Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2128248
Rachel Stauffer
ABSTRACT In Russian films depicting the 1990s, the theme of emigration emerged as an escape from the unstable, uncertain, and unfamiliar political, social, and economic conditions of transition. Western destinations, especially California, represented an idealised alternative to life in transitional, unpredictable Russia. Through examination of two films, one from 1995, Dmitrii Astrakhan’s Everything Will Be Fine, and one from 2020, Alexander Molochnikov’s Tell Her, it is possible to trace shifting ideologies around emigration, the US-Russia relationship, and Russians’ perceptions of the US and California, in particular. Whereas Astrakhan reveals flaws in the Russian system as a rationale for emigration, conforming to popular culture of the 1990s, Molochnikov sees emigration to the US as a less viable option, aligning with politically-motivated anti-Western ideologies, which reflects a shift in views on emigration from the 1990s to the present. This interdisciplinary essay suggests that even though emigration was increased and viewed popularly in the 1990s, when emigration out of Russia soared into the millions, more recently, this view has fallen out of favour, owing to widespread Kremlin ideology.
{"title":"Shifting Ideologies in Russian Cinematic Representations of California: Astrakhan in 1995 Vs. Molochnikov in 2020","authors":"Rachel Stauffer","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2128248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2128248","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In Russian films depicting the 1990s, the theme of emigration emerged as an escape from the unstable, uncertain, and unfamiliar political, social, and economic conditions of transition. Western destinations, especially California, represented an idealised alternative to life in transitional, unpredictable Russia. Through examination of two films, one from 1995, Dmitrii Astrakhan’s Everything Will Be Fine, and one from 2020, Alexander Molochnikov’s Tell Her, it is possible to trace shifting ideologies around emigration, the US-Russia relationship, and Russians’ perceptions of the US and California, in particular. Whereas Astrakhan reveals flaws in the Russian system as a rationale for emigration, conforming to popular culture of the 1990s, Molochnikov sees emigration to the US as a less viable option, aligning with politically-motivated anti-Western ideologies, which reflects a shift in views on emigration from the 1990s to the present. This interdisciplinary essay suggests that even though emigration was increased and viewed popularly in the 1990s, when emigration out of Russia soared into the millions, more recently, this view has fallen out of favour, owing to widespread Kremlin ideology.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134020803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2146415
Nathaniel Sikand-Youngs
ABSTRACT Transnationalism is largely understood as a cross-national or international phenomenon, but the globalising forces of imperialism, capitalism, and decolonisation also undermine national hegemony from within the nation itself. This underexamined concept of ‘internal transnationalism’ is vital to settler-colonial spaces like California in its early US statehood, where national sovereignty is decoupled from national territory. The transnational implications of western expansion prompted different spatial imaginaries of California under US rule, two of which this article focuses on. James Mason Hutchings in his touristic Hutchings’ California Magazine (1856–1861) – most famous for promoting the Yosemite Valley in its debut issue but critically neglected thereafter – portrays an American California as a ‘pointillist’ geography, in which American sovereignty emanates from myriad colonial outposts rather than being a property of the land itself. After the Civil War, John Wesley Powell and Clarence King, two federal surveyors conventionally seen as scientific adversaries, each pointed towards a bioregional Californian America, where local environmental conditions supersede national sovereignty. Through these case studies, I contend that California as a settler-colonial space cannot be taken for granted as domestically ‘American’, and that California and America instead represent a transnational pairing.
{"title":"From American California to Californian America: internal Transnationalism and Settler-Colonial Expansion","authors":"Nathaniel Sikand-Youngs","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2146415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2146415","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Transnationalism is largely understood as a cross-national or international phenomenon, but the globalising forces of imperialism, capitalism, and decolonisation also undermine national hegemony from within the nation itself. This underexamined concept of ‘internal transnationalism’ is vital to settler-colonial spaces like California in its early US statehood, where national sovereignty is decoupled from national territory. The transnational implications of western expansion prompted different spatial imaginaries of California under US rule, two of which this article focuses on. James Mason Hutchings in his touristic Hutchings’ California Magazine (1856–1861) – most famous for promoting the Yosemite Valley in its debut issue but critically neglected thereafter – portrays an American California as a ‘pointillist’ geography, in which American sovereignty emanates from myriad colonial outposts rather than being a property of the land itself. After the Civil War, John Wesley Powell and Clarence King, two federal surveyors conventionally seen as scientific adversaries, each pointed towards a bioregional Californian America, where local environmental conditions supersede national sovereignty. Through these case studies, I contend that California as a settler-colonial space cannot be taken for granted as domestically ‘American’, and that California and America instead represent a transnational pairing.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132345305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2146961
Mike Docherty
ABSTRACT In introducing this special issue of Comparative American Studies, this essay traces a history of attempts to define and practice a transnational American studies, and suggests that such efforts face inherent and perhaps intractable difficulties. It then explains this issue’s rationale for approaching the culture, literature, and history of California through a transnational lens, proposing why we might productively, indeed necessarily, think of this subnational entity as a transnational one. It does so by discussing and responding to the different ways in which a transnational conception of California is constructed and mobilised in each of this issue’s constituent articles.
