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.

摘要

跨国主义在很大程度上被理解为一种跨国或国际现象，但帝国主义、资本主义和非殖民化的全球化力量也从国家内部破坏了国家霸权。这种“内部跨国主义”的未被充分审视的概念对于像美国早期建州时期的加利福尼亚这样的定居者殖民地空间至关重要，在该地区，国家主权与国家领土脱钩。西部扩张的跨国影响促使人们对美国统治下的加利福尼亚产生不同的空间想象，本文重点关注其中两个。James Mason Hutchings 在他的Hutchings' California Magazine（1856-1861 年）旅游杂志中——最著名的是在第一期宣传优胜美地山谷，但此后被严重忽视——描绘了一个美国加利福尼亚作为一个“点彩派”地理，其中美国的主权来自无数的殖民前哨，而不是土地本身的财产。南北战争结束后，约翰·韦斯利·鲍威尔和克拉伦斯·金这两位传统上被视为科学对手的联邦测量员，各自指出了加州美洲的生物区域，当地环境条件取代了国家主权。通过这些案例研究，我认为加利福尼亚作为一个定居者-殖民地空间不能理所当然地被视为国内“美国”，而是加利福尼亚和美国代表了跨国配对。