LEIDO Extrapolating

Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of
Karen Tei Yamashita's "Through the Arc of the Rain Forest"

Author(s): Aimee Bahng
Source: MELUS, Vol. 33, No. 4, Alien/Asian (Winter, 2008), pp. 123-144
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating
Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of
Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the
Rain Forest
Aimee Bahng
University of California, San Diego
I will outnumber you.

I will outbillion you.
I am the spectacle in the forest.
I am the inventor of rubber.
I will outrubber you.
Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more
than a rotten caricature of great opera.
?Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo
In 1927, Henry Ford bought approximately 2.5 million acres of Amazon

rainforest in the northern state of Para, Brazil, where he established a size
able rubber plantation.1 "Fordl?ndia" strived to be an all-inclusive, neo
colonial system, extending the plantation infrastructure beyond sawmills
and processing plants to include US-style hospitals, schools, white clap
board houses, and even recreational facilities such as a motion-picture the
ater and an eighteen-hole golf course. As documented in the company's
archives, the Ford rubber plantations in Brazil worked to fulfill a Fordist
fantasy of bringing "modernity" and "progress" to the "almost impenetra
ble tropical jungle."2 In her speculative fiction Through the Arc of the Rain
Forest (1990), Asian American writer Karen Tei Yamashita excavates this
largely forgotten scene of US imperialism in Brazil and extrapolates from
such imperial legacies what might happen to the Amazon when a valuable,
rubbery, and possibly alien resource is unearthed during an age of global
restructuring. In Through the Arc, disavowed imperial legacies such as
Fordl?ndia resurface in mutated forms that haunt Yamashita's near-future
speculations. By unearthing these buried histories, I place Through the
Arc's historical extrapolations in critical dialogue with a long line of
science fictions that have worked on behalf of European and US empire
building to render the resource-rich jungle available for imperial conquest
and expansion.
MELUS, Volume 33, Number 4 (Winter 2008)
124 BAHNG
Through the Arc intervenes in and disrupts imperialist fantasies of an

uninhabited and virginal jungle, unruly, in need of outside regulation, and
ripe and available for development. While speculative narratives about
the tropics have often served projects that capitalize on the alienation and
exoticization of indigenous peoples, I suggest that Yamashita offers her
own speculations on the Brazilian Amazon to quite different ends. At once
a cautionary tale of deforestation, exploitative labor practices, and abu
sive extraction of natural resources on the part of an avaricious first-world
capitalist machine, Through the Arc critiques the historical amnesia that
often accompanies progress narratives and what Mar?a-Josefina Salda?a
Portillo has called "fictions of development" (752).
Set in the rainforests of Brazil and featuring a Japanese Brazilian
protagonist, Through the Arc recently garnered attention from Asian
American scholars looking to complicate the US national formation of
Asian American Studies.3 In her reading of Through the Arc, Rachel Lee
highlights how Yamashita's work "broadens definitions of Asian America
to include Asian diasporas to Latin America" (Americas 121). Lamenting
the book's characterization by reviewers as magical realist, satirical, and
futuristic, but never a work of Asian American literature, Lee asserts
that Through the Arc is in fact an Asian American text, future-fitted for a
post-nationalist conceptualization of Asian America (113). In this essay, I
emphasize the importance of reading Yamashita's work not only as Asian
American literature, but also as science fiction?or, more accurately, as
what writer and critic Nalo Hopkinson has termed "postcolonial science
fiction."4 Distinguishing their own work from science fiction's frequent
fascination with exploration, conquest, and strange encounters, Hopkinson
and Yamashita both take interest in telling "stories that take the m?me
of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the coloniz?e, cri
tique it" (Hopkinson 9). Extrapolated from lived experiences of alienation,
abduction, and space and time travel, postcolonial science fiction such as
Yamashita's Through the Arc formulates near-futures that call attention to
imperial legacies of exclusion, exploitation, and displacement. These revi
sionist science fictions bring a certain double vision?a forward-looking
glance that is also haunted by historical retrospection?to their imaginings
of other spaces and times. I read Yamashita's Through the Arc as a kind
of "speculative act" and proffer "speculation" as a helpful hermeneutic
to analyze how Yamashita intervenes in a genre that has often imagined
Asians as alien.5
In addition to citing multiple textual allusions to science's historical
collusion with the machinations of empire in the Brazilian Amazon, I offer
Fordl?ndia as a concrete example of the partnership between early twentieth
century US imperialism and the discourse of tropical science held over
EXTRAPOLATING TRANSNATIONAL ARCS 125
from the earliest European imperialist ventures into the jungle. By analyz
ing promotional material on Fordl?ndia and letters describing the com
pany's first speculative journeys into the rainforest alongside Yamashita's
text, I situate the civilizing mission Ford used to rationalize his plantation
building within a longer history of nineteenth-century European imperial
ist discourses on tropical nature and race, sustained by ethnographic and
scientific expeditions to the Amazon. Yamashita's articulation of a more
complicated set of Japanese-Brazilian-American affiliations is informed
not only by a more complex understanding of migration, but also by a his
tory of multiple, intertwined, and flexible empires. In this way, Through
the Arc helps map trans-imperial cartographies in a neocolonial moment,
when the complex movements of capital and empire prove difficult to
trace through time and space.
Mutations of Empire
Yamashita's Through the Arc revisits the speculative space of the