{"title":"Turn West: Finding and Defining the Transnational in California","authors":"Mike Docherty","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2146961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2146961","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In introducing this special issue of Comparative American Studies, this essay traces a history of attempts to define and practice a transnational American studies, and suggests that such efforts face inherent and perhaps intractable difficulties. It then explains this issue’s rationale for approaching the culture, literature, and history of California through a transnational lens, proposing why we might productively, indeed necessarily, think of this subnational entity as a transnational one. It does so by discussing and responding to the different ways in which a transnational conception of California is constructed and mobilised in each of this issue’s constituent articles.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"116 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124258746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2143745
George Katito
ABSTRACT In late 1970s Paris, San Francisco Nights and Far West, popular institutions in the city’s new queer nightlife, helped fashion new sexual norms. They were part of a constellation of California-inspired places that stimulated new imaginings of how queerness could be expressed and embodied. Indeed, large Californian cities, San Francisco in particular, provided a profit model based on queer consumption that participated in the creation of a new queer Paris. As the decade came to an end, the mobilisation of a gay vote in California also fed Parisian activists with the inspiration to organise a queer voting bloc in Paris to influence national elections and lobby for an end to discriminatory, anti-gay sections of the penal code. These re-imaginings of politics and urban economy challenged cherished French universalist ideals. As such, opposition accompanied the embrace of California-inspired visions of queer life. Both support and resistance attested to the growing global power of California, and of the United States. Drawing upon archival research, this paper explores California as a cultural reference, commercial brand, and political aspiration in the construction of a new queer Paris at the end of the 1970s and the dawn of the 1980s.
{"title":"Sex, Profit, and Political Power: California and Its Influence on Paris’s Queer Business, Press and Politics in the Late 1970s and 80s","authors":"George Katito","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2143745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2143745","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In late 1970s Paris, San Francisco Nights and Far West, popular institutions in the city’s new queer nightlife, helped fashion new sexual norms. They were part of a constellation of California-inspired places that stimulated new imaginings of how queerness could be expressed and embodied. Indeed, large Californian cities, San Francisco in particular, provided a profit model based on queer consumption that participated in the creation of a new queer Paris. As the decade came to an end, the mobilisation of a gay vote in California also fed Parisian activists with the inspiration to organise a queer voting bloc in Paris to influence national elections and lobby for an end to discriminatory, anti-gay sections of the penal code. These re-imaginings of politics and urban economy challenged cherished French universalist ideals. As such, opposition accompanied the embrace of California-inspired visions of queer life. Both support and resistance attested to the growing global power of California, and of the United States. Drawing upon archival research, this paper explores California as a cultural reference, commercial brand, and political aspiration in the construction of a new queer Paris at the end of the 1970s and the dawn of the 1980s.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114772570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2146416
Jodie Childers
ABSTRACT Years before he attained international acclaim, the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness spent almost three years in the United States; however, few scholars in American studies have delved into Laxness’s pivotal experience in California or his consequential literary encounter with Upton Sinclair. Using American and Icelandic sources, this article maps Laxness’s travels through a transnational California culminating in an incident of political suppression that reveals the risks of radicalism during the 1920s. Foregrounding how Laxness confronted economic inequality and disparaged nativist patterns in American society through his book Alþýðubókin, a collection of essays published in 1929, this article also situates Laxness’s work in a broader tradition of left-wing dissent, while also revealing the influence of the muckraking style on Laxness’s politics and prose.
