Colline dorate: l’extractive fiction sino-californiana di C Pam Zhang

This essay analyzes the novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) by Chinese-American writer C Pam Zhang and how it provides a fresh and much-needed account of Californian history and the disastrous consequences of the 19th century Gold Rush, an activity that forever changed the demographic composition of the region. Both a historical novel and a western, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a sad reflection on human extractivist activity on the landscape and its inhabitants; in particular, Zhang focuses on the legal and affective consequences of Californian laws that cut Chinese immigrants out of the regional official history. Because of its stress on issues of belonging, extraction, and immigrant labor, Zhang’s novel can be read as an innovative example of Californian extractive fiction, which  deconstructs the American exceptionalist narrative of one of its most-mythologically charged states by unveiling its many contradictions and its history of landscape and human disaster.