Introduction

Biohumanities

To begin thinking about the biohumanities and how it might relate to race, we first had to land on what we meant by race. We took it as a given that race is an unstable object and idea that eludes definition. Race might be seen as a set of knowledges applied to morphology, a discourse, what Stuart Hall called a “sliding signifier,”1 but also a set of practices: a formation, an enactment,2 a material–semiotic relation.3 We are interested here in the myriad things race can be and the ways race is made and remade in time and place.

With this in mind, we tentatively began to respond to other prompts that were fundamental, such as “what do you think that the biohumanities is?” and “how can the biohumanities be a response to the racial crisis of our time?” Ultimately, as we explain in more detail, the biohumanities, in our rendering, takes as its object the multifaceted linkages between the “bio” and the “human,” and it is also a methodological lens that brings the biosciences and humanities into conversation to open up the category of the human.

What possibilities does the concept of the biohumanities offer for making us think, for making us “look around,” rather than ahead, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing would have it?4 How could this concept move our thinking and inspire methodologies that help us attend to difference differently as well as to structural injustices? On the face of it, the combination of the bio and the human would seem to offer us more modernist trouble. Combining a biological rendering of the human with a humanist approach to what humans are seems to further solidify and naturalize a conception of universality. In what follows we take a theoretical step back and pause with some genealogical threads of the bio and the human and their relations with race, and then move on to consider the epistemological and methodological possibilities that the biohumanities enfolds.

In the formative The Invention of Humanity, the historian and political scientist Siep Stuurman shows how modernity and the modern states of justice are based on the (supposed) sameness of humans as the norm, and their (supposed) equality before the law is the consequence of this idea. He argues that historically there have been three crucial “modalities” that have helped invent this thing called humanity.5 First, at the very earliest days of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, there is the acknowledgment of a common humanness, that is, the idea that humans belonged to the same biological species. The second modality is related to the anthropological turn of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through which cultural differences came to be understood as variation on a common theme, assuming a shared human culture. The third modality, contemporary with the anthropological turn, is a temporal regime that helped to think civilization in terms of an evolutionary development, in the way that even if some peoples are not there yet, they are assumed to undergo similar development and eventually arrive in modern times to come. Although the three modes that have helped establish the paradigm of humanity have been widely shared by different civilizations across the globe, so Stuurman argues, the coupling of equality and sameness became pivotal in racial Europe during the Enlightenment. The dictum was: To become equal is to become like those who are already equal, that is, the European whites. Enlightenment thus became the obligatory passage point for becoming equal.

As such, the concept of humanity, according to this reading, is inherently racial, and arguably racist. In addition, the modern, evolutionary biological concept of the human has contributed to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story”:6 a story that helps to order species, organisms, and related entities on a line, that starts with the primordial soup to take us straight to the “now.”7 The biological and its rendering in the biological, life sciences, and medicine has been rightly critiqued for reductionist and essentializing gestures, and for contributing to the legitimization of inequalities, violence, and destruction. So, from this perspective it seems that juxtaposing the bio and the human gives us far more trouble rather than helping us attend to and intervene in such injustices. How have these stories been told? Why have they been so believable?

Intuitively in the twin figures bio-humanity, it is the bio that has been deemed fixed and rigid, the culprit of many harms and iniquities. But might it be that a different take on the bio could help decenter the human? Through this very juxtaposition, the bio helps us attend to the somatic aspects of the human, the fact that this human is situated in a body (that is not one, to evoke Annemarie Mol).8 This way of thinking requires first that we accept that the biological cannot be reduced to a singular entity, be this an organism, cell, hormone, or gene. The biological is necessarily a nature-culture assemblage,9 afforded through extended networks and practices. Second, precisely because the biological is relational and concerned with life (in its generality), it contributes to a decentering of the human. So, thinking this through, might the bio even radically shift the boundary between the human and the more than human, helping us look around, to touch and reconfigure our relations with the world? Might it help us address and rework injustices that do not only center on human relations but include our relations with more-than-humans/“earthbeings”?10 Could the bio, precisely because it both recalls and decenters the human, help us attend to and rework ecological disasters and the way they are racially structured? Can the bio help us reimagine the ecological, including how social and political structures impinge on ecologies and multispecies lives?

