Land of Sunshine: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical

Print cultural scholar Sigrid Anderson’s much-awaited new book Land of Sunshine: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) finally gives an important turn-of-the-century California monthly the attention it deserves. Land of Sunshine (1894–1923) published many of the authors whom we now associate with regionalism and writing about the west—for example, “Sui Sin Far” (Edith Eaton), Mary Austin, Ella Rhoads Higginson, Jack London, Ina Coolbrith—as well as some less familiar but equally ambitious authors like Constance Goddard DuBois and Beatriz de Luna. Initially, issues contained only one or two short stories—maybe two to three pages in length—but eventually, the magazine featured longer fiction as well as serialized novels.Anderson’s method combines periodical studies, regionalist studies, and paratextually informed close readings of fiction and poetry to answer four questions about the magazine: What triumphalist story does Land of Sunshine tell about “The West”? How does literature by women contributors push back against that view? How does fiction in particular use shifting point-of-view to refocus the debate, especially about topics like settlement and land use? And how does who tells the story influence that story?Land of Sunshine was founded in 1894, changed its name to Out West in 1902, and was edited by amateur ethnographer and journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928) for the first fifteen years of its twenty-two-year run. The popular magazine was elaborately printed and generously illustrated with photographs, half-tones, and typographical ornaments and ornamental initials. The magazine’s explicit goal, like that of Overland, Sunset, The Traveler, and other western regional journals, was to attract visitors and settlers to the area, in this case, Southern California, especially after the 1893 depression had put one quarter of the nation’s railroads into receivership.Land of Sunshine’s imagined readers (and many of its contributors) were “geographic outsiders,” that is, white Easterners who had been transplanted to California or were open to being transplanted to the state. Often, texts published in Land of Sunshine depicted geographical outsiders moving to California—often by train—and reporting on the cultural differences they encountered, expected and unexpected. Land of Sunshine can be understood to have brought Southern California into being by representing this geographic area as fertile, healthy, and temperate, and as the ideal location for Easterners. In effect, Land of Sunshine, like other magazines during this period, “performed” America and the West.However, like many cultural products of the time, the magazine was Janus-faced: At the same time that it brought this region into being by celebrating its ethnographic richness, its business model (its subscriptions, its advertising revenue, etc.) involved promoting settlement that would inevitably displace the peoples whose cultures were being celebrated as germane to the area, all in the name of “white progress.” Its editor, Lummis, at the same time that he championed Indigenous cultures (and defended the importance of permitting residential schoolchildren to spend summer holidays in their communities), also displayed a patronizing attitude to non-white people and believed in the racial superiority of whiteness.Anderson, however, discerns a challenge posed by women writers to what she describes as the masculinist imperialist project of the magazine, even if several of these writers today might be read as problematic. Anderson argues that women authors, who were the primary contributors of local color fiction to Land of Sunshine, were able, to various degrees, to infiltrate the magazine and to counter the triumphal accounts of white progress. Anderson argues that Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, Mary Austin, Constance Goddard DuBois, and Beatriz de Luna offered alternative narratives that centered Native peoples and other marginalized groups and demonstrated the negative consequences of the settler-colonialism encouraged by magazines like Land of Sunshine. Of course, doing so required a rhetorical balancing act: as self-supporting writers, these women could not appear to be undermining the business model of the magazine in their work and risk being rejected by its editor. Anderson explores the clever ways in which these women authors achieved this balancing act.Anderson begins by considering the typical content published by the magazine. Chapter 1, “Land of Sunshine’s Western Story: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Poetry of Expansion,” considers Gilman’s poetry, which asserts that transplanted Easterners will thrive in the region that contributes to the regeneration and health of white settlers, as representative of the creative work Lummis included in Land of Sunshine. Printed on pages accompanied by photographs of effortless farming and plump babies, Gilman’s works convey a pro-white, pro-eugenics, manifest destiny–driven vision of sunny California that is not at odds with the triumphalist narrative that Land of Sunshine as a whole was promoting.Chapter 2, “Ornaments of Ethnicity: Making a Typographic Case for Western Identity,” examines the multimodality of Land of Sunshine, that is, how text and image work together to support the dominant narrative. Anderson argues that the ornamental initials that served as the opening capital letters of each text celebrated whiteness through their evocation of medieval European decorative arts and an idealized white past.The remaining chapters examine contributions by women authors who pushed back against this triumphalist narrative even as their accounts of racialized cultures may be read today as “deeply flawed” (62). For example, chapter 3, “Indigenous Geographies: Mapping Mary Austin’s The Blue Moon and The Truscott Luck,” considers how less known serialized novels by Austin rewrote the romanticized tale of the solitary white miner’s success in the region that was common to many magazines of the period. In The Truscott Luck, which appeared in Land of Sunshine, and The Blue Moon (1909), a serialized novella that Austin published in Sunset (another regional magazine promoting settlement in California), Austin deromanticizes the figure of the solo white miner as “discoverer” of the West by exposing how white miners’ success relied on appropriation of Indigenous knowledge.Chapter 4, “Finding a Place for the ‘Vanishing Indian’: Land Dispossession in Constance Goddard Du Bois’s A Soul in Bronze,” explores how Du Bois, an ethnographer and Native rights activist, exposes how land appropriation in Southern California led to the impoverishment of Indigenous communities in her 1898–1899 serialized novel, Soul in Bronze, which was the longest work of fiction ever published in Land of Sunshine.Chapter 5, “Beatriz Bellido de Luna’s Romance Plots: Exposing the Erasure of Mexican Land Ownership in California,” recounts how author Bellido de Luna, granddaughter of a Cuban separatist, exposes similar loss of land by both Mexican and Californio families in her 1890s fiction published in Land of Sunshine.The conclusion to Land of Sunshine: Race, Gender, and Regional Development in a California Periodical, “Who Gets to Tell the Story in Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far’s Chinatown?” shows how short fiction by Chinese North American author Edith Eaton (pen name “Sui Sin Far”) resists common stereotypes of Chinatowns and the Chinese that were circulating at the time and by so doing transforms the regionalism of depictions of US Chinatowns. Positioning herself as an insider, Edith Eaton, through stories that appeared in the pages of Land of Sunshine before being collected in her 1912 volume, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, resists characterizations of Chinese women as hidden, diseased, and morally suspect, and representations of them as either slaves or victims. In Land of Sunshine and other US periodicals, Eaton countered the composite of the white Easterner who moved west to profit from the exploitation of lands belonging to Indigenous people.This is a book-length exploration of a prominent California magazine that is very welcome. All of these chapters are beautifully written and compelling. Anderson’s attention to less familiar novels by Austin and to the works of less known authors like Du Bois and De Luna is much appreciated. Anderson tries very hard to make nuanced claims about these women authors who “push back.” That is challenging, given that these authors’ depictions of Indigenous, Spanish, and even Chinese people would strike many of today’s readers as deeply problematic, even if at the time of publication, their perspectives were progressive. I wished that the chapter on Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far did not have to do “double duty” as the book’s conclusion (it seemed to me that the study ended abruptly before broader conclusions about how Anderson’s investigation gleaned insights that could be applied to other regional magazines).That said, I appreciate the exemplary approach Anderson models here and hope other periodical studies scholars will follow her lead and devote studies to a single modernist periodical. Much is to be learned from a paratextual investigation of a particular magazine.