Cloudy Swords

Paul F. Russell, Man’s Mastery of Malaria (Oxford University Press, 1955), 244, citing David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Routledge, 2000), 182n13.

Mary Kosut and Lisa Jean Moore, “Urban Api-Ethnography: The Matter of Relations between Humans and Honeybees,” in Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism, ed. Victoria Pitts-Taylor (New York University Press, 2016), 245–57, 246.

Kosut and Moore, “Urban Api-Ethnography,” 246. Hegemonic images are always unstable. Although even the behavior of bees is predictable, it is not completely so, as the case of so-called Africanized killer bees shows: escaped from a Brazilian breeding experiment in 1957, which had crossed the European honeybee with African honeybees, many feral swarms developed, ultimately crossing the US border in 1990, where, because of their “mobility and aggressiveness” as well as their “unwillingness to settle into working-class stability,” they were considered “threats to the order and efficiency of production.” Anna L. Tsing, “Empowering Nature, or: Some Gleanings in Bee Culture,” in Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. S. Yanagisako and C. Delaney (Routledge, 1995), 113–43, 135.

See also: Juan Antonio Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudí to Le Corbusier (Reaktion, 2000), 25–35.

Horn, Bees in America, 19–64.

Jens Martin Gurr, “The Mass-Slaughter of Native Americans in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man: A Complex Interplay of Word and Image,” in Word & Image in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures, ed. Michael Meyer, Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen (Brill Academic Publishers, 2009), 354–71, 355.

The use of biological weapons, like bees and other insects, is neither exclusive to the US nor anything really new; see Jeffery Lockwood, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Jake Kosek, “Ecologies of the Empire: On the New Uses of the Honeybee,” Cultural Anthropology 25 no. 4 (2010), 650–78, 656.

Jake Kosek, “New Uses of the Honeybee,” in Global Political Ecology, ed. Richard Peet, Paul Robbins, and Michael Watts (Routledge, 2011), 227–51.

Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut, Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee (York University Press, 2013), 138.

Jay Bybee, “Memorandum for John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, August 1, 2009, 1–18, 2 ➝.

Bybee, “Memorandum for John Rizzo,” 3.

See also: Neel Ahuja, “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar,” Social Text 29, no. 1 (2011), 127–49, 128.

Ahuja, “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar,” 129.

Ahuja, “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar,” 134.

Ahuja, “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar,” 133. See also Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text, no. 72 (2002), 117–48.

John Robert McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Diane M. Nelson, “A Social Science Fiction of Fevers, Delirium, and Discovery: The Calcutta Chromosome, the Colonial Laboratory, and the Postcolonial New Human,” Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 2 (2003), 246–66, 260.

Nelson, “A Social Science Fiction,” 260f.

Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Harvard University Press, 1988), 141.

Nelson, “A Social Science Fiction,” 247.

Jeanne Guillemin: “Choosing Scientific Patrimony: Sir Ronald Ross, Alphonse Laveran, and the Mosquito-Vector Hypothesis for Malaria,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 57,4 (2002), 385–409.

Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, An Anthropology of Biomedicine (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 179.

Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Anthropology of Biomedicine, 43f. William B. Cohen sees this critically, at least with regard to French expansion politics. According to Cohen, it was not so much medical knowledge from tropical medicine, which soldiers in battle were often skeptical of, and whose prescriptions, like the taking of quinine, were often only half-heartedly followed, but rather, contrariwise, the political and social stabilization of French colonial areas made possible the increased recruiting of local troops and the construction of mosquito-unfriendly military architecture (buildings made of clay, brick, and stone, instead of tents), which in turn at first led to lower losses due to malaria. William B. Cohen, “Malaria and French Imperialism,” Journal of African History, no. 24 (1983), 23–36.

Emma Umana Clasberry, Culture of Names in Africa: A Search for Cultural Identity (Xlibris Corp, 2012), 54.

Clasberry, Culture of Names in Africa. See also Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Macmillan, 1987), 65ff.

Ambe J. Njoh points to the aspect of ideological division, since the segregated part of the local population was ascribed the status of “health threat,” while to the other part, who as servants were allowed to live in the healthy, European zones, this could appear as personal gratification and inclusive appreciation. Cf. Ambe J. Njoh, “Urban Planning as a Tool of Power and Social Control in Colonial Africa,” Planning Perspectives 24, no. 3 (2009), 301–317, 303.

Philip D. Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985), 594–613, 602.

Jonathan Roberts, “Korle and the Mosquito: Histories and Memories of the Antimalaria Campaign, Accra, 1942–45,” Journal of African History, no. 51 (2010), 343–365, 348.

Roberts explains: “Though there is no record of outright resistance by the migrant workers hired as human bait, it appears that they took measures to preserve their dignity, and, especially, to avoid mosquito bites.” “Korle and the Mosquito,” 358.

