The Polar Imaginary: Extraction and Empire represents a shift from the traditional frameworks on the Arctic and Antarctic. The conceptual origins of the panel emerge from the theoretical foundations of works like Shane McCorristin’s The Spectral Arctic (2018), Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North (2005), Maria Lindgren Leavenworth’s The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction (2024), and Elizabeth Leane’s Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South (2012); however, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) represents the discursive genesis of the polar imaginary in the anglophonic world, we engage with textual and cultural material that seeks to problematize the outsider-looking-in perspectives of polar sites, troubling their relationship with the extractive impulse of empire.

This panel represents a timely contribution to the field of the Polar Humanities. One such reason for this panel’s relevance is Donald Trump’s desire to take control of Greenland. As global warming melts permafrost, mineral deposits become more easily accessible for extraction. However, there are ulterior motives for acquiring the state, with shipping routes emerging within the ice pack. Similarly, according to a 2008 report from the U.S. Geological Survey, 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil lie beneath the Arctic. As the ice pack that covers much of the Arctic Ocean melts, these pockets of oil will be more conveniently accessible. Presenting control of the territories in and around the Arctic as a security measure attempts to justify claims on the space: securitization camouflages extractive desires. Countries are currently competing to establish credible “ownership” of the arctic to extract from it. Similarly, despite the Madrid Protocol (1991) banning any activities relating to mineral extraction in Antarctica until 2048, countries such as China and the United States have built up infrastructure for scientific extraction, while Russia has surveyed regions for mineral speculation as the frozen continent begins to thaw due to global warming, marking both northern and southern poles as extraterritorial sites of extraction.

James McDougall’s “The Spell of the Yukon: White Settler Colonialism, Naturalism, and the Biopolitics of Robert Service” argues that the poetry of Robert Service naturalizes white settler colonialism during the Klondike Gold Rush. Comparing Service’s work to other naturalist writers, his paper suggests that Service’s poetry can be understood as Exclusion Act Literature, or the global literary genre responding to the exploitation and subsequent exclusion of Chinese labor based on white settler populism.

Next, Sydney Wildman’s “Satirical Speculations: Antarctica in the 19th-Century Imperial Imagination” argues that James Demille’s 1888 novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder offers a satirical inversion of the imperial paradigm by depicting Antarctica’s environments as a nonhuman actant that resists and destabilizes the British protagonist’s attempts at colonial settlement and extraction. Wildman’s critique elucidates the diverse complexities in representing Antarctica within the imperial imagination, demonstrating a foundation from which to understand our current eco-political crises.

Finally, Patrick Vincent’s “Arctic Mastery: Science, Extractivism, and Resource Colonialism” engages with contemporary texts and media from Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark (2022) to HBO’s True Detective: Night Country to problematize the extractivist ideologies that inform our engagement with the site of the Arctic. Vincent’s presentation interrogates the entanglements of science and extraction. Ultimately, his argument suggests that the Arctic has become a problematic metonymy for the relationship between global climate precarity and extractivism, largely ignoring the lived experiences of Indigenous communities in the region.

The three prospective panelists will give 15-17 minute presentations, leaving ample time to field questions on the presentations but also to open a more general discussion on the topics with the audience. The panelists represent a set of diverse perspectives, working at institutions in China (McDougall), Canada (Wildman), and the United States (Vincent), all industrial nations with their own vested interests in extracting from the polar regions.