The session takes as one working premise that no global issue is more important than the question of climate change and global warming. In practical terms, the North and South Poles, so long inaccessible, dream spaces for explorers and artists in all genres, are no longer off limits in the same way. Despite their fundamental differences -- in terms of their nature (water, land), fauna, economic consequence, and geographic accessibility (the Arctic Circle is now almost casually accessible; the Antarctic Circle is still dauntingly remote) -- the polar regions share a seductive pull on the explorer, the developer, the scientist, and artists in all genres. This session aims to open and extend scholarly engagement with the polar regions and with the urgent questions that their imperiled existence pose for human life.
Lowell Duckert's paper introduces premodern authors, artists, cartographers, and explorers who envisioned the Arctic as of the world, not out-of-it: Nicolò (ca. 1326-1402) and Antonio Zeno (died ca. 1403), in/famous fourteenth-century travelers to a northwestern New World; Gerhardus Mercator (1512-94) and Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612), creators of the Septentrionalium Terrarum Descriptio (1606), the first map of the North Pole; and Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1537-83), author of Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (written 1566, printed 1576). At the same time, their differences in presentation prove that illustrating an “other” faraway world that oddly connects with, and is strangely similar to, your own is dependent on who the “your” is at the moment of imagining. The first Inuit transported under English command came from Frobisher’s forays into Baffin Island (now Nunavut): a man (“Calichough”), woman (“Ignorth”), and child (“Nutiok”) from his second voyage of 1577. A generation later, kidnapped “Greenlanders” attempted a daring escape by kayak from Copenhagen Bay; they had been taken during the three expeditions the English pilot James Hall (d. 1612) carried out for Christian IV of Denmark. The Danish, Dutch, English, and indigenous multi-faceted portrayals of the otherworldly north—configured here as whirl/pool, archipelago, and passage—help to readjust our perceptions about a supposedly remote marine world. Their Arctics, both plural and pluralizing, allow us to imagine the northscape in new ways, and, in doing so, move us to create different, more proximate, ones right now.
Andrew Ferguson's work examines the antiscientific discourse of the curiously revitalized Flat Earth Society. At a time when aerial mapping of the poles means that much discourse on our global icecaps has shifted to the more practical concerns necessitated by ongoing climate change, and attendant legal and political (not to mention neocolonial) questions such as the ownership of icebergs and the validity of claims to polar resource basins, the flat-earth community constitutes one of the few places where the romance of polar exploration continues unabated: the impassibility of conditions leaves them free rein to speculate about the existence of continents beyond the supposed “ice wall.” My paper explores several of these alternate and demonstrably unscientific polar visions, seeking to account for their appeal while considering also how these narratives, through the very mechanism of flattening, work to renew the enabling fiction of the original polar expeditions and our ongoing economic exploration of these zones; i.e., the erasure of the indigenous peoples already carving out a living in those spaces.
Courtney Ryan argues that the Arctic is a prime example of what Henri Lefebvre warns against: the abstraction of physical space in order to mask its social production. In contemporary Western culture, the Arctic is Santa Claus and Coca Cola polar bears. Ask a conservationist, and it is teeming with life; ask an oilman and it is vast desolation awaiting drilling. More than most environments, the Arctic is susceptible to abstraction, because it is a place few people can visit. And, yet, given the fact that in 2017 Congress voted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it is crucial to consider the Arctic’s spatiality not only mentally and socially but also physically. If the Arctic is not an empty wasteland but rather a concrete place, it is vulnerable to material forces.While environmentalists have iconized polar bears and caribou as symbols of the threat that Arctic drilling poses, few have attempted to actualize the Arctic itself. However, in Forward, a play that drifts across Fridtjof Nansen’s 1893 Artic exploration and Norway’s subsequent development, playwright Chantal Bilodeau makes Ice a central character. Although Ice at first seems to be a feminized projection of Nansen’s own desire to both conquer and be conquered by the ice, gradually, her own desire to connect with humans and to share her self-knowledge across time comes to the fore. In embodying Ice, Bilodeau materializes the Arctic and makes the Far North a little less far.
Maxwell Cassity offers a response to and reading of the science fiction film The Thing within the discourses developed in this session. As a distant and dangerous space where notions of geography, nationality, and identity reach uneasy limitation, the Antarctic disrupts notions of ontological certainty and produces terrifying imaginative possibilities. He uses Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” to examine how the body-snatching, shape-changing monster of John W. Campbell Jr.’s 1938 short story “Who Goes There?” works in conjunction with the tale’s frigid and unforgiving landscape to exemplify social paranoia regarding infection and transmission across political, social, and biological limits.