Literature and Theatre
Nick Groom develops his earlier work on the influence of The Vampyre on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Both were conceived at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816, and Frankenstein has deep affinities with the vampire lore that was evidently aired during conversations between Lord, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin (later Shelley), Claire Clairmont, and Polidori. But the influence was also reciprocal, and Frankenstein echoes through Polidori’s tale in unexpected ways. The character Aubrey has often been seen as a self-portrait of Polidori while it is generally accepted that the vampire Lord Ruthven is an audacious attack on Byron, who employed Polidori as his personal physician. However, in this chapter Groom presents a radical and unsettling close reading of the character of Aubrey, informed by Mary Shelley’s presentation of Victor Frankenstein, arguing that the relationship between Aubrey and Ruthven is far more complex and uncanny than has hitherto been recognised.
This chapter explores the potential of Northern wetlands to interrogate established imagined geographies of the Arctic. Throughout the chapter, we maintain a dialogue between scientific discourse and moving images, arguing that wetlands are spaces of ambiguity and ambivalence in both; they are construed as both threatening and threatened, and they resist comprehension and incorporation into dominant knowledge systems and the space of the nation-state. The chapter begins by exploring scientific discourse about Northern wetlands in the context of climate change and the carbon cycle. We then draw upon this scientific discourse in our analysis of filmic and televisual mediations of wetlands and their communities: the Finnish-Swedish drama Elina (2002), the Finnish horror film Sauna (2008), the Russian thriller/supernatural television series Topi (2021), and the Sámi short horror film Eahpáraš (2011). In Western imaginaries, wetlands have a long history of being associated with disease, dirt, and the monstrous (Giblett 1996). However, during the eighteenth century, they were given more positive attributes, becoming a sign of fertility, beauty, or utility (Howarth 1999). In Arctic cultures, furthermore, wetlands have long been seen as homelands connected to Indigenous livelihoods. Wetlands thus remain a sign of ambiguity and multiple meanings, making them unstable but rich. The shifting meanings of wetlands also shape the scientific and screen mediations that are the focus of this chapter. These mediated wetlands are spaces of in-betweenness and plurality, complex cultural and nonhuman ecosystems that help us pluralise how we understand the Arctic.
This chapter investigates fantasies of ice in twenty-first-century animated film, foregrounding the ‘plasmatic’ potential of the medium (Heise 2014) to think about the agency of ice in the Anthropocene. Taking as one of its premises the metonymic relationship between ice and the Arctic, the chapter examines contemporary fantasies of ice in relation to climate change, gender, and Indigenous epistemologies. It traces changing imaginaries of ice in recent animation, such as the Ice Age films (2002–2016) and the Russian The Snow Queen series (2012–2018), before offering a close analysis of Disney’s Frozen (2013) and Frozen II (2019). In highlighting the dynamic agency and other potentialities of ice, Frozen and Frozen II powerfully (if ambivalently) express both Arctic Indigenous communities’ ‘right to be cold’ (Watt-Cloutier 2015) and the urgency of climate action. In animated film, the depiction of ice involves two kinds of mediation operating at different levels. First, ice becomes an influential medium that shapes the narratives, communicates nonhuman forces, and mediates human agency. Elsa’s ability to create ice in Frozen, readