nor children leave written archives or provide a “voice” available for historiographical record like the subaltern, they literally “cannot speak.” Here again, the historian turns to pictures and illustrations to envision children as infrahuman, as in the photographs of infant and adult skeletons in pediatrics books that portrayed the child as “different from the adult in every fiber.”
  
  The mid-twentieth century was a time of great anxieties about the human condition. Images and photographs tell the story better than words. The era of extraterrestriality was bordered by the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on one end and the picture of the blue planet as seen from outer space on the other. Extraterrestrial creatures were a matter of sighting and picturing more than storytelling or inventing. The pictures of aliens crashing at Roswell, New Mexico, with their “short gray” bodies and oversized heads, took to the public imagination and were described in similar terms by “alien abductees” who came up with similar visions although they had no way to coordinate their testimonies between themselves. While aliens on the big screen or in popular media tended to be large, monstrous, and even superhuman, aliens “sighted” by the American public were small, quasi-human, and frail. Here the author has a theory that stands at variance with standard interpretations of alien invasions as inspired by the red scare of communism. It wasn’t the Cold War and the mass panic over the infiltration of communist subjects that inspired the narratives and depictions of alien abductions and Mars attacks, but rather the traumatic after-effects of the Holocaust pictures that were disseminated at the end of the Second World War. As Megan Glick argues, “both tell a story about the nature of midcentury visual culture, both are concerned about the boundaries of human embodiment, and both question the futurity of humanity.” Meanwhile, the increasing precision of human genetics gave way to a post-Holocaust eugenic culture, in which the fight against social ills that undergirded the earlier eugenic movement was traded in for a more exacting battle against biological flaws. Key to these developments was the Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg, a bacteriologist who made seminal contributions to the field of human genetics and who launched the speculative study of exobiology, of life on other planets. Like in the final screenshot of the cult movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, the picture of the earth as viewed from space paralleled the image of the fully developed fetus within a woman’s womb as reproduced on the cover of Life magazine. Lederberg and his colleague envisioned the impending elimination of genetically based disabilities through intra-uterine manipulation of the embryo. Considering the backdrop of sterilization campaigns for disabled persons or anxieties raised by overpopulation in the Third World, this raised concerns that African American populations could be targeted for “defective genetic traits” such as the prevalence of sickle cell disease.
  
  Jumping the species barrier
  
  The 1980s was marked by the AIDS crisis, which at first was associated with stigmatized populations such as gay men, intravenous drug users, and migrants from Haiti. The AIDS epidemic has already been studied from various perspectives, locating the disease within the history of sexuality, race, and medicine. Carol Glick adopts a new angle by taking an animal studies perspective by treating AIDS as a zoonotic or cross-species disease, placing it in a series that also includes SARS, mad cow disease, and avian flu. When the virus was found to have emerged from within chimpanzees in Africa, questions wee soon raised about how, why, and when AIDS had jumped the species barrier. Speculations extended to the “strangeness” of African sexual habits and dietary customs, and the denunciation of the consumption of bush meat operated both a dehumanization of African poachers and a humanization of monkey species. Tracts of tropical forest were cleared from their human presence to preserve the habitat of great apes. Dehumanization also worked at the level of AIDS patients, who were denied proper treatment and health insurance up to this day. An extreme form of dehumanization is animalization, especially the comparison of humans with certain devalorized species such as pigs. A cartoon published in the New Yorker shows the evolution of the human species from ape to mankind, and then its devolution into pigness due to sloth and obesity. In such representations, the obese body is usually represented as disabled and deformed; it is more often than not male, bald, and white. But statistically, obese people are more likely to be black, poor, and female. Public health campaigns put the blame of overweightness on individuals, obfuscating the role of food companies, advertisement campaigns, and policy neglect for our unhealthy diet. In more than one way, pigs are our posthuman future genetic engineering is capable of creating porcine chimeras capable of developing human cells and organs for xenotransplantation benefitting needy patients. Using animal parts in human bodies results in the hybridization of both species, while the American dietary passion for pork creates the possibility of a species transgression akin to cannibalism that the taboo on pork consumption for Muslims and Jews seems to have anticipated. The main barriers to our porcine and infrahuman future may not be scientific and technological, but cultural and religious.
  
