IMPERIAL RUBBER

The Speculative Arcs of KarenTei Yamashita's Rainforest Futures

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 Werner Herzog's 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo, the eponymous protagonist dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. His impossible dream is realized by staging an opera aboard the steamship he originally commissioned for the purpose of securing a fortune in rubber. Fitzcarraldo, using the suspiciously volunteered labor of hundreds of Indians, succeeds in dragging his ship over a mountain to gain access to untapped rubber trees, only to have his boat cut loose and set adrift into perilous rapids by the same indigenous workers on the other side.

The "discovery" of rubber proclaimed by French geographer Charles-Marie de La Condamine in the mid-eighteenth century occasions one early manifestation of what could be called science fiction, in the sense that his expedition journal — later published as a scientific treatise — reads as a rather fantastical travel narrative. As elucidated in Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes, La Condamine's report on his expedition to the Amazon is strikingly speculative in nature, "written mainly not as a scientific report, but in the popular genre of survival literature." Rubber is just one spectacular character among many in La Condamine's narrative, which describes the strangeness of a tropical "new world" and even attempts to verify the existence of the mythic Amazon women warriors. As it narrates an encounter with an otherworldly landscape, populated with alien (to the French scientist) flora, fauna, and other entities, La Condamine's account of his scientific expedition reads like speculative fiction, particularly because it is produced in the service of empire both to sensationalize and rationalize — or to rationalize through sensational fantasy — the possible wealth to be controlled and wildness to be domesticated in the Brazilian jungle.

The history of the rubber industry necessarily stretches across multiple geographies and temporalities. It links the tropical forests of the Amazon and Southeast Asia, highlighting the competing imperial holdings of England, the Netherlands, and the United States. This history also connects La Condamine's 1744 expedition with that of Carl LaRue, a Ford Motor Company geographer, in 1927 — the year Henry Ford bought approximately 2.5 million acres of Amazon rainforest in the northern state of Pará, Brazil, and established a sizable rubber plantation. "Fordlándia" was designed to be an all-inclusive neocolonial system, extending the plantation infrastructure beyond sawmills and processing plants to include U.S.-style hospitals, schools, white clapboard houses, and even recreational facilities such as a motion-picture theater 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 impenetrable tropical jungle." Ford's ventures in Brazil attempted to impose a vision of the future, as conjured up by commerce, profit making, and Western modernity, upon a geography he imagined to be stuck in prehistoric time. In this way, this U.S. captain of industry extends the imperialist logics of Victorian England, for example, by figuring "geographical difference across space [ ...] as a historical difference across time." Furthermore, these land speculations — brokered through a collusion between scientific and economic interests — relied on the production of several fictions about the working habits of indigenous peoples, the rainforest's resilience, and capitalism's deliverables to succeed.

Roughly twenty years before Greg Grandin's 2009 history of Fordlándia brought renewed attention to Ford's Amazonian exploits, the Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita excavated this largely forgotten scene of U.S. imperialism in Brazil when she set her 1990 speculative fiction, Through the Arcof the Rain Forest, largely at the scene of rubber extraction in the Brazilian rainforest. Through the Arc extrapolates from Ford's imperialist legacies to project into the near future what might happen to the Amazon when a valuable, rubber-like resource is unearthed during an age of global capitalist restructuring.

By calling attention to the buried histories to which Yamashita playfully alludes, I place Through the Arc's historical speculations in critical dialogue with other kinds of scientific fictions that have worked on behalf of European and U.S. empire building to render the resource-rich jungle available for imperial conquest and expansion. To do this work, Yamashita's speculative fiction itself suggests a methodology of excavation, both archaeological and genealogical in the Foucauldian sense. Because Through the Arc presents itself as a form of speculation in conversation with other forms, including land and financial speculation, this methodological experiment — of extrapolation via excavation — highlights how modernity and indeed futurity traffic in racisms that emerge from a discursive relation to older discourses of race that are, in Ann Laura Stoler's words, "'recovered,' modified, 'encased,' and 'encrusted' in new forms." Excavation, as Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd formulate it in their introduction to The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, enacts a practice of "looking to the shadows" for "alternative histories and their different temporalities that cannot be contained by the progressive narrative of Western developmentalism." Along these lines, Yamashita's Through the Arc looks to the shadows of capital in the Amazon rainforest to offer an alternative to developmental historiography, to teleological narration, to a profit-driven futurity.

This chapter considers a history of imperial and neocolonial structures in Brazil, the overlapping nature of various empires in South America, and the technoracialization of the global Asian subject. In Through the Arc, Yamashita focuses on the presence of U.S. multinational corporations in Latin America as a manifestation of a longer history of empire in Brazil. The narrative suggests that earlier empire-builders shrewdly cultivated a racialized understanding of the tropics and established the beginnings of a history of imperial efforts in the guise of benevolent enterprises, including tropical medicine, technological...