This book engages and critiques the Enlightenment humanist story, where the human species has been seen as biologically hierarchized, with some positioned as more human than others, and where the human as ontological category has only been produced through (and thus depended on) the coproduction of marginalized nonpersonhood, animals, and objects (and the slippages between these). We critically examine this legacy by considering—as our object of analysis—the myriad linkages between the “bio” and the “human.” In doing so, we eschew any simple understanding of the relationship between these two terms as simply referring to the biological properties of the human as species. As noted, this idea is infinitely fraught, as biology (and the sciences more generally) and the modern concept of “the human” have been essential to the division between humans, and between humans and nonhumans. Crucially, we also engage the linkages between bio and human, “biohumanities,” as a methodological lens to open up the category of the human and thus to interrogate race.

What does a biohumanities approach entail? In one sense, the term has been invoked in philosophy and literature. Philosophers of science, for instance, have used the term biohumanities to characterize a mode of collaborative thinking that humanistic approaches from philosophy and history of science can offer with/to/in/on biology itself.11 For scholars of literature and medicine it has marked an enterprise that examines textual representations and interpretations of “biological, ecological, historical, and structural determinants of both the amelioration and the exacerbation of suffering.”12 While our rendering of biohumanities as a methodology takes aspects of these understandings into consideration, it is distinct in that it pursues a revised (posthuman) humanities approach. That is to say that our examination of culture and power in human societies (the traditional terrain of the humanities) is predicated on critically examining what we even mean by “human,” rather than taking it as a given. But the biohumanities might offer both an approach or method and a relationship: studying the biosciences from a social and ethical perspective, while also bridging the ongoing conversations among biological and biomedical scientists on the one hand and humanities scholars on the other, and putting these often-disconnected domains into relation. Humanities can comment on the biosciences, but also add to the biosciences. Moving beyond a social determinants of health approach, biohumanities might offer a generative way to engage with how society and culture (including biology as a science) condition biological life.

Our vision of biohumanities brings the biosciences and their knowledges into the terrain of resources that we might use to interpret and reckon with our realities, past and present. This is not to elevate the biosciences above other forms of knowledge, nor is it to make biological knowledge subservient to other ways of knowing. Instead, we are interested in how bioscientific knowledges come about, as well as how they refract and reconfigure other forms of knowledge, and how this opens possibilities for new, generative analysis.

Specifically, we examine how the figure of “human” contours biological life along lines of race, and critically address the politics that informs and conditions life—at the level of embodied bio-materiality. We do so not to catalog “reality” (documenting what is happening) or arrive at “overarching meaning” (establishing veracity) but, rather, to highlight meaning-making practices and their effects. Across its four chapters, this book theorizes the cage and caging as material–semiotic sites for racialization and for iteratively redefining the human–animal boundary.

Caging

As indicated previously, we brought our different fields of research into our conversations. We took the time to query each other’s objects of research as methodological objects that could help us think and rethink the bio and the human. It is in this way that we came to the thematic of cages. Caging was pressing on our consciousness in different ways, ranging from living in lockdown in Sydney, to researching metabolism cages. We started to wonder whether cages and caging could be the overarching theme for us, a way into the puzzle of race, the biological, and the human, and a power relationship to explore, given how race and racism have long operated as caging mechanisms that contain and constrain. While the idea immediately captured something already at stake for some of us, others took time to think about how to give it content and contour in our contributions. We ended up bringing in literary and philosophical sensibilities to caging, race, and racism.

Under the social conditions of modernity and through the gaze of scientific racism that upheld those conditions, Europeans invented the modern concept of “race” to biologize the social and economic hierarchies that stratified human societies during and after colonialism. Conceptualizing race as biological—as located deep in the recesses of the body or written on its surface—created an ontological context where only white European men could be said to be fully human, with all others relegated to a beast-to-things continuum. Race became a way to think, act, and organize life in ways that registered and materialized social inequalities as biological and ascribed those inequalities to an essential animal(ized) nature, ostensibly caging non-whites within these knowledges. As a system of social power, racism, in turn, is deployed to cage those viewed as having “wild” bodies, recasting hierarchies of animality in distinctive racial formations. Race and species classifications delineate among the earth’s creatures, by creating not only distances but also deep asymmetries that structure life chances, such as unequal patterns of health for human and nonhuman animals alike. Such asymmetries are inaugurated and sustained not only through practices of social closure and government but also through material artifacts that encircle and tame nonhuman animals’ bodies and animalized human bodies for scientific, commercial, and political advantage. Empowered by policies and cultures organized around security, health, science, and leisure, the practice of caging enables certain peoples and creatures to be “kept.” This book is concerned with the practices of caging related to racialized “others” (how caging functions as part of racialized social systems), and examines the ways caging draws on racial and species hierarchies for justification and meaning. Antiracist praxis must confront these cages, seeking to uncage their captives through inventive liberatory strategies of self-definition and collective mobilization.