Amazon and summons several extraordinary, if not extraterrestrial, subjects
to the site, including Kazumasa Ishimaru, the Japanese ex-rail inspec
tor from whose cranial orbit a gyrating, rubberized sphere narrates the
account; Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan, who manage a worldwide,
fortune-telling, pigeon courier service; Man? Pena, a healer indigenous to
the Amazon Valley who cures people of their afflictions and ailments using
a magical feather; Chico Paco, a religious pilgrim turned radio evangelist
whose love for his disabled neighbor Gilberto motivates his faith; and J.
B. Tweep, a three-armed entrepreneur from the US who becomes enam
ored not only with corporate expansion in Brazil but also with Michelle
Mabelle, a triple-breasted French ornithologist. Yamashita's text examines
flows of culture, capital, and labor by following these multiple approaches
to a "new" natural resource embedded in the mantle of the jungle floor.
In a reversal of often racialized tropes of aliens in science fiction, mani
festations of the alien in this Asian American fabulation take the shape
of mutant agents of empire such as Mabelle and her lover J. B. Tweep.
Mabelle and J. B. embody the over-indulgent desires of colonial and
neocolonial enterprises in the Amazon. Their marriage (a union between
science and capitalism) unlocks a "capacity for insatiable lust" and "the
possibilities of unmitigated pleasure" (123), resulting in three aptly named
progeny: Fraternit?, ?galit?, and Libert?. With details such as this and
Mabelle's parrot Napoleon, who "scream[s] the Marseillaise with exag
gerated pride," Yamashita establishes Mabelle as a symbol of French
(European) imperialism (123). For example, Mabelle, who "came from
a long line of bird lovers," including a great-grandfather who "met Paul
126 BAHNG
Gauguin in Tahiti" (122), studies exotic birds of the Amazon through the
cultivated, colonial gaze of the tropics exemplified in Gauguin's fetishiza
tion of Tahitian women in his paintings and writings.6
Mabelle also pursues her research in the vein of the scientific expe
ditions that occasioned many of the first European ventures to South
America. French anthropologist Claude L?vi-Strauss, for example, con
ducted some of his earliest ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil between
1935 and 1939. The resulting memoir/field journal/social-science mani
festo Tristes Tropiques begins with the paradoxical declaration "Je hais
les voyages et les explorateurs " or " I hate traveling and explorers" (13).
Yamashita references this volume in her "Author's Note" to Through the
Arc, it reveals L?vi-Strauss's constant wrestling with the ethics of ethno
graphic fieldwork and professed disgust with scientific adventure writing
and has become a staple in anthropological debate. While describing the
"basic elements" of the Brazilian soap opera (novela) form that inspired
Through the Arc, Yamashita writes: "Claude Levi-Strauss described it all
so well so many years ago: Tristes Tropiques?an idyll of striking inno
cence, boundless nostalgia and terrible ruthlessness" (n. pag.). By juxta
posing a foundational text of Western social science with popular culture,
Yamashita asserts that Tristes Tropiques and the Brazilian novela share a
penchant for melodrama and sensation that renders them both speculative
texts, participating in the perpetual reconstitution of a national and inter
national understanding of Brazilian culture.
J. B.'s enterprising efforts in the Amazon point to the commercial
involvement of the United States in Brazil during the early twentieth cen
tury and its overtures to incorporate Latin America into its "manifest des
tiny." With three arms, he is the living embodiment of the multiply and
tirelessly reaching US corporations with interests overseas. Through his
story, Yamashita complicates the alien encounter. J. B.'s experience of his
alien body asserts a level of acceptance not usually associated with muta
tion and difference. He thinks of his physical difference as an asset. "As far
as J. B. was concerned," writes Yamashita, "he had entered a new genetic
plane in the species. ... He was a better model, the wave of the future"
(30). In his eyes, his third arm renders him so exceptional that he exceeds
the normative bounds of the world around him. He finds that the assembly
line, musical compositions, and conventional sporting rules cannot adjust
their logics for his extraordinary abilities. He throws off the rhythm of pro
duction by working too efficiently, gets bored with Beethoven and Chopin
because "there was nothing written for his particular expertise," and gets
kicked off his baseball team "because there were no rules for a two-mitt
player" (31). In J. B.'s case, difference may lead to unemployment and
ostracization, but he converts economically his self-doubt to a sense of
exceptionalism. His extraordinary abilities find their ultimate fulfillment

in the service of the ever-insatiable appetite and ever-expanding domain
of capitalism. On one hand, Yamashita's critique of a bilaterally biased
world interrogates the systemic scope of normativity. At the same time,
her depiction of the multinational corporation leader is one of excess and
mutation.
The terrain Through the Arc examines is itself a mutant space. The book
describes this terrain?called the Matac?o?as "an enormous impenetra
ble field of some unknown solid substance, stretching for millions of acres
in all directions" along the floor of the rainforest. The Matac?o attracts
the attention of "scientists, supernaturalists and ET enthusiasts, sport
ing the old Spielberg rubber masks" (16). Early conjectures characterize
the Matac?o as alien, but this miraculously pliable and tensile material
turns out not to be otherworldly but very much a product of earth's own
making:
The Matac?o, scientists asserted, had been formed for the most part within the
last century, paralleling the development of the more common forms of plastic,
Polyurethane and Styrofoam. Enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable mate
rial buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth had undergone
tremendous pressure, pushed ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth's
mantle. The liquid deposits of the molten mass had been squeezed through
underground veins to virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon Forest, being one
of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty. (202)
Rather than animating the Matac?o plastic as an invasive foreigner,

