Overview

Congolese logging camps are places where mud, rain, fuel smugglers, and village roadblocks slow down multinational timber firms; where workers wage wars against trees while evading company surveillance deep in the forest; where labor compounds trigger disturbing colonial memories; and where blunt racism, logger machismo, and homoerotic desires reproduce violence. In Rainforest Capitalism Thomas Hendriks examines the rowdy world of industrial timber production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to theorize racialized and gendered power dynamics in capitalist extraction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Congolese workers and European company managers as well as traders, farmers, smugglers, and barkeepers, Hendriks shows how logging is deeply tied to feelings of existential vulnerability in the face of larger forces, structures, and histories. These feelings, Hendriks contends, reveal a precarious side of power in an environment where companies, workers, and local residents frequently find themselves out of control. An ethnography of complicity, ecstasis, and paranoia, Rainforest Capitalism queers assumptions of corporate strength and opens up new ways to understand the complexities and contradictions of capitalist extraction.

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9781478017844

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Reviews

Offering a rare look at the everyday lives of the people who live in and around Congolese timber labor camps, Thomas Hendriks draws out the continuities and discontinuities of racialized colonial extraction. Artfully written, Rainforest Capitalism will make a major contribution to theories of capitalism, race, and sexuality. -- Jessica M. Smith, author of * Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West * In this fresh and captivating book, Thomas Hendriks offers precious insights into the precarity of logging in the Congolese rainforest. His lively ethnography demonstrates that the analysis of neoliberal capitalist extraction should address not only labor and political economy but also memory, affect, sexual desire, and racial fetishism. His sophisticated theoretical framework allows him to capture the fleeting character of logging and brings together forestry, anthropology, and queer studies in visionary ways that will inspire many scholars. -- Peter Geschiere, author of * Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison * Based on a lengthy period of ethnographic research, this book is a lively, readable account of life in a logging camp, and the author makes a useful, thought-provoking contribution to the literature on power, capitalism, gender, sexuality, and race/racism in anthropology, African studies, and related fields. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. -- E. E. Stiles * Choice *

Offering a rare look at the everyday lives of the people who live in and around Congolese timber labor camps, Thomas Hendriks draws out the continuities and discontinuities of racialized colonial extraction. Artfully written, Rainforest Capitalism will make a major contribution to theories of capitalism, race, and sexuality. -- Jessica M. Smith, author of * Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West * In this fresh and captivating book, Thomas Hendriks offers precious insights into the precarity of logging in the Congolese rainforest. His lively ethnography demonstrates that the analysis of neoliberal capitalist extraction should address not only labor and political economy but also memory, affect, sexual desire, and racial fetishism. His sophisticated theoretical framework allows him to capture the fleeting character of logging, and brings together forestry, anthropology, and queer studies in visionary ways that will inspire many scholars. -- Peter Geschiere, author of * Witchcraft, Intimacy, and Trust: Africa in Comparison *

Author Information

Thomas Hendriks is FWO Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa at KU Leuven and coeditor of Readings in Sexualities from Africa.

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