Immunocapitalism

NECROPOLIS: DISEASE, POWER, AND CAPITALISM IN THE COTTON KINGDOM By Kathryn Olivarius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. Pp. 352. Paper $21.95. Epidemiology is necessarily political; human disease is entangled with human social institutions and constructs. Epidemiology thus involves, always, an examination of social inequality. As Olivarius puts it, the history of yellow fever in New Orleans was one of “wealth for the few, and misery for the many.” In Necropolis, Olivarius analyzes the economics of yellow fever in the history of New Orleans, an economics interwoven with the economics of racialization—including chattel slavery, the anti-Black racism of the antebellum era, waves of European immigration, the influx of Asian workers, and the imagination of white supremacy. With no clear understanding of “how the disease spread manifested, and killed,” yellow fever became a focal point for imagination, for interpretative narratives that both made sense of the disease and served to further other political desires. When so acknowledged, white New Orleans conceived of immunity literally as capital.... Immunity was immaterial, intangible, and immovable (it could not be transferred as material capital could). But it was merit-based (each person earned it) and encoded with pecuniary value no different from other forms of tangible capital, like machines or enslaved people. A white man with immunocapital found himself economically reborn; he made more money in better jobs, was promoted more readily, and had access to new lines of credit and insurance. His social standing also improved. With the acclimation “credentials,” he could mingle and marry within elite circles and was provided access to lucrative commercial and civic networks. Immune white individuals also possessed cultural capital. In declaring themselves acclimated, they made a claim about their innate worth and legitimacy—that they were good risks, people of character and grit permanently invested in this society and, in turn, worthy of investment. (21) Immunity thus, for the white elite, became evidence of the righteousness of their elite status, an argument for both class and white supremacy through the supposedly objective realm of the biological. Survival was read as a mark of strength, acclimation as belonging. A moral narrative was thus overlaid over an otherwise chaotic and obviously unjust reality: those at the top deserved to be at the top; those below them were constitutionally lesser. At one point, Olivarius describes immunocapital as manifesting in a perception and declarations of a “de facto moral legitimacy, a tropical (if ecumenical) twist on Max Weber's aristocracy of the elect” (152). One white survivor was greeted by a friend as having, through emerging with immunity to yellow fever, received “his naturalization papers,” explicitly linking citizenship with immunity. Immunocapital represents biopower, biopower read as evidence for and understood within the framework of a broader white supremacist worldview. In such a world, whiteness was policed as vigorously as its others (those European immigrants who succumbed to the disease lacked the bona fides of New Orleans whiteness, ultimately) and imagined as robustly as those who claimed it imagined “Blackness.” Indeed, while Blacks were attributed, by white New Orleanians, with a natural immunity, they were also, at times, scapegoated as the very source of the disease. As those suffering through yellow fever were prone to vomit a distinctive, black vomit (sometimes compared to coffee grounds), white writers were quick to voice a paranoic logic of similarity and insist that “the negro was at the bottom of it,” the historic cause of this deadly disease. As with Covid, yellow fever was often vernacularly renamed, with media emphasizing the spurious origins in Africa by calling it “African fever” or “African plague,” “African poison.” (223) Black survival—and Black immunity—was capital only for white slavers. The value of Black individuals within the slave-based economy was purely monetary, though this system, dependent upon a dehumanization of the Black, also drew support from interpretive narratives spun about the disease. In these anti-Black accounts, however, the very resilience to survive yellow fever that was cited as biological evidence of superiority when witnessed within elite white bodies was read as so much more evidence of Black beastliness, an animal nature befitting chattel slavery. In the wake of the Civil War, claims of Black immunity were walked back, with recognized instances of infection among Black people blamed on emancipation and even on “de-Africanization,” both understood as moves away from an essence that linked the Black to the primitive, less than human but with particular biological strengths. In what is here an aside but the subject of other volumes, Olivarius relays a brief account of the yellow fever outbreak of 1793 in Philadelphia. With the city decimated by disease and abandoned by those who had the resources to flee, Benjamin Rush, presuming that Blacks would be immune from the disease, urged Black citizens to step up and care for the ailing, even asking his friend Richard Allen to help him recruit Black support. As Olivarius summarizes it, “Philadelphia's Black population answered the call. But over 400 Black people died from yellow fever that summer. Then, adding serious insult to injury, Philadelphia mayor Matthew Clarkson accused Black survivors of profiteering off the epidemic by extorting money and goods from sick white people” (41). Olivarius's book is very much a book about race, despite that word not making it into the subtitle, though much more work could be done on the shifting application of racial logic that she observes happening after the Civil War. In order “to maintain a racialized labor hierarchy... whites sought new racial and ethnic others to replace Black slaves.” Asians—categorized, rather loosely, as “Chinamen” and derogatorily labeled via the dehumanizing term “coolies”—were likewise said to be naturally immune to yellow fever. Arguments in favor of this supposed immunity again rested on the idea that such individuals had been “acclimated to the tropics” and would naturally be at home along the swamps of Louisiana, working in the rice and sugar fields. Arguments about acclimation—of supposedly lesser races—were made, at various times, regarding Irish and Sicilians as well. Olivarius, in an already jam-packed book, does not linger on the slippery dynamics of such racialization—and doesn't pursue consideration either of how it functions without, as the creation of Blackness did, hegemonic social acceptance or how such racialization exists within a spectrum and sometimes trajectory of/toward whiteness—but future scholars will surely find narratives to pursue here. Olivarius' work is to be commended as much for the questions it raises as for the theory of immunocapital it offers. This theory is the key use of the book for a religious studies audience, immunocapital linking epidemiology and racialization and capitalism—arguably pointing to the religious functions of all three, the way these discourses and sets of practices