Yamashita insists that it is the disavowed slag of capitalist over-accumu
lation and hubris. As the text unfolds against the backdrop of the Matac?o,
Yamashita denudes the mystique constructed around it, revealing the
black plastic to be the compressed r?gurgitation of first-world waste?
the byproduct of the most powerful and productive economies, surfacing
in the third world. The rubbery and plastic properties of the Matac?o
allude to the resilience and flexibility of empire, which continues to resur
face in mutated form in Yamashita's extrapolation of this near-future that
emerges from an excavated history of US and European empire in the
South American tropics.
Through the Arc's rainforest is a speculative space in which all sorts of
discarded, forgotten, and disavowed histories resurface. Just adjacent to
the Matac?o rests a graveyard of military vehicles, war planes, and Ford
Model T's. Amidst the grey, sticky goop of napalm, this rainforest "park
ing lot" gives rise to a strange, new species of mouse and spectacular new
colorations for butterflies, birds, and amphibians (99). Yamashita writes:
"The entomologists were shocked to discover that their rare butterfly only
128 BAHNG
nested in the vinyl seats of Fords and Chevrolets and that their exqui
site reddish coloring was actually due to a steady diet of hydrated ferric
oxide, or rusty water from the oxidation of abandoned US military vehi
cles" (100). In this example, Yamashita upsets the ideological narrative
of scientific "discovery." The most exotic-looking, tropical species of the
Amazon are already biologically entangled with neo-colonial investments
in Brazil. The spectacular colorations of these jungle organisms come
from their nibbling on the rusty skeletons of US industrial and military
vehicles. This surprising diet serves as an equally piquant reminder of US
military presence in Latin America throughout the twentieth century.
In another example of resurfacing discarded histories, Yamashita con
tinues to interrogate Western interpretations of the Amazon through the
questionable lens of early ethnographic research. She writes: "[S]ome
anthropologist ran about frantically re-editing and annotating a soon-to
be-published article about the primitive use of mirrors in ancient religious
rites" after encountering the shiny bumpers and rearview mirrors stripped
from the cars in the rainforest parking lot (100). Yamashita's construction
of the Amazon forces revision of romanticized and overdetermined views
of the tropics held over from nineteenth-century European representations
of the jungle as a space of unspoiled, unfettered nature in need of discovery
and discipline through interpretation, conquest, and/or exploitation. The
anthropologist's forced re-evaluation of the tropics points to productions
of scientific knowledge in the Amazon that changed medical history in
Europe. In her history of "tropical empiricism," Brazilian scholar J?nia
Ferreira Furtado writes: "Knowledge gleaned from new elements found
in these exotic environments . . . would later transform medicinal practice
in Portugal, the East, and in South America, and would force authors to
adopt new classification schemes, which in turn stimulated the extensive
production of literature mixing medicine and natural history" (129). In this
way, the multidirectional flow of scientific knowledge production upsets the
colonial construction of center and periphery.
Historian of science Nancy Leys Stepan places these enduring represen
tations of the tropics in the context of European empire-building, the emer
gence of racist pseudoscience, and ethnographic travel and tourism to Latin
America.7 Yamashita revises the jungle narrative of tropical danger and con
tagion by tracing the perception of a wild, out-of-control, mutant landscape
back to imperial fantasies but also to the material operations of empire in
the Amazon. Littering the rainforest with the decaying vestiges of clandes
tine US military and commercial operations in the Amazon, Yamashita indi
cates how these narratives of tropical danger and contagion ultimately stem
from European and US imperial fantasies and fabrications. She embeds a
mantle of manmade, first-world solidified sludge in the rainforest floor, sug
gesting that "the jungle" when excavated reveals a cavernous system of

northern/European disavowal through a projection of exoticism. This dis
avowal takes material form in the pollution, waste, and over-accumulation
of capitalist imperialism.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997),
Avery Gordon asserts that a haunted text fights "an oppressed past," which
she defines as "whatever organized violence has repressed and in the process
formed into a past, a history, remaining nonetheless alive and accessible to
encounter" (65-66). Gordon brings together "the ghost story" and Walter
Benjamin's materialist historiography, asking us to take haunted texts and
the ghosts they produce seriously as an opening to revive the disappeared,
the dispossessed, and the disavowed. Yamashita's Through the Arc is pre
cisely such a haunted text, and it incites a remembering of European impe
rialist and US neocolonial enterprises in the Amazon.
In the spirit of "investigating how that which appears absent can indeed
be a seething presence" (Gordon 8), I take the exhumation of the Matac?o
as the opportunity to articulate an "other" narrative of Asian American
migration. While the narrative tropes mutated bodies as indicators of US
and European imperialist developments in the Amazon, it also, through
Kazumasa Ishimaru's intricate and profound attachment to his cranial sat
ellite orb, raises questions about Japan's sometimes contradictory connec
tions to the expansive logics of late capitalism. Lee argues that Yamashita's
characterization of Kazumasa gestures not only to the familiar archetype
in Asian American literature of the Chinese American railroad worker, but
also to "an elite transnational" in "a world where Asian immigrants to the
Americas are just as likely to be the owners of capital and the exploiters of
labor as to be the persecuted migrant worker" (118). Because his orbiting
sphere detects new sources of Matac?o plastic, Kazumasa becomes "the key
to this incredible source of wealth" (Yamashita 144). As Kazumasa's mon
etary and spinning peripheral assets become increasingly embroiled in the
expansionist project of J. B.'s multinational corporation GGG Enterprises,
the ball remarks: "Greed was a horrible thing. Kazumasa could, if neces
sary, divest himself of his monetary fortune, but he could not rid himself
of me" (145). The sphere, which is comprised of the same rubbery mate
rial as the Matac?o, attaches itself to Kazumasa's head, pulling him toward
the epicenter of neocolonial transformation of the Amazon. This image
points not only to Japan's history as an empire hungry for resource-rich
territories (resulting in increased military expansionism during the 1930s in
Manchuria, Micronesia, and Southeast Asia), but also to more contemporary
investments of Japanese global capital in Latin America, which, according
to recent studies on Japanese-owned maquiladoras, are responsible for the
generation of an egregious amount of hazardous waste.8
130 BAHNG
The rubbery sphere that narrates Through the Arc opens the story by
stating that it was "brought back by a memory" (3). Framing the rest of the
narrative, the ball states: "Memory is a powerful sort ofthing, although at
the time I made my reentry into this world, no notice at all was taken of the
fact" (3). Yamashita thus opens her narrative at a moment of simultaneous
return ("reentry") and disavowal ("no notice"). The rest of the text engages
in the process of re-membering and extracting this forgotten history from
the speculative space of the Matac?o. At the end of the narrative, Kazumasa
suffers and mourns the loss of his attachment to that which marked him
as alien. While still tenuously connected to Western capitalist enterprises,
Kazumasa negotiates multiple transnational affiliations that remain visible
in "the tropical tilt of his head" (211).
The story of the alien thus always returns the reader to a layered his
tory of imperialist ventures into the Amazon to mine the rainforest for its
resources. The irony of this connection between the alien and the imperial
ist invader is the history of jungle narratives that imagine the jungle from
the perspective of the colonizer or the neocolonial entrepreneur as an alien
space of extraordinary flora, fauna, and "primitive" peoples. To this extent,
Through the Arc's rainforest becomes a site of excavating imperial legacies
rather than a site that empire relentlessly mines.
Imperial Rubber: Residues of US Empire in the Brazilian Rainforest
The "discovery" of rubber, which was first introduced to European

