The mediated Arctic charts emergent geographical imaginaries of the Arctic. In the twenty-first century, the Arctic has entered worldwide public discussion to an unprecedented extent in the context of climate change, global scrambles for resources, and new shipping lanes. Alongside this new hypervisibility in environmental, geopolitical, and economic debates, the last two decades have seen an explosion of fictional and artistic mediations of the Arctic. Responding to these trends, The mediated Arctic analyses twenty-first-century works that reimagine and remap the Arctic, whether through actual cartographic practice or through the geographical and spatial possibilities of literature, film, television, animation, comics, visual art, or hip hop. Taking a circumpolar approach, it enquires into the multiple relationships between the material and the medial, asking how elements of Arctic geography such as ice, rivers, wetlands, coastlines, and urban spaces are translated into aesthetic forms that carry political force. The authors thereby pay special attention to Indigenous cultural production alongside outside perspectives on the Arctic. While the ‘Arctic’ is a Southern invention steeped in colonial histories, it is increasingly claimed by Indigenous communities to denote circumpolar homelands, forge Northern alliances, and decolonise the spatial imagination. Grounded in extensive collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from multiple disciplines and different epistemological traditions, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the transformative geographical force of words, images, and stories in a circumpolar context. Like the works it discusses, The mediated Arctic does not merely ‘describe’ the Arctic but takes part in its ongoing creation.
Across a range of media, sound is often deployed to represent Arctic landscapes, ecologies, and livelihoods. Although this is often achieved through direct reproductions of Arctic sounds (e.g. recordings) or indirect sonic evocations (e.g. musical compositions), we turn instead to the works of authors and artists who use textual or visual references to accomplish sonic mediations. They animate the land through sound (and silence), building on various traditions of using sound to interpret Northern landscapes. While Western explorers and artists frequently foreground the sublimity and terror of frozen Arctic landscapes, Inuit accounts tend to view snow and ice as thoroughly alive; the phenomenological experience of sound, for instance, is important for navigating space in Inuit unikkaaqtuat. Drawing on various sonic understandings of Arctic geography, this chapter engages four works that engage sound to mediate distances and differences between the reader/viewer, the creator/narrator, the artwork, and the referenced place. British nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s reflections on the perceived musicality of Greenlandic soundscapes, Iñupiaq poet Carrie Ayaġaduk Ojanen’s evocations of sound as the embodiment of memory, the use of sound in the Nunavut-based horror film Kajutaijuq, and Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke’s depictions of silenced screams to reference resistance to colonisation all represent different positionalities and different media. Reading across these works, the chapter examines the role of sound in revealing, obscuring, and telling stories about places and times that cannot be directly grasped. It thereby provokes reflection on the multifaceted ways in which sound can mediate geographical knowledge about the Arctic.
This chapter engages with new Arctic migration stories by examining how the land mediates migrant and refugee experiences in recent cinematic representations of the far North. In contrast to frequently discussed stories of settler colonialism or, conversely, stories of suppressed and recovered Indigenous identities, we enquire into stories in which the Arctic and its inhabitants are connected to the global circulation of migrants and displacements from the ‘Global South’. The chapter focuses on six films from across the circumpolar world: Nigerian American Chinonye Chukwu’s alaskaLand (2012), Inuk filmmaker Lucy Tulugarjuk’s Tia and Piujuq (2018), Filipina director Veronica Velasco’s Nuuk (2019), Sámi filmmaker Yvonne Thomassen’s Aquarium (2018), Ellen-Astri Lundby’s Burning Memories (2019), and the Czech documentary Kiruna – A Brand New World (Greta Stocklassová, 2019). Discussing the affective bonds between the protagonists and the landscape, the chapter draws on Adriana Craciun’s suggestion that ‘[t]he circumpolar Arctic … is central to any planetary consciousness’ (2009, 114). It argues that these films poetically construct Arctic geography as a relational space. They engage with shared histories of displacement and respond to new migratory movements where the circumpolar world functions as refuge and second homeland for people who have escaped from war or difficult economic conditions. More than simply reflect new multicultural realities of the Arctic, the films also shape new spatial and geographical imaginaries that correspond to these migration stories. They create surprising connections spanning the globe, tracing lines and networks fundamentally different from the northward trajectories of imperial powers.
“Monster in the Archive” asks what the presence of a figure with a massive archival presence like James Baldwin does to our understanding of the presumed “absence” or “lack” of Black subjects in American archives. Paying careful attention to Michel Foucault’s observations about archives in “Lives of Infamous Men” as well as Baldwin’s correspondence with his friend, Mary Painter, this article argues that Baldwin’s “exceptionality” forces scholars and archivists to treat his archival presence as monstrous. Moreover, it argues that we need to develop new methods to approach Black archives. Again, following Foucault, the article proposes that we imagine approaching archives through the lens of friendship suggested by Foucault shortly before his death.
Instead of finding women characters who are reabsorbed by the marriage plot as their narrative closure, this chapter finds ones who are removed from the economy of the marriage market entirely. Chapter 5 examines women’s decisions regarding mistresshood in Dickens’ Hard Times and Dombey and Son, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Gissing’s The Odd Women. While these characters’ rejections of mistresshood seem to uphold the weight of the “harlot’s progress” narrative, they articulate reasons why genteel women might actually consider entering such a relationship. Other than Jane Eyre, the characters choosing not to become mistresses are not offered the conventional reward of a happy marriage. By reading their decisions and their unusual narrative closures as potential rather than failure, readers can imagine other lived experiences. The negative portraits of marriage as a business exchange in these same novels contribute to the reduction of stigma for the kept mistress. In making these sympathetic women protagonists think rationally about becoming a kept mistress, readers can begin to understand it as a realistic option for a woman who does not have many in a time of legal and social oppression. Further, supplying the implicit for the narrative gaps enacts reader engagement in a distinctly queer manner.
This essay presents ten notes, historical and speculative, sparked by the fact that two of the classics of American queer writing, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), were partly inspired by the same tiny Paris hotel room. In place of a case for buried collaboration, I take inspiration from the coincidence of Baldwin and Sontag’s shared space to think their differences together—a conjunction which reveals larger things about the Baldwin we have revived, the Sontag we are reviving, and our residual habit of picturing queer modernism as a star map of individual, trademarked celebrity-functions. Fresh concentration on Sontag and Baldwin’s neglected interactions might help to save both from the distortions of the revivalist spotlight.