Discussion: Banhg/Simal Article Response Forum

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) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20343510 Accessed: 27-06-2016 22:52 UTC

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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."

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