scientists by geographer Charles-Marie de La Condamine in the mid
eighteenth century, occasions one early manifestation of what could be
called "science fiction." As elucidated by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial
Eyes, La Condamine's report on his expedition to the Amazon is rather
speculative in nature, "written mainly not as a scientific report, but in the
popular genre of survival literature" (20). Rubber appears as one spectacu
lar character among many in La Condamine's narrative, which describes
the strangeness of a tropical "new world" and even attests to the existence
of the mythic Amazons. For Pratt, La Condamine's scientific fictions "sug
gest the extent to which science came to articulate Europe's contacts with
the imperial frontiers, and to be articulated by them" (20). Because it nar
rates a European's encounter with an otherworldly landscape populated
with alien flora, fauna, and entities, La Condamine's account of his scien
tific expedition can be understood as a science fiction produced in the
service of empire.
The Amazon rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries deeply informs Yamashita's rendering of the rubbery Matac?o.
The shiny, black, ductile resource unearthed at the Matac?o can be molded
into any shape, which will then have the structural integrity of steel. One
of the most fantastical manifestations of the malleable material's architec
tural possibilities is an amusement park. Named "Chicol?ndia" after Chico
Paco, who conceived of and constructed it, the park makes the rest of the
allusions to US neo-colonial presence in the Amazon even more concrete
by summoning by name the specter of Fordl?ndia, the largely forgot
ten, early twentieth-century US rubber plantation and civilizing mission
introduced by Henry Ford. Ford's civilizing mission borrowed from pre
existing discourses on tropical nature, race, and sexuality promulgated
by nineteenth-century French and British scientific expeditions into the
Amazon; the larger project of Fordist social reform extended its reach
beyond the US under a banner of "benevolent science" and "technological
progress." By excavating the forgotten history of Fordl?ndia in the form of
a resilient but ultimately doomed rainforest resource, Yamashita's fabulist
text traces the residue of US empire in Brazil and proposes a future world
in which that denied imperial history ultimately undermines the continued
US extraction of Brazilian natural resources, culture, and labor.
Because the plantation met with consistent financial difficulties,
Fordl?ndia's justification for renewed funding and support relied heavily
on its self-promotion as a civilizing mission. The rubber plantation regu
lated its primarily indigenous laboring subjects through the imposition of
US social institutions (schools, churches, and hospitals), cultural practices
(prohibition of drinking and smoking, and viewings of Hollywood films),
and labor administration (punch cards, a 9-to-5 workday, and ID tags).
Through such linguistic and material disciplining structures, the plantation
promoted US "modernity" by capitalizing on pre-established fantasies of
the tropics.
Couched in a discourse of benevolence, the project of settling and
developing Fordl?ndia exemplifies US efforts to distinguish its twentieth
century overseas investments and holdings from British imperialism of
the nineteenth century.9 Since the 1870s, Dutch and British entrepreneurs
had established an expansive and successful rubber tree empire in Asia. In
1922, the British Rubber Restoration Act (a.k.a. the Stevenson Plan) sought
to double the price of rubber, which would exert pressure on the growing
US automobile empire. British domination of the world rubber market
threatened Ford's vision of complete vertical integration of his automotive
industry (from rubber tree plantations to tires on Model T's). In retalia
tion, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone mobilized a campaign to break the
emerging rubber cartel. Because rubber tree cultivation was restricted to
tropical climates, the resulting competition among British, Dutch, and US
rubber industries in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brazil gave rise to an often
overlooked material connection between British and Dutch imperialism
132 BAHNG
in Asia and US neo-colonial investments in Latin America. Years later,

Malaya and Singapore came under Japanese occupation between 1942
and 1945. Japan's interest in these regions was arguably due in large part
to the rubber resources it would access and control during a time of war.
Organized and run as a US plantation, Fordl?ndia implemented a series
of social ordering structures that helped sustain the racialized aspect of
benevolent supremacy rationalizing US neocolonial presence in Brazil. To
conform to US work practices, local laborers were forced to work during
the most exhausting midday hours, wear ID badges, and eat hamburgers
and hot dogs in a cafeteria. During a revolt in 1930, the kitchen and the time
clock were clear targets. Workers directed their frustrations at these inva
sive cultural systems that sought to force a certain digestive and temporal
regimentation on their everyday lives. Images of Fordl?ndia resemble a
suburban grid, complete with stucco dwellings, power lines, (segregated)
swimming pools, and hospital. Inhabitants were not allowed to drink
or smoke, the children wore school uniforms, and in their leisure time,
employees could attend the company-run churches and motion picture the
aters, or they could even play golf on the 18-hole course "700 miles from
civilization." In short, according to a Ford company pamphlet about the
rubber plantations in Brazil, they had "everything necessary for the health,
happiness and well-being of Ford employees." The report emphasizes the
plantation's role in "modernizing" the tropics, calling attention repeatedly
to the "modern hospital" and describing Fordl?ndia as "a modern city" (2)
that took the place of "the trackless green waste" of "the trackless jungle"
(8, 5). Targeting current or potential investors, the Fordl?ndia brochure
blames the Brazilian plantation's shortcomings on increased demand and
the more rigorous scientific development of rubber cultivation technolo
gies in Asia. It suggests that in "the early days of automobiles, before the
need was so great, the unskilled methods of natives produced most of the
world's supply of rubber from the jungles of Brazil." The company char
acterized pre-plantation rubber cultivation as the rudimentary and primi
tive production of "jungle natives." With increased demand, though, the
brochure explains that "Brazil lost its pre-eminent place to the Far East,
which developed scientific methods of tree culture that resulted in greater
yield and higher quality of crude rubber" (1). In this way, the brochure ren
ders a history of the Amazon that narrates the need for "scientific methods"
to restore Brazil's pre-eminence in the rubber industry. Page after page of
the brochure comments on the transformative power of industry, compar
ing Fordl?ndia's residences to "any midwestern (sic) town" or "a winter
home in Florida" and taking great pains to amplify the remarkable nature
of such a feat "in the heart of Brazil": "Shades of Tarzan! You'd never
guess these bright, happy, healthy school children lived in a jungle city
that didn't even exist a few years ago" (16). News media coverage of the
Fordl?ndia project highlights the plantation's school system and includes
many photographs of Indian children in clean, white uniforms standing
and saluting the Brazilian flag's motto: "Ordern e Progres so" (Order and
Progress). As Anne McClintock suggests of nineteenth-century European
expositions and museum culture, the brochure "converted the narrative
of imperial Progress into mass-produced consumer spectacles" (33). The
Ford Company thus sold its project to US audiences and investors as a
civilizing mission that could tame not only the unruly jungle but also the
denizens of the Amazon Valley.
In a May 6, 1927, document titled "Living Conditions in the Amazon
Valley," Carl D. LaRue depicts first and foremost a disorderly Para state:
"In the smaller villages and along the rivers, the people are everywhere
poor and forlorn. Most of them are penniless and without hope for the
future." LaRue sets the stage for Fordist reform by describing the need
for a civilizing mission, a need for a restoration of "hope for the future"
through financial, international speculation. He then immediately shifts to
the topic of potential labor sources: "These people are usually called lazy,
improvident, thriftless, etc., and it is true that they are not energetic, but
when we consider that they are racked with disease, and have never been
properly nourished in their lives, one wonders at their powers of endur
ance." LaRue's characterization of these potential laborers as disease
ridden and poorly nourished establishes an occasion for a medical interven
tion as a means of bolstering the labor supply while assuming a position
of humanitarian aid, benevolent force, and civilizing mission. LaRue
reports: "No attention is paid to housing such people or looking after their
health" (1). Nevertheless, the extent to which his call for medical aid is
tied to a racialized concept of health and hygiene remains abundantly clear.
Referring to the potential plantation workers as "magnificent specimens,"
LaRue writes:
The dwellers of the Amazon Valley are of three main stocks. Indian, Portuguese
and Negro. There was a time when names were given the different racial
crosses as of Indian with Negro, Indian with Portuguese, etc. but now admix
ture has gone on so long that it is difficult to distinguish the different types.
The mixture is not a particularly good one from a racial standpoint, but it is by
no means a bad one. (1)
What "racial standpoint" does LaRue take for granted here? In the US
around 1927, the wide acceptance of scientific racism and eugenicist
thought led to compulsory sterilization practices and immigration restric
tion legislation. However, 1927 also marks the height of Brazil's own
debates around race that emerged in relation but in contradistinction to
134 BAHNG
European and US racial ideologies. Prior to the publication of Gilberto