  The concluding chapter is titled The Plurality is Near, a pun on Ray Kurzwell’s book announcing that “the singularity is near” and that humans will soon transcend biology. The plurality of species, which includes parasites and vectors of harmful diseases, raises the issue of speciesism does mankind have the right to eradicate certain species, such as the mosquito Aedes aegypti targeted by a campaign of total elimination due to its role in the spread of malaria, dengue, and Zika? The elimination of mosquitoes in the name of human health is hard to contest; and yet we do not know what the long-term consequences of this tinkering of ecosystems will be. Scientists record an alarming rate of species decline and extinction, with spectacular drops in the population of bugs, butterflies, and insects. A future without insects would have catastrophic implications for birds, plants, soils, and humans; so much so that in order to slow down and someday reverse the loss of insects, we must change the way we manage the earth’s ecosystem and enhance their chances of survival. The plurality of species also forms the background of the new discipline of microbiomics, the study of the genetic material of all the microbes—bacteria, fungi, yeasts and viruses—that live on and inside the human body. Yoghurt commercials have popularized the notion of the intestinal flora as essential to the well-being of the organism. Digestive health sees the intestinal tract as not only a site of transit and evacuation, but also of flourishing and symbiosis. New models representing the body go beyond the mechanics of fluids and the circuitry of organs they mobilize the ecology of populations and the co-evolution of ecosystems. Like the poet Walt Whitman, the human body can claim to contain multitudes where the body ends and the environment begins is no longer clear. What happens at the infrahuman level unsettles the definition of the human “the proposed manipulation of populations that exist in parasitic and symbiotic relation to the human species, often inside the body itself, suggests a deep unsettling of the animal/human binary and a restaging of human difference.” Seeing human beings are primate-microbe hybrids sets a new frontier for research and raises questions about the future of mankind. As microbiologist and NASA adviser Joshua Lederberg once declared, “We live in evolutionary competition with microbes, bacteria and viruses – there is no certainty that we will be the winners.”
  
  Unmasking the ideology of infrahumanism
  
  The infrahuman, then, takes up different figures throughout the twentieth century the ape, the child, the creature from outer space, the embryo, the racial other, the posthuman hybrid, the microbiome within the human body. The infrahuman complicates notions of the other, of what counts as alien, outsider, non-human, friend or foe. It appears through twentieth-century scientific and cultural discourses that include pediatrics, primatology, eugenics, exobiology, microbiotics, and obesity research. The infrahuman confronts us with what the author calls “hyperalterity” or the radically other. By extension, infrahumanism, taken in the plural, designates an ideology, an episteme, or an -ism that inspires processes of infrahumanization. It rests on the belief that one’s ingroup is more human than an outgroup, which is less human. It results from a dual movement of dehumanization, which denies the humanity of certain individuals or collectives, and of rehumanization, which bestows non-human animals with certain human characteristics. It is closely related to the notions of speciation, the process by which differences are constituted into a distinct species, and of speciesism, the idea that being human is a good enough reason for human animals to have greater moral rights than non-human animals. What gets to count as human or as animal also affects our conceptions of human difference such as race, sexuality, disability, and disease status. Carol Glick argues that unmasking the ideology of infrahumanism is crucial to better understanding the persistence of human social inequality, “laying bare the rhetorics of being ‘beyond’ or ‘post’ race, gender, and other forms of social difference thought now to be on the precipice of mere social construction.” She notes the curious coincidence between the deconstruction of humanist thought and the emergence of an animal rights discourse at the precise moment when feminist and minority movements started to demand the recognition of their full rights as human beings, a category from which they had long been excluded. This is why “feminism should not end at the species divide” feminist studies have a distinctive contribution to offer on the human/nonhuman distinction and how it affects the rights and claims of both groups.
  
  Thinking about humanism, and its infrahumanist variants, as the ideology proper to the human species also transforms our vision of “the humanities”. Rather than simply reproducing established forms and methods of disciplinary knowledge, posthumanists should confront how changes in society and culture require that scholars rethink what they do—theoretically, methodologically, and ethically. Infrahumanisms bridges the scientific and cultural spheres by attending to the cultural imaginaries of scientists as well as to the changes brought by science in popular culture. It provides a welcome critique of the foundations of the field of animal studies, itself less than a couple of decades old. In her introduction, Carl Glick scratches in passing some of the great founders of the discipline—Cary Wolfe and his infatuation with systems theory, Jacques Derrida and his cat, Donna Haraway and her doggie—while giving kudos to more recent entries that mix the radical critique of feminist studies, critical race studies, queer studies, and disability studies—with authors such as Mel Chen, Neel Ahuja, Lauren Berlant, and Claire Jean Kim. She doesn’t support radicalism for radicalism’s sake she has strong reservations with the biological essentialism of some animal rights activists who conflate racism with speciesism, and she reminds us that “we cannot ethically argue for the direct comparison of people and animals.” Her book is therefore a welcome contribution “to the vast and difficult conversation about the place of nonhuman animals in the humanist academy.” As mentioned, Carol Glick also extends what counts as historical archive and how to present it to the reader. Images, pictures, photographs, screenshots, and movies will remain as the twentieth century’s main archives. They require a mode of analysis and exposure that is distinct from textual interpretation, and for which tools and methodologies are only beginning to be designed. Illustrations used by the author form part of her demonstration. For many readers, the striking book cover of Infrahumanisms will remain an apt summary of her main argument.