Petromodernity, petro-finance and plastic in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest

Abstract

This article reads Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) and its account of the discovery of the Matacão–a mysterious plastic bedrock found in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest–as bound to the nation’s recent history of neoliberal financialization and petrolic extraction. The Matacão is examined as an allegory for the dispossession of peasant communities by multinational capitalism through its references to historical resource rushes as well as the developmental arcs of discovery, excavation and exhaustion attending commodity booms. The discussion concludes by examining the text’s framing of North American influence in Brazil alongside the emergence of extra-human resistance to the commodification of the Amazon. Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis have argued that plastic makes “visible a stratigraphy of oil capital”, and, likewise, this article connects the local and global production of petro-ecological surpluses, petro-plastic waste and petro-dollar debt as rendered in Yamashita’s novel.