{"title":"California Treason: Halldór Laxness and Upton Sinclair","authors":"Jodie Childers","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2146416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2146416","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Years before he attained international acclaim, the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness spent almost three years in the United States; however, few scholars in American studies have delved into Laxness’s pivotal experience in California or his consequential literary encounter with Upton Sinclair. Using American and Icelandic sources, this article maps Laxness’s travels through a transnational California culminating in an incident of political suppression that reveals the risks of radicalism during the 1920s. Foregrounding how Laxness confronted economic inequality and disparaged nativist patterns in American society through his book Alþýðubókin, a collection of essays published in 1929, this article also situates Laxness’s work in a broader tradition of left-wing dissent, while also revealing the influence of the muckraking style on Laxness’s politics and prose.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127608085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2138797
D. Bustillo
ABSTRACT This article outlines a carceral history of Los Angeles through the policing of gender, and in particular, the policing of queer brown masculinity. It traces the twinned regimes of gender and prison in Los Angeles to Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th century colonial fiction about the capture of a gender nonconforming warrior queen Calafia, who ruled the mythical island of California. The violent logics of Calafia’s capture persist in the city’s carceral expansion and continue to impact gender nonconforming people today. Through an engagement with community histories that document spaces for gender confinement, such as the Daddy Tank, a cellblock used for masculine expressed people and lesbians at the Sybil Brand Institute in the 1970s, this paper centres moments of queer excess that counter such spaces. I follow Nancy Valverde, a Chicana butch elder, whose stories of detention for ‘masquerading’ in Los Angeles in the 1950s have much to teach us about gender nonconformity – from its policing to the liberatory possibilities of queer resistance.
本文通过对性别的监管，特别是对酷儿棕色男性的监管，概述了洛杉矶的警察历史。它将洛杉矶性别和监狱的双重政权追溯到加尔西Rodríguez德蒙塔尔沃(Garci de Montalvo)的16世纪殖民小说，讲述了一个性别不一致的战士女王卡拉菲亚(Calafia)的被捕，她统治着神秘的加利福尼亚岛。抓捕卡拉菲亚的暴力逻辑在这座城市的监狱扩张中持续存在，并继续影响着今天的性别不一致者。通过对记录性别限制空间的社区历史的参与，比如20世纪70年代西比尔·布兰德研究所(Sybil Brand Institute)用于男性表达者和女同性恋者的牢房“爸爸坦克”(Daddy Tank)，本文关注的是与这些空间相抗衡的酷儿过剩时刻。我跟随南希·巴尔韦德(Nancy Valverde)的故事，她是一名墨西哥男性长老，上世纪50年代在洛杉矶因“假面”而被拘留的故事，从性别不合规的监管到酷儿抵抗的解放可能性，给了我们很多关于性别不合规的启示。
{"title":"With and Beyond Los Angeles’s Daddy Tank: Gender, Confinement, and Queer Desire","authors":"D. Bustillo","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2138797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2138797","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article outlines a carceral history of Los Angeles through the policing of gender, and in particular, the policing of queer brown masculinity. It traces the twinned regimes of gender and prison in Los Angeles to Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th century colonial fiction about the capture of a gender nonconforming warrior queen Calafia, who ruled the mythical island of California. The violent logics of Calafia’s capture persist in the city’s carceral expansion and continue to impact gender nonconforming people today. Through an engagement with community histories that document spaces for gender confinement, such as the Daddy Tank, a cellblock used for masculine expressed people and lesbians at the Sybil Brand Institute in the 1970s, this paper centres moments of queer excess that counter such spaces. I follow Nancy Valverde, a Chicana butch elder, whose stories of detention for ‘masquerading’ in Los Angeles in the 1950s have much to teach us about gender nonconformity – from its policing to the liberatory possibilities of queer resistance.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115158467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2114285
M. Winter
ABSTRACT This essay considers how California novelists have depicted the state as a locale of defeat – where, if you are on the wrong side of history, the land can be stolen out from under you. The first part of this article considers several early novels that address the 19th-Century power struggles of the state: The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,, Ramona, The Squatter and the Don, and The Octopus. These novels reveal that the state was shaped by white supremacy, monopolies, suspect legislation, and discriminatory federal policies. The second part of the essay illuminates more recent narratives of dispossession in California, including If He Hollers Let Him Go, American Son, Under the Feet of Jesus, When the Emperor Was Divine, and There There. This study also incorporates theories of cultural geography, drawing from the writings of Alex Hunt and Hsuan L. Hsu, who make connections between space and power, and examine the processes and significance of regional transformation.
本文考虑了加州小说家是如何把加州描绘成一个失败的地方的——在那里，如果你站在历史错误的一边，土地就会从你脚下偷走。本文的第一部分考虑了几本描述19世纪国家权力斗争的早期小说:《华金·穆列塔的生活与冒险》、《雷蒙娜》、《霸占者与堂》和《章鱼》。这些小说揭示了这个州是由白人至上、垄断、可疑的立法和歧视性的联邦政策所塑造的。文章的第二部分阐述了加州最近关于剥夺财产的叙述，包括《如果他叫，让他走》、《美国之子》、《在耶稣的脚下》、《当皇帝是神的时候》和《那里那里》。本研究亦结合文化地理学的理论，借鉴Hunt和Hsuan L. Hsu的著作，将空间与权力联系起来，检视区域转型的过程与意义。
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2128247
Jack Hodgson
ABSTRACT This article is a comparative event study of a series of children’s rights disputes concerning the Mexican American community in California during the Great Depression. To stand up against abuses in reformatory schools, eugenic sterilisation and school segregation, Mexican Americans pursued a variety of strategies which reflected the dualities of Mexican American identities. These events demonstrate that Mexican origin struggles and advocacy for their children's rights were not just reactionary or localised but part of a historical tradition. Furthermore, the article underlines the vitality of the study of children and childhood to the study of Civil Rights in Chicanx/Latinx Studies.