Freyre's work on "Brazilian racial democracy," this period witnessed
efforts among Brazilian authorities and landed gentry, informed by
European racial pseudoscience, to push for a "whitening" of the Brazilian
population in the decades following the abolition of slavery in 1888.10
As a natural scientist and a Ford employee, LaRue likely brought to his
scouting report of the Amazon his own version of white supremacy as
bolstered by the prevailing racial ideologies of US science and industry.
Concurrently, the merging discourses of Brazilian racial "improvement"
and Ford's civilizing mission are rather suggestive. LaRue's concluding
lines to his report reinforce this relationship between the two connected
discourses of "improvement": "The salvation of these people lies in some
development which will give them employment at reasonable wages and
with decent living conditions. . . . This is an opportunity to do a great ser
vice to hundreds of deserving folk" (5). For LaRue, capitalist development
leads to "salvation," and it is in this way that LaRue reveals himself to be
a devout believer in Fordist reform as a universal imperative.
LaRue's final rallying call pivots on a particularly revealing racial hier
archy. He writes: "The fate of these people is the more tragic because they
are not possessed of the stolidity of many of the orientals, but have enough
of the white race in them to suffer keenly and long intensely for better
things. As it is, their condition is worse than that of any of the coolies in
the East; far worse even than that of the average slave in the old days" (4).
In this astonishing quotation, LaRue's preoccupation with the competing
rubber industry in Southeast Asia manifests in a racialized comparison
between Asian and Brazilian mixed-race labor. Conscientious of the fact
that local Indian labor "is somewhat more expensive than in the East,"
LaRue argues that this cost differential is offset by the fact that "labor is
also more intelligent than the average labor in the East." He explains that
"the use of machines on the modern plantation should offset this advan
tage in the East." In his entreaty to Ford to create his rubber empire in
Brazil rather than in Sumatra, LaRue mobilizes two contradictory orien
talist formulations of Asia as, on the one hand, hopelessly un-modern and
less intelligent, and on the other hand, at an advantage and in less need
of being "saved" by Fordist progress. This passage also reveals clearly
LaRue's efforts to distance his and Ford's mission in the Amazon from the
systems of oppression at work in European colonization of Southeast Asia
and the US's own slave past.
As a scouting mission, LaRue's report could be considered another kind
of speculation?one that demonstrates the kinds of capitalist fantasies sur
rounding Ford's vision of docile laborers, modernity in the jungle, and
high-density accumulation of wealth. However, contrary to the Fordist
fantasy of modernizing and regulating the tropics, Fordl?ndia ultimately

