UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores transformations in the geographic imaginary of American empire as it reached up into the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans, from the purchase of Alaska in 1867 through the middle period of the Cold War. In a series of three long-form essays, I argue that the waters around the Aleutian and Pribilof islands— commonly called Unangam Tanangin by Native Unangax̂ before Russian (c.1740-1867) and U.S. (1867-) colonial occupations— incubated a uniquely transoceanic formation of U.S. imperialism that set the stage for later global designs. Strung across almost 2,000 miles of ocean between the Alaska and Kamchatka peninsulas, the Aleutian chain comprises more than 300 volcanic islands at the subductive interface between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates. Volcanic activity and ocean circulation between waters of the deep Aleutian Trench and much shallower Bering make it a zone of extraordinary biophysical productivity and geophysical dynamism. These qualities made the Aleutians a rich environment for Unangax̂ forms of life; so too for i) geoeconomic, ii) geopolitical, and iii) geophysical and technoscientific modes of imperial speculation. First, for late-19th and early-20th century U.S. expansionists, the Aleutians were a two-way axis of control linking speculative transpacific markets with the prospects of Arctic resources and transpolar passage. Second, the power to police—if not entirely claim sovereignty over—that axis became a geopolitical imperative involving the complex racialization of Unangax̂ laborers and, later, Japanese adversaries in an imagined global race war. Third, the equally tempestuous oceanic and volcanic milieu fomented theoretical work by early hydrographers and nuclear scientists alike on the entangled nature of geographic relations and the powers of the earth itself—both of which would become the improbable objects of imperial desire. In each case, these transoceanic imaginaries of American empire envisioned the Aleutians as both lock and key to increasingly global—even planetary—futures. Drawing on a variety of archival materials and approaches from critical scholarship in geography, science and technology studies, philosophy, and environmental history, I trace these themes through what I call the “geographic techniques” of U.S. imperialism. Toward that end, I follow the drawing of three different kinds of lines— the hydrographic surveyor’s line, the global color line, and the waveform of a nuclear detonation, respectively–– as they index the tenuous compositions of technics, bodies, and milieu conscripted (and refused) to make the transoceanic formations of American empire.