In examining the concept of the cage and practices of caging, we look to critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, postcolonial sciences and technology studies, and their intersections to ask: How do science, technology, and medicine participate in the racial formation of metaphorical iron cages and real material cages? How is racism materialized through both metaphorical and literal cages? What critical ideas about biology, animality, and the human(ities) are needed to analyze how cages participate in racial formation, conditioned always by gender, class, sexuality, and geopolitical factors?

What are we to make of the cage? Caging and then freeing oneself from the cage is the creative work of an escape artist. But usually, caged peoples are not magicians who orchestrate a performance of captivity, only to break through the chains, pick the locks, and flee the cage to escape mortal threat. While white-American figures like Henry Houdini popularized precisely that kind of performance escapology for white mass consumption in the twentieth century, Black figures like Henry Box Brown and Noble Drew Ali engaged in forms of escapology for political freedom and creative expression. Jacob Dorman tells the story of Noble Drew Ali, founder of the Moorish Science Temple in the 1910s, who advertised that he could free himself from bounded rope.13 The abolitionist and performer Henry Box Brown packed himself into a shipping crate and shipped himself to freedom in 1849.14 And Harriet Jacobs, as she describes in her autobiographical antebellum slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, escaped into what she called a “loophole of retreat”: a tiny crawl space above her grandmother’s shed, where she hid for seven years to avert her master’s persecution, remaining “hidden in plain sight.”15

What has it meant for escapology to have emerged under the incantations of racecraft,16 where we mistake the practice of escaping from cages as one that has nothing to do with escaping racism? And yet, performing and enacting even fraught forms of liberation offers practice for the real thing. For Christina Sharpe, the slave ship hull operates as a type of waterborne cage, ferrying Africans to the New World.17 Yet caging might not be identical with enslavement while it is tactically involved in the act of enslaving others.

Critical race and ethnic studies scholars foreground that state officials have long used cages to confine people who are accused of committing violations of civil, criminal, and immigration laws. In the United States, there exists a long-standing practice of keeping detained migrants in cages and chain-link kennels, a racist policy that is supported by large segments of the citizenry. In 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform (Elijah Cummings, Maryland, Chairman) held a hearing titled “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border,” which was convened to draw critical attention to the practice.18 Simultaneously, critical race and ethnic studies scholars have taken up the cage as a technology of state immigration policy and practice. Recent accounts of migrant children and families being kept in cages along the Mexico-U.S. border have increased moral outrage, but as Sophia Jordán Wallace and Chris Zepeda-Millán point out, the original chain-link fences from World War II Japanese internment camps were dug out of the desert and repurposed to contain migrants and separate families along the border.19 In Ana Minian’s work, the United States represents a “cage of gold” that traps Mexican migrants who become a population without a country.20

In Iron Cages, Ronald Takaki describes the ideological forces in white culture that shape comparative attitudes and politics across racial and ethnic groups.21 Mashing up the phrase from Parson’s (mis)interpretation of Max Weber and Karl Marx, Takaki argues that racism forms part of an ideological superstructure, a kind of “iron cage” that culturally and materially organizes bodies, labor, and power in Western capitalist societies. Cultural conditioning under what we now call racial capitalism leads to the mobilization of racist assumptions about the supposedly essential subhuman or nonhuman nature of non-whites.

These are just some of the ideas that inform—and unfold within—the chapters that follow. While the chapters here are each distinct, they developed in relation to one another and took shape through our shared conversations around the biohuman(ities), race, and the concept of caging.

