California and the Fictions of Capital

TLDR: In this article, the authors discuss the relationship between capital and nature in the late nineteenth-century countryside and the literature of rural realism, and present a survey of the history of rural realism in the United States.

Abstract: Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside? The Discourse of Rural Realism Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel? Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds Reference Maps Part I: Making Geographies 1. Rural Commodity Ragtimes: A Primer The Logics and Illogics of Production: The Shift to and out of Grain The Regime of Specialty Crops A Wider Division of Labor: The Country in the City 2. Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital Capitalism and Nature: The Agrarian Nexus Axis One: The Mann-Dickinson Thesis, Nature as Obstacle Axis Two: Exploiting the Natural Obstacle Keeping Capitalism Out or Letting Capital In? Marx on Circulation Blurred Boundaries and Fugitive Bodies Nature and Circulation Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in the United States Capital, Nature, and the Space-Time of Agro-Credits in California Conclusion: Reading the Landscape of Fictitious Capital 3. Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, and the Fictions of Capital The Way to Get Farm Labor? The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 1: Continuity of Wage Labor and Changes in the Wage Labor Market The Ever-New, Ever-Same, 2: Resistance and Reaction Racializing the Working Body and Multicultural Racism Toward Rural Realism: An Agrarianism without Illusions? Variable Capitalists All: Capitalist Laborers and the Fictions of Capital in Country and City Coda: The Labor of Fiction Part II: Excavating Geographical Imaginations Introduction Many Countrysides The Trials of Capital and Narratives of Social Space The Narrative of Social Space in Rural Realism 4. Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism The Commodification of Mussel Slough: Railroad, Speculators, and Squatters Converge in the Tulare Basin Blood Money and the Anatomy of Development The Country and the City: From Transgression to Similitude The Octopus and the Bourgeois Sublime Bourgeois Discourse and the Uses of Nature 5. Reality Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust in Southern California Where Is Southern California? From Ranchos to Real Estate The Boom of the 1880s The Southern California Boom Novel Conclusion: Production, a Necessary Evil 6. Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire in the Imperial Valley The Problem Engineers and Entrepreneurs Producing the Imperial Valley What a Difference a Flood Makes Imperial Valley Representations, 1: Promotion and Its (Dis)Contents Imperial Valley Representations, 2: The Winning of Barbara Worth and the Erotics of Western Conquest Conclusion: Engineering Rural Realism 7. Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, and the Countryside Designer Ducts Los Angeles and the Owens Valley San Francisco and Hetch Hetchy Valley Rural Eclipse: The Water-Bearer and The Ford Wither Rural Realism? Conclusion Notes References Index