failed. The workers rebelled, the rainforest remained untempered by the
plantation, and the Fordist project in Brazil settled into relative obscurity.
Therefore, Yamashita's late-twentieth-century excavation of this largely
forgotten Amazonian rubber plantation helps situate her extrapolative
imagining of twenty-first century capitalization on rainforest resources in a
longer history of transimperial endeavors in Brazil. Linking European eth
nographic and scientific expeditions of the nineteenth century to the Fordist
project of plantation building in the early twentieth century, Yamashita
also connects these imperial traces to the more contemporary moment of
post-Fordist global capitalism in Latin America. In this way, her trans
formation of the Amazon rainforest into a speculative space unearths the
historical layers of European and US claims to Brazilian natural resources.
More generally, Yamashita takes issue with scientific exploration of the
Amazon under banners of benevolent research but through the perpetua
tion of tropicalist stereotypes of "jungle nations."
Spectacular undertakings in the rainforest hardly begin or end with
Fordl?ndia, and Yamashita references several more notable examples in
her text. When J. B. decides to transport the twenty-three-storied GGG
headquarters in its entirety from New York to the Matac?o, Yamashita
cites two "historic precedents for such a grandiose move" (76). The
first is the Teatro Amazonas opera house in Manaus, built in 1896 out
of imported French tiles, Italian marble, and Murano glass chandeliers
with the expressed desire to bring European "civilization" to the heart
of the jungle. Yamashita writes that the opera house "imported . . . every
detail from the iron fixtures to the parquet floors from England" (76). She
also references US billionaire Daniel Ludwig 's farfetched plan to float a
fully-constructed pulp mill and factory on two giant pontoons from Japan
to the Brazilian city of Munguba in 1978 "for the purpose of churning
everything into tons of useful paper" (76). In his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo,
Werner Herzog stages the hoisting of a steamship, commissioned to find
and tap rubber trees in a previously unreachable plot of land, across a
mountain separating two tributaries of the Amazon River, using the labor
of an indigenous tribe and the ingenuity of a German entrepreneur.11
From Ford to Herzog and from opera houses to floating factories,
empire in its various permutations has historically rendered the Amazon
a speculative space. These commercial and cultural incursions point to
European and US capitalist speculations, which have attempted to lay
claim to tropical resources in the rainforest since the early colonial period.
These enterprises also work in conjunction with a system of fantastical
speculations that construct a tropicalist imaginary sustained through colo
nialist visual and literary representations of the jungle.12
136 BAHNG
Recycled Empire and Cycles of Migration
The failed tropical projects of Ford and Ludwig and their erasure from
histories of capitalist exploration of the Amazon are examples of the types
of forgetting that are central to the speculative imperative of imperial and
scientific narratives. They serve as material corollaries to the military and
capitalist wreckage that seeps to the surface of the jungle in Through the
Arc. The ecological mutation of the Matac?o and the mutated bodies of the
characters who converge in Brazil from other parts of the world gesture
toward conventional science fiction tropes of near-future extrapolation
and alien invasion. However, by drawing attention to historical collabo
rations between science fictions and imperial speculations,Yamashita's
work highlights how empire in its more flexible manifestations continues
to mobilize narratives of alienation. Yamashita's story of alien encoun
ter thus deploys speculation as a postcolonial analytic shaped by a lived
experience of cultural and legislative alienation of Asian migrants to the
Americas and Asian Americans.
In their introduction to Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian
America, Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu write that the
"alien encounter" in science fiction "manifests both threat and promise?
the threat of imminent invasion, takeover, or control and the promise of
adventure, transformation, and exchange" (29). Fascinated with Asian
characters from late-twentieth-century US popular culture such as Karma
of the Marvel New Mutants comic book series and Data of Steven
Spielberg's 1985 film Goonies, Nguyen positions herself as both a fan
and critic of these spectacular fictions that tell stories about technology,
science, and mutation, but also construct narratives around Asian differ
ence, superheroism, and alienation.13 Although representations of Asian
alienness in US popular culture persistently reproduce orientalist fantasies
and paranoia, the realm of science fiction (and speculative fiction, also
known as "SF") and its related subcultures remain a powerful and compel
ling force in Asian America.14
A long history of racialization of Asian immigrants to the United States
informs this conflicted relationship to the juncture of Alien/Asian. Given
the "historical legacy that has unrelentingly configured Asian Americans
as exterior to or pathological to the US nation-state" described so cogently
by David Eng in Racial Castration, a justified uneasiness exists at the
crossroads of Asian American enthusiasm for science fiction in light of
the genre's frequent participation in the fashioning of Asian otherness (33).
Nevertheless, Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest illustrates
the potential of a critical science fiction that revels in "making the impossi
ble possible" to the end of renegotiating social imaginaries.15 In Immigrant
Acts, Lisa Lowe points to the ways in which legislative acts (such as the
Alien Exclusion Act of 1882 and Alien Land Laws of 1913, 1920, and
1923) constructed Asian immigrants to the US as "illegal aliens," and to
the powerful "acts of labor, resistance, memory, and survival" of those
alienated subjects who produce "politicized cultural work that emerges
from dislocation and disidentification" (9, emphasis added). In part
because of "a history of being constituted as 'aliens,'" Asian Americans
can lend critical perspective to a national memory forged in narratives of
liberal democracy and citizenship that actively forgets these acts of exclu
sion and disavows US imperialism (Lowe 21). Through the Arc of the Rain
Forest is a "speculative act" that attends to the historical displacement and
estrangement of Asian immigrants to the Americas through compelling
excavations of imperial legacies.16
Yamashita's text is shaped by arcs that include migration, reverse migra
tion, and secondary migrations; excavations of things repressed and dis
avowed; and the unraveling of narratives of progress and development.17
Inspired by the multidirectional migrations of Japanese Brazilians over the
course of the twentieth century, Yamashita complicates the assimilationist
teleology of one kind of immigrant narrative and renegotiates a space for
a more transnational set of complex affiliations for Asian American lit
erature. Through the Arc contains sections titled: "Part I: The Beginning,"
"Part II: The Developing World," "Part III: More Development," but then:
"Part IV: Loss of Innocence," "Part V: More Loss," and "Part VI: Return."
In this schema, development leads to loss and more loss rather than profit
and benefit, and it thus belies one kind of very limited immigrant narra
tive that constructs the trajectory of immigration to be only about leaving
a homeland to arrive in a new world where assimilation is the path to
success.
In his name, Kazumasa Ishimaru recalls a century of transpacific pas

sages. Appearing also in the title of Yamashita's second work Brazil-Maru,
the Japanese suffix -maru gestures to the names of the ships that crossed
the Pacific, facilitating Japanese immigration to South America. The
Kasato-Maru brought the first 781 Japanese immigrants to the Brazilian
port of Santos in S?o Paolo in 1908, and the Brazil-Maru shuttled tens
of thousands of Japanese settlers to Brazil, Argentina, and Peru for two
decades following World War II.18
Yamashita's text attends to the variable conditions of Japanese-Brazilian
immigration that took hold over the course of the twentieth century. The
earliest Japanese migrants to Brazil worked on sugar, cotton, coffee, and
rubber plantations in a system of indentured labor under harsh working
conditions (Affigne and Lien 9). While Japanese immigration began shortly
after the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, Japan had long since out
138 BAHNG
paced Brazil in economic development, emerging in the post-World War II

