American Bloodlands: Race and the Making of the Plasma Economy

American Bloodlands tells the story of the commercial blood plasma economy, a $26 billion global market in which human blood plasma is manufactured into lifesaving and lucrative pharmaceutical products. Underpinning this extensive business are millions of American plasma donors who use the money earned to meet the increasingly expensive costs of daily life. Kelsey Johnson traces the roots of this trade back to plantation prisons in the US South in the 1960s and follows how plantation geographies have shaped the industry’s trajectory ever since. Examining the plasma economy as it has expanded into urban and suburban life, she also shows how the flow of blood products back and forth across the Atlantic extends earlier histories of plantation economies, racism and slavery, and the place of the US South as a source of biological material for use elsewhere in the Global North. In American Bloodlands, Johnson shows how regimes of race and nature originating in slavery continue to shape the landscapes of health and wealth today.