{"title":"The Transnational Defence of Mexican American Children’s Rights in Depression-era California","authors":"Jack Hodgson","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2128247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2128247","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article is a comparative event study of a series of children’s rights disputes concerning the Mexican American community in California during the Great Depression. To stand up against abuses in reformatory schools, eugenic sterilisation and school segregation, Mexican Americans pursued a variety of strategies which reflected the dualities of Mexican American identities. These events demonstrate that Mexican origin struggles and advocacy for their children's rights were not just reactionary or localised but part of a historical tradition. Furthermore, the article underlines the vitality of the study of children and childhood to the study of Civil Rights in Chicanx/Latinx Studies.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128420471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2114286
Edwin Gilson
ABSTRACT This essay argues that the fire-plagued Los Angeles of Amitav Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island functions as a device to illuminate the planetary processes and continuities of climate change and the Anthropocene. I demonstrate the ways in which Ghosh makes metaphorical connections between the disparate settings of his novel – particularly L.A and the Sundarbans delta in the Bay of Bengal – to portray the Earth as a single living organism defined by environmental, ecological and social flux. As a consequence of this transnational narrative, Los Angeles becomes a symptom of planetary malaise rather than a distinct, bounded space. Analysing Gun Island primarily through the framework of Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinic and Jeff Diamanti’s conception of ‘climate realism’ – with reference also to Amy Elias and Christian Moraru’s ‘planetarity’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘sense of planet’ – I explain how the novel exhibits a contemporary realist form that rejects provincial thinking and advocates a planetary consciousness. Moreover, I contend that Gun Island departs from the long lineage of Los Angeles disaster literature, suggesting that Ghosh’s L.A does not expose national anxieties – as has often been the case in such fiction – but rather a planetary condition.
{"title":"Planetary Los Angeles: Climate Realism and Transnational Narrative in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019)","authors":"Edwin Gilson","doi":"10.1080/14775700.2022.2114286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2022.2114286","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay argues that the fire-plagued Los Angeles of Amitav Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island functions as a device to illuminate the planetary processes and continuities of climate change and the Anthropocene. I demonstrate the ways in which Ghosh makes metaphorical connections between the disparate settings of his novel – particularly L.A and the Sundarbans delta in the Bay of Bengal – to portray the Earth as a single living organism defined by environmental, ecological and social flux. As a consequence of this transnational narrative, Los Angeles becomes a symptom of planetary malaise rather than a distinct, bounded space. Analysing Gun Island primarily through the framework of Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinic and Jeff Diamanti’s conception of ‘climate realism’ – with reference also to Amy Elias and Christian Moraru’s ‘planetarity’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘sense of planet’ – I explain how the novel exhibits a contemporary realist form that rejects provincial thinking and advocates a planetary consciousness. Moreover, I contend that Gun Island departs from the long lineage of Los Angeles disaster literature, suggesting that Ghosh’s L.A does not expose national anxieties – as has often been the case in such fiction – but rather a planetary condition.","PeriodicalId":114563,"journal":{"name":"Comparative American Studies An International Journal","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115812119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-30DOI: 10.1080/14775700.2022.2095194
Kris Jacobson
ABSTRACT California occupies a special place within contemporary American climate fiction and environmental history. It provides the key setting for cli-fi novels such as Edan Lepucki’s California (2014), Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015), T.C. Boyle’s When the Killings Done (2011) and A Friend of the Earth (2000), Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). California also plays a key role in fostering the contemporary environmental movement with its stringent, groundbreaking environmental policies and history. California offers a defining trope and shorthand for climate change in the United States and beyond. This survey of California-based cli-fi places California as a flashpoint location for climate change catharsis within the American and global environmental imagination, offering a paradoxical productive and torpifying release. I argue the depictions of California highlight how the climate crisis is always experienced locally, but like ecological or tropic cascade, Californian cli-fi demonstrates repercussions beyond its individual bioregions. As a flashpoint for national climate change catharsis, California inspires change and problematically keeps climate change’s impact at a distant frontier, at least for those who do not live within its borders or who do not have the means to escape.
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