era as "an industrial power of the first rank" (Linger 22). Asian exclusion
and immigration restriction in the United States between 1924 and 1965
and in Brazil beginning in 1934 punctuate the history of Japanese migra
tion to Brazil and other South American sites. During World War II, Latin
American countries including Peru and Brazil participated in US-led initia
tives to relocate and intern people of Japanese descent by either deporting
them to the United States or confining Japanese to their areas of settle
ment while also further curtailing their already limited liberties and rights
to land ownership (Masterson 120, 132-140). In 1990, in an effort to fill a
deficit of unskilled industrial labor, Japan extended an invitation to over
seas Japanese, including about 200,000 Japanese Brazilians, to return to
Japan. Although Japan had once turned to workers from Pakistan, Iran,
and Bangladesh, Japanese Brazilians were considered more-assimilable
subjects who served the same labor niche without presenting Japan with
an overtly visible (and racialized) face of migrant labor (Linger 23-25).
In Through the Arc, movements of peoples are incredibly complex; mul
tiple systems of racialization and shifting centers of global capital inform
and shape patterns of migration. The substantial migration of Japanese
Brazilians (back) to Japan in the late 1980s and 1990s renders false the
idea that Asian American history would have only one trajectory.
The novel's epigraph further emphasizes the cyclical processes that
reflect dynamic and diverse circulations of people rather than unidirec
tional movements from one place to another: "I have heard Brazilian chil
dren say that whatever passes through the arc of a rainbow becomes its
opposite. But what is the opposite of a bird? Or for that matter, a human
being? And what then, in the great rain forest, where, in its season, the
rain never ceases and the rainbows are myriad?" Yamashita's ruminations
here?on multiple arcs of migration, myriad passages across ephemeral
boundaries, and the complex unfolding of transformation?characterize
the central themes of her work and attest to her narration of a more com
plex system of transpacific migrations and intertwined cultural memories.
The passage presents the rainforest as an already speculative space where
constant precipitation (the unceasing rain) yields a propensity for messy
mutation (myriad rainbows), rather than neatly packaged transformation.
In an age of neoliberal globalization, when narratives of technology
often invite such fantasies of transformation and liberation, Through the Arc
of the Rain Forest illustrates how narratives of progress have historically
accompanied moments of labor exploitation and disregard for the rights of
those whose protest might disrupt the ongoing expansion of empire. The
particular intersections of science/fiction and Alien/Asian are vital to an
expanded formulation of Asian American studies in an age when narratives
of Asian technocultural prowess stir up anxieties in the US of being unseat

ed as the dominant force in the global market. Through the Arc of the Rain
Forest exerts pressure on the generic delineations of Asian American litera
ture and science fiction by claiming to be both at once. Yamashita expands
notions of Asian American literature by calling attention to the ways in
which US, European, and Japanese imperial efforts all have shaped this his
tory of migration. As a history of imperial and neocolonial structures that
connect Latin America and Asian America in powerful ways, Yamashita's
science fiction complicates the technoracialization of the global Asian sub
ject in the contemporary moment.
Notes
1. For historical accounts of Ford rubber plantations in Brazil, see Elizabeth Esch,
Richard P. Tucker, and Barbara Weinstein.
2. Accession #74, Box 1: "History and Cost," Brochure: The Ford Rubber
Plantation of Brazil, Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, Michigan. All fur
ther references to this company-published brochure procured at the Henry Ford
Archives will be made parenthetically.
3. In addition to Rachel Lee's The Americas of Asian American Literature, see
Kandice Chuh, Caroline Rody, and Molly Wallace.
4. Co-edited by Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, So Long Been Dreaming:
Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy anthologizes a long-standing tradi
tion of black speculative writing and urges a more transnational consideration
of science fiction writing among multiple diasporic peoples. In 2000 and 2004,
two momentous collections of science fiction sought to illuminate and evidence a
long-standing tradition of speculative writing by black writers. Edited by Sheree
Thomas, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones establish a rich collection of black specula
tive writing, reaching back to W. E. B. Du Bois's 1929 short story "The Comet."
Also published in 2004, Hopkinson and Mehan's So Long Been Dreaming worked
further to broaden notions of a genre often associated primarily with white male
writers (and fantasies) from the US and Europe. The Dark Matter anthologies
and So Long Been Dreaming actively engage in a theoretical discussion about
race and science fiction. Mehan seeks out a definition of postcoloniality that
"included those of us who are the survivors?or descendants of survivors?of sus
tained, racial colonial processes; the members of cultures of resistance to colonial
oppression; the members of minority cultures which are essentially colonized
nations within a larger nation; and those of us who identify ourselves as having
Aboriginal, African, South Asian, Asian ancestry, wherever we make our homes"
(269). The anthology reflects this broader conceptualization of postcoloniality by
including the work of Larissa Lai, Karin Lowachee, and Vandana Singh alongside
that of Nisi Shawl, Sheree Thomas, and Opal Palmer Adisa.
5. This essay looks to speculative fiction as a genre of inventing possibilities of
the other in the form of alternate realities, upside-down hierarchies, or haunted
140 BAHNG
genealogies. "Speculative fiction," as a term affiliated with science fiction (but

