Between the frequently recounted events of the Gold Rush and the
Great Depression stretches a period of California history that is
equally crucial but less often acknowledged. In his fresh,
synthetic consideration of these in-between years, George L.
Henderson points specifically to the take-off of California's rural
juggernaut between the 1880s and middle 1920s--the upward spiral of
city bids for country dollars and rural bids for urban investments.
These decades were salve for mining's risky finances yet groundwork
for the chaotic 1930s. Moreover, Henderson argues that much like
the two important periods which framed it, this era produced a
cultural and literary apparatus that attempted to grapple with
capital's machinations, if only to legitimate them in the end.
Central to California and the Fictions of Capital is a theory of
how the circulation of capital wove itself into agriculture. The
book asks why it mattered to capital that agriculture was based in
Nature, and then explores the procedures through which images of
Nature became central to capitalism's story of itself. What unique
possibilities did Nature offer to circuits of capital and what was
their role in suturing the urban and rural together? How did boom
and bust intervene and set the pace for regional change? How was
capital linked to the racializing of working bodies? And why was
the capitalist imperative expressed in landscape alterations like
irrigation? Such are the key questions informing this bold,
far-reaching volume.
Beyond political economy, the book also looks to the rural
juggernaut's cultural and literary work, which was stamped by
celebratory, if fretful, ruminations. In all sorts of texts--but
especially in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, Harold Bell
Wright, and many other writers--difficult questions surfaced.
Capital was seen in terms of its spillage into rural frontiers,
just as rural frontiers were seen in terms of movements of capital.
Capital was the new geography of money. But for whom did it work?
Which identities did it favor? In mapping the real and imaginary
realms that capital occupied, Henderson locates the banker-, land
developer-, and engineer-heroes of California fiction as well as
the fictionalized "new woman" of the capitalist, agrarian West. He
unravels the colliding representations of race, gender, and class,
while linking their treatment to the naturalizing rhetoric of
capital's agrarian turn.
In part a tour of California as a virtual laboratory for refining
the circulation of capital, and in part an investigation of how the
state's literati, with rare exception, reconceived economy in the
name of class, gender, and racial privilege, this study will appeal
to all students and scholars of California's--and the American
West's--economic, environmental, and cultural past.
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