Roberts, “Korle and the Mosquito,” 355.

Harriet Deacon, “Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Cape Town,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 2 (1996), 287–308.

Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 176.

See also: Curtin, “Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa”; Njoh, “Urban Planning as a Tool of Power and Social Control in Colonial Africa.”

Cited in John W. Cell, “Anglo-Indian Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation in West Africa,” American Historical Review 91, no. 2 (1986), 307–335, 308.

Cell, “Anglo-Indian Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation,” 332.

See also: Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change During the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis 98, no. 4 (2007), 724–54; Maria Kaika, “Dams as Symbols of Modernization: The Urbanization of Nature Between Geographical Imagination and Materiality,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96, no. 2 (2006), 276–301.

Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire?,” 725.

Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 19–53, 26.

At that time, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease had just finished its successful campaign against a hookworm species called Necator americanus (Latin for “American killer”) in eleven southern American states, which lasted from 1909 to 1915, and became part of the Rockefeller Foundation International Health Division. The connection between poverty, race, and infections by the murderous hookworm played an important role in the formation of cultural perception and self-image of those affected. See also: Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2006), 96–132.

Wray, Not Quite White, 96.

Ricardo Salvatore, “Imperial Mechanics: South America’s Hemispheric Integration in the Machine Age,” American Quarterly 58,3 (2006), 663–91, 663f.

Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke University Press, 2016), 19.

Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 77.

Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 73. For a discussion of the US Army’s cinematic warfare against the anopheles mosquito in the 1940s, which was here portrayed as the second main war enemy and turned into a “placeholder for warnings about alcoholism, homosexuality, loose morals, sexually transmitted diseases and the fear (or desire) of sexual penetration,” see Gudrun Löhner, “Anopheles Anni vs. Malaria Mike,” in Tiere im Film. Eine Menschheitsgeschichte der Moderne, ed. Maren Möhring, Massimo Perinelli, and Olaf Stieglitz (Böhlau, 2009), 193–205, 194.

Ahuja, Bioinsecurities, 99; see also 216n13.

Federico Caprotti, “Malaria and Technological Networks: Medical Geography in the Pontine Marshes, Italy, in the 1930s,” Geographical Journal 172, no. 2 (2006), 145–55, 147.

Caprotti, “Malaria and Technological Networks,” 149f.

Caprotti, “Malaria and Technological Networks.” 153.

Leo Barney Slater and Margaret Humphreys, “Parasites and Progress: Ethical Decision-Making and the Santee-Cooper Malaria Study, 1944–1949,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 51, no. 1 (2008), 103–120, 107.

Nicolas Rasmussen, “Plant Hormones in War and Peace: Science, Industry, and Government in the Development of Herbicides in 1940s America,” Isis 92, no. 2 (2001), 291–316, 292.

Eric D. Carter, “‘God Bless General Perón’: DDT and the Endgame of Malaria Eradication in Argentina in the 1940s,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64, no. 1 (2008), 78–122.

Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 50.

Sunil S. Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 104.

Alfons Labisch, “Species Sanitation of Malaria in the Netherlands East Indies (1913–1942): An Example of Applied Medical History?,” Michael Quarterly, no. 7 (2010), 296–306, 298.

David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Routledge, 2000), 165–94, 166.

Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers, 168.

Catherine Lutz and Jon Elliston, “Domestic Terror,” The Nation, October 14, 2002, 14–16.

Nelson, “A Social Science Fiction,” 263n6.

Uli Beisel and Christophe Boëte, “The Flying Public Health Tool: Genetically Modified Mosquitoes and Malaria Control,” Science as Culture 22, no. 1 (2013), 38–60, 58. This is a bioeconomic cake that emerging markets like Brazil also want a piece of. See also: Luisa Reis-Castro and Kim Hendrickx, “Winged Promises: Exploring the Discourse on Transgenic Mosquitoes in Brazil,” Technology in Society 35 (2013), 118–28.

Uli Beisel, “Markets and Mutations: Mosquito Nets and the Politics of Disentanglement in Global Health,” Geoforum, no. 66 (2016), 145–55, 145.

Beisel, “Markets and Mutations,” 150.

See also Kosek, “Ecologies of the Empire,” 653.

Beisel, “Markets and Mutations,” 153.

Eva Johach, “Termitewerden: Staatenbildende Insekten im Industriezeitalter,” Kultur & Gespenster 4 (2007), 20–37, 21. See also: Douglas Starr and Felix Driver, “Imagining the Tropical Colony: Henry Smeathman and the Termites of Sierra Leone,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 92–112.

It was long assumed that it was Reticulitermes flavipes (Kollar), the most widespread termite of North America. Current research suggests another conclusion: the Hamburg termite population seems to consist of the southern European “cousins”: Reticulitermes lucifugus. See Udo Sellenschlo, Vorratsschädlinge und Hausungeziefer: Bestimmungstabellen für Mitteleuropa (Springer Verlag, 2010), 49.