more inclusive of "soft" science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the gothic), main
tains an intimate and tenuous relationship to science that has yet to be explored
in Yamashita's work. I find the term speculation particularly helpful in that it
suggests inconclusive reflection rather than tidy resolution; it shifts the emphasis
of scientific pursuit from fact-chasing to experiment-reveling and understands
history, science, and nation as constructed, partial narratives, rather than objec
tive, universal truths. As it contemplates both the future and the past, speculation
disrupts the ideological ordering of time, encouraging narratives that might not
resolve according to linear ideas of progress. Furthermore, as its etymology sug
gests, speculation attends to the practices and powers of looking associated with
the making of spectacles and spectacular events. Finally, the term speculation
obliquely and bleakly references capitalist discourses of business ventures (finan
cial speculation, land acquisition, and purchasing "on the margin").
6. See Edmond and O'Brien. O'Brien writes that Gauguin, "whose vision of the
Pacific has cast an enduring shadow on all that followed," spent time not only in
Tahiti but also in Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. "Like so many Occidental voyagers
before him, Gauguin lusted for the mythologized halcyon days of Tahiti encapsu
lated by Bougainville. At first he was lacking any substantial knowledge of Tahiti,
but what loomed largest in his imagination was a place of tropical fecundity, femi
nine beauty, and sexual emancipation that waited for immortalization. . . . From
the 1880s, Gauguin's formative artistic years, the long-standing South Seas myths
woven from the earlier phases of colonization were revived and embellished for a
popular audience of readers with a fresh interest in the empire" (216).
7. In the epilogue o? Picturing Tropical Nature, Stepan asks: "As we look to the
future, what place will tropical nature hold in the imagination? In an era of the
commodification of nature on an unprecedented scale and of wholesale environ
mental destruction; when world travel and global networks make all places seem
increasingly alike ... ?shall we then find that 'tropical nature', as an imaginative
construction, has itself become banal and trivialized? If so, what will the conse
quences be for our empathetic understanding of the natural world, especially the
tropical world that we are so rapidly destroying?" (240).
8. See Kathryn Kopinak.
9. See Melani McAlister's discussion of "benevolent supremacy" (43-83).
10. See also Gilberto Freyre and Nancy Leys Stepan. In 1925, Mexican philoso
pher Jos? Vasconcelos published La Raza C?smica, or "The Cosmic Race," which
posits a Utopian "fifth race" of the Americas comprised of a bronze people, so
racially mixed that its members found a new civilization called "Univers?polis."
11. Fitzcarraldo's eponymous protagonist dreams of building an opera house in the
middle of the Amazon along the lines of the opera house at Manaus. His impossible
dream is realized by staging an opera aboard the steam ship he originally commis
sioned for the purpose of securing a fortune in rubber. Capitalizing on the suspi
ciously volunteered labor of hundreds of Indians, Fitzcarraldo drags his ship over
a mountain to gain access to untapped land, only to have it cut loose by the same
indigenous tribe on the other side and set adrift into perilous rapids. Fitzcarraldo
puts on display Western Europe's colonial enterprises and civilizing missions in
the Amazon during the early twentieth century. It not only links the rubber boom
with opera-house building, but, because Herzog himself negotiates the employ
ment of indigenous non-actors in his film, Fitzcarraldo as cultural production does
not escape the very imperialist structures it attempts to narrate. Film, music, and
legal scholars alike (including Keith Richards, Lutz P. Koepnick, Michael Bull, and
Andrew W. Hurley) investigate these intricate and fraught layers of colonial resi
dues in Herzog 's film and Les Blank's documentary of the making of Fitzcarraldo.
12. See Aparicio and Ch?vez-Silverman's Tropicalization and Ileana Rodriguez's
Transatlantic Topographies.
13. See Nguyen and Tu's Introduction to Alien Encounters and Nguyen's "Queer
Cyborgs and New Mutants" in Asian America.Net.
14. Several Asian American scholars have examined orientalist representations
of Asians and Asianness in US technocultural discourse. See, for example, Asian
America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, eds. Rachel C. Lee and
Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, and Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes and Digitizing Race.
15. In an interview with Alondra Nelson, Nalo Hopkinson defines speculative
fiction as "fiction that starts from the principle of making the impossible possible"
(98, emphasis added).
16.1 use the term "estrangement" here to gesture toward Darko Suvin's definition
of science fiction as a literature of "cognitive estrangement" (2-15).
17. The author's own biographical trajectories point to secondary and reverse
migrations of Asians across, from, and between the Americas. When she moved
from the United States to Japan and then to Brazil in the late 1970s and early
1980s, Yamashita was pursuing her interest in and research about Japanese migra
tion to and from the Americas. Home to the largest population of Japanese out
side of Japan, Brazil also became Yamashita's home for almost ten years, during
which time she married a Brazilian architect and began raising her children in
S?o Paolo. Yamashita and her family also lived in Japan for a year, where she
conducted research on Japanese Brazilians who migrated back to Japan. For more
biographical information on Yamashita, see interviews with the author by Michael
S. Murashige, Jean Vengua Gier and Carla Alicia Tejeda, and Wendy Cheng. Also
see Kandice Chuh's "Of Hemispheres." In Gier and Tejeda's "An Interview with
Karen Tei Yamashita," Yamashita situates her own transnational migration (back)
to Los Angeles from S?o Paolo at a moment when "there was a large migration of
Japanese-Brazilians who went to Japan to work."
18. For histories of Japanese migration to Brazil, see Daniel M. Masterson
and Sayaka Funada-Classen's The Japanese in Latin America', Daniel Touro
Linger's No One Home', New Worlds, New Lives: Globalization and People of
Japanese Descent in the Americas and from Latin America in Japan, eds. Lane
Ryo Hirabayashi, Akemi Kikumura-Yano, and James A. Hirabayashi; Japan and
Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society,
eds. Mike Douglass and Glenda S. Roberts; and Tony Affigne and Pei-te Lien's
"People's of Asian Descent in the Americas."
142 BAHNG
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LEIDO Extrapolating

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Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of

Karen Tei Yamashita's "Through the Arc of the Rain Forest"

I will outnumber you.

?Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo

In 1927, Henry Ford bought approximately 2.5 million acres of Amazon

MELUS, Volume 33, Number 4 (Winter 2008)

Through the Arc intervenes in and disrupts imperialist fantasies of an

Yamashita's Through the Arc revisits the speculative space of the

exceptionalism. His extraordinary abilities find their ultimate fulfillment

Rather than animating the Matac?o plastic as an invasive foreigner,

gesting that "the jungle" when excavated reveals a cavernous system of

Imperial Rubber: Residues of US Empire in the Brazilian Rainforest

The "discovery" of rubber, which was first introduced to European

in Asia and US neo-colonial investments in Latin America. Years later,

European and US racial ideologies. Prior to the publication of Gilberto

fantasy of modernizing and regulating the tropics, Fordl?ndia ultimately

Recycled Empire and Cycles of Migration

In his name, Kazumasa Ishimaru recalls a century of transpacific pas

paced Brazil in economic development, emerging in the post-World War II

of Asian technocultural prowess stir up anxieties in the US of being unseat

genealogies. "Speculative fiction," as a term affiliated with science fiction (but

Hurley, Andrew W. "Re-Imagining Milirrpum v Nabalco in Werner Herzog's

Richards, Keith. "Export Mythology: Primitivism and Paternalism in Pasolini,

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