are also always means of building worlds. Olivarius's book contributes to growing religious studies bibliographies on each of these, from work on religion and public health (Jessica Hardin's remarkable work on Samoa, for instance) and the religious imaginings of race (including those tracing shifting historical trajectories, like W. Paul Reeve's Religion of a Different Color) and work examining the religion-shaped space capitalism occupies (such as Adam Kotsko's Neoliberalism's Demons). Necropolis provides both a specific theoretical frame and a robust historical case study, ripe for comparison with other instances—and thus a strong addition to the undergraduate or graduate seminar on these “religion and” topics. While the scholarship of the entanglements of religion and race and religion and capitalism are quite deep, more work needs to be done, in the humanities generally, approaching epidemiology as not merely a biological affair but also always social and political—stories about microbes or viruses, perhaps, but always also stories about human power, its imbalances and exertions. Immunocapital, of course, does not die out with yellow fever, even though, in New Orleans, “acclimation ceased to be a powerful form of capital, organizing social principle, or method of class and racial dominance in New Orleans” by the 1890s, once the vector of yellow fever—mosquitos, specifically the A. aegypti—was discovered and significant anti-insect measures, including fumigation, were implemented in the city. To think comparatively about immunocapital is certainly an implicit invitation of this book. To read Necropolis and not to think, moreover, about comparative reactions to disease, rationalizations, and vernacular narratives of explanation is impossible in our current historical moment. Still in the wake of a global pandemic, a swift and radical public health response, and (at least in the United States) widespread discontent regarding public health mandates, it is morbidly fascinating to hear of the stringent opposition to quarantine among the New Orleans elite or to read of satiric polemics against the insistence that “yellow fever would be ameliorated by more rigorous public health infrastructure.” (201). Opposition to quarantines is one thing; however; Olivarius also notes widespread denial of the disease's very physical ravages. New Orleanians would insist that the disease wasn't an outbreak or as bad as rumored and would describe media accounts as a plot of Northern aggression or, more specifically, an attempt at social and economic sabotage by “meddling abolitionists” (207). Olivarius argues not only that “disease denialism resonated with whites across every social class because it reinforced the racial and economic order they wanted.” She goes further to insist that the logic of disease denialism “tracked the logic of proslavery ideology, the South's ‘dominant fundamental’ worldview, which was similarly fact-allergic and rooted in denial” (205). Thus, she gives us here “proslavery thinking and disease denialism as two parallel, occasionally intersecting ideologies. Both cloaked anti-Black racism in the language of natural science” (205). In our present global moment of paranoia about, for instance, immigrant populations, supposed indoctrination regarding sex and gender, or even a resolute commitment to capitalism in the face of that exploitative system's catastrophic environmental impact, Olivarius's words hold real resonance. This is a book on a history that serves well for thinking about other case studies and contexts. It also reveals the human aspects—the constructed nature, the role of fear and desire—of scientific discourse and imagination. The 1850s, for instance, are far away from our political moment, but to read that popular interpretations of the yellow fever epidemic and public statements thereon function as “litmus tests” for specific political positions (“the proper role of government, states' rights, territorial expansion, and—most of all—slavery”) echoes with contemporary scenes. (203). Olivarius is at her strongest, in fact, when she speaks in a wide register, making observations across the specifics of histories. As grounded in the contingent as her study here is, she also voices an overarching critique of capital: “All forms of capitalism—war, necro-, racial, slave-racial, industrial—arise not because of the irresistible logic of the market but because powerful actors mobilize the materials at their disposal to consolidate their dominance,” she writes. Disease, then, offers such “materials.” According to Olivarius, “In this manner, immunocapitalism is reminiscent of what Naomi Klain called ‘disaster capitalism’: when governments or regimes take advantage of major disasters—“shocks”—to enact policies and build systems the population would not normally accept” (24). This move—the explicit call to thinking comparatively with Klein, to thinking of capitalism in relation to “disaster capitalism,” which Klein has recently and provocatively theorized in relation to post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico (see The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists, Haymarket Books, 2018)—is a bold and useful one, insisting again on the value for thinking about New Orleans history with slavery and yellow fever as consequential in relation to contemporary history and politics. It should be noted, too, that any decent—I mean this in an ethical sense—critique of capital must be attentive to the actual human lives involved, the ineluctable and quotidian individuality of those affected by—or ground up within the gears of—the economic system. Here, Olivarius does not disappoint, though the gruesome nature of the experiences of suffering she offers us make, to put it mildly, difficult reading. Yellow fever was and is a horrific disease, sapping strength and wracking its victims with pain, waves of vomiting, internal bleeding, and organ failure. We hear individual accounts of the dying, surrounded by filth, swaddled in their deathbeds. Economics comes into play, too; in the ice offered as a comfort, in the price of lodging and nursing, even in expense that would come with death—the burial, at times in trenches serving as mass graves, with, in one horrific scene, the corpses of babies wedged in between the adult-sized bodies. In Olivarius's hands, such details eschew any impulse toward titillation; rather, they are there as stark reminders of the stakes. “Immunocapitalism,” like any intellectual concept, can appear, in a certain light, abstract, existing as it does as a tool for thinking. Olivarius wants us always to keep in mind that the term describes a despicable, predatory circumstance. As she writes, “Within this system of immunocapitalism, it became economically, socially, and politically profitable for a set of powerful, white, opportunistic actors to operate in such a profoundly unhealthy space.” (11) There is much to learn from this book, a nuanced engagement with a specific history that nonetheless speaks to our present moment and, likely, if lamentably, our voracious, capitalist futures

Economics · Neoclassical economics · Political economy · Sociology · Race, Genetics, and Society