Nel Yomtov, From Termite Den to Office Building (Cherry Lake Publishing, 2014), 10.

According to Abraham Margolis, the chief engineer of the enterprise, the driving force for the project was the high cost of fuel after World War I. But Margolis himself saw much more in electrical heating: social-political, hygienic, medical, and ecological aspects. After he was driven out of the corporation’s management by the National Socialists in the 1930s, Margolis settled in the United Kingdom and continued his work with another company, which would bring district heating to Pimlico, a London residential area. Wolfgang Mock, “Margolis, Abraham,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 16, 1990, 169f. See also: Charlotte Johnson, “District Heating as Heterotopia: Tracing the Social Contract through Domestic Energy Infrastructure in Pimlico,” Economic Anthropology 3, no. 1 (2016), 94–105.

“Karoviertel, Termiten-Attacke,” Hamburger Morgenpost, February 9, 2009.

According to expert interviews with various municipal officials in April and May 2013 (together with the architect and researcher Christina Linorter).

Thermidor was the eleventh month of the French revolutionary calendar, which lasted from the middle of July to the middle of August and literally means “the month of heat.” Maximilien de Robespierre was toppled in this month of the year 1794.

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According to expert interviews with various municipal officials in April and May 2013 (together with Christina Linorter).

Silke Klöver, Was hat die Globalisierung mit uns zu tun? Grundwissen erwerben—Zusammenhänge erkennen (Persen Verlag, 2011), 21.

Theodore A. Evans, Brian T. Forschler, and Grace J. Kenneth, “Biology of Invasive Termites: A Worldwide Review,” Annual Review Entomology, no. 58 (2012), 455–74, 457.

Theodore A. Evans, “Invasive Termites,” in Biology of Termites: A Modern Synthesis, ed. David Edward Bignell, Yves Roisin, and Nathan Lo (Springer, 2011), 519–62, 520.

Evans, “Invasive Termites,” 521.

Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: ‘Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), 203–230.

The paragraph from the chapter “The Planet without a Visa” in Trotsky’s autobiography, My Life, reminds us (living in the times of whistleblower Edward Snowden and Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan) of the continuities between his and our epoch: “I must admit that the roll-call of the western European democracies on the question of the right of asylum has given me, aside from other things, more than a few merry minutes. At times, it seemed as if I were attending a ‘pan-European’ performance of a one-act comedy on the theme of principles of democracy. Its text might have been written by Bernard Shaw if the Fabian fluid that runs in his veins had been strengthened by even so much as five percent of Jonathan Swift’s blood. But whoever may have written the text, the play remains very instructive: Europe without a Visa. There is no need to mention America. The United States is not only the strongest, but also the most terrified country. Hoover recently explained his passion for fishing by pointing out the democratic nature of this pastime. If this be so—although I doubt it—it is at all events one of the few survivals of democracy still existing in the United States. There the right of asylum has been absent for a long time. Europe and America without a visa. But these two continents own the other three. This means—The planet without a visa.” Leon Trotsky, My Life (Grosset & Dunlap, 1960 (1930)), 579.

Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia (Pantheon, 2010), 469–73.

Mitchell, Rule of Experts.

Clapperton Changanetsa Mavhunga, The Mobile Workshop: Mobility, Technology, and Human-Animal Interaction in Gonarezhou (National Park), 1850–Present, dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008, 7.

Bambule was the name of a countercultural trailer park of squatters in the aforesaid Karovierterl, where the Hamburg termites also live. Massive protests against the police clearing of the alternative living project became the subject of international press coverage. While Bambule machen (making bambule) is a northern German slang expression for rioting and rampaging, bamboula goes back to the name for a big drum and the dance that accompanied this drum—both had their origin in Africa and were brought to the US through the “traffic in human flesh.” Particularly after the Haitian revolution, slaves gathered in Congo Square on the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans to dance the bamboula.

Wilhelm Bölsche, “Der Termitenstaat. Schilderung eines geheimnisvollen Volkes (1931),” 52, cited in Johach, “Termitewerden,” 31.

Bölsche, “Der Termitenstaat,” 34.

Karl Escherich, inaugural speech at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich on November 25, 1933.

Jean L. Sutherland, “Protozoa from Australian Termites,” Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science, no. 2 (1933), 145–73, 76.

Donna J. Haraway, “Otherworldly Conversations; Terran Topics; Local Terms,” Science as Culture 3, no. 1 (1992), 94.

Myra Hird, Sex, Gender and Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 68.

Nikki Sullivan, “The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/human: A Critical Response to the New Materialism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, no. 19 (2012), 299–313, 306.

Das purpurne Muttermal, program (Burgtheater/Akademietheater Wien, 2006).

Rupert D.V. Glasgow, The Minimal Self (Würzburg University Press, 2017), 358n860.