Chapter 1 examines the metabolism cage—any scientifically engineered confinement system that captures and measures the flow of matter into and out of a confined animal’s captive body. Metabolism cages emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a key site for experiments in calorimetery throughout Europe, the United States, and their colonial and imperial satellites. It compares the racial discourses that keepers use to frame patterns of social inclusion and exclusion in metabolism cage research and to justify, interpret, and disseminate their scientific findings. The chapter narrates three stories. It opens with a story about Emil Osterberg, a Swedish-born custodian/scholar and known drinker, who was the first human to spend time in Wilbur Atwater’s respiration calorimeter at Wesleyan University in the winter of 1896. The second story unfolds in the 1930s and tells the story of Jim—a Black man who worked as a “professional guinea pig” in William Abbott’s research program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine—and a bullet that was lodged in his body. The final story confronts the statistical correction for race and social difference in contemporary calorimetry, comparing differential access to high-tech metabolic cages, metabolic carts, and metabolic rooms used in intensive care units and clinical research facilities. It speculates that metabolism cages operate as racial cages because they are experimental spaces where conceptual ideas about race, human difference, and social inequality are forged and tested through scientific experiments and biomedical surveillance; they are commercial sites for the development of new technologies of economic exploitation, social stratification, and unequally distributed environmental harms; and they are dramaturgical sites where who gets to perform the role of keeper and who must play the role of the kept is structured by racial, gender, class, and species hierarchies.

Chapter 2 begins with the idea that, even though race is far from being caged in science and society, in social theory we tend to entertain limited views on what it is and thus cage it: For example, in the default statement, “race is not real, but is real in its consequences,” or “race is a social construction.” This chapter suggests that we ask the obvious yet overlooked question: “What is race made to be in practice”? Uncaging race is indeed a proposal for making space for this question, that is, to attend to race and study it more carefully so as to help demonstrate its presence in mundane practices that are seemingly indifferent to race. The chapter switches focus from race in relation to difference to race in relation to sameness, in order to attend to this question of what race is made to be in practice. Different modes of racialization based on sameness are explored: race as us-ness and race as otherness. Drawing on examples from a forensic DNA case as well as the public and political response to Europe’s so-called refugee crisis, the chapter shows how racialization based on us-ness allows for variation and differentiation within the group, whereas racialization-based otherness tends to homogenize the group.

Chapter 3 engages with the ways the idea of the human contours biological life along lines of race, by examining two key quarantine technologies deployed in the racialized governance of health during the Covid-19 Delta lockdown in Sydney, Australia. The first of these technologies was a caging (or carceral control), applied in distinct and disparate ways across the population, such that some subjects were rendered lesser “humans,” in line with the human/animal binary opposition of Western liberalism. The second technology was a staging (or spectacle) of minority spaces and residents, showing how race functions as a “cut” within the infrastructure of the state. The chapter explores how these technologies could be said to constitute a “zoological governance”—a form of governing relating to or affecting “lower animals” that does not exclude racialized subjects from the general populace, but instead pursues conditional incorporation to maintain racial reasoning and racial order.

Chapter 4 is concerned with not only naming what we don’t want to see in the world but also what we do want to see. Continuing to examine the themes of carcerality and the boundaries of the human, this analysis shifts the focus to explore how the racial cage might have openings. First, the chapter considers the elusive and oppressive ideal of the hermetic seal in the context of Covid-19 and the vital breaking of the seal by the Movement for Black Lives. It then takes a more conceptual turn, considering the etymology and philosophy of “the cage” and the urgency of uncaging, as articulated in an earlier era by Marilyn Frye and Maya Angelou. In concluding our collective provocations around race, carcerality, and the biohumanities, this chapter closes with an insistence on refusing despair and holding on to necessary hope as we strive to dismantle cages of oppression.

We offer these chapters as kaleidoscopic reflections on the problematic of the racial cage. A kaleidoscope’s glass and mirrors create changing patterns when the tube is rotated, and these chapters can do something analogous. They highlight constantly changing patterns or sequences of objects or elements of racial caging and linkages between the bio and human. Race cannot be looked at from one vantage point or single pattern of relations, and the chapters thus take diverse concrete entry points that are not precisely case studies. Drawn from different geographical contexts and pointed toward different objects and social relations, the illuminated fragments do not add up to a settled global view. They might be read in any order, but will be more interesting for being read together, refracting and diffracting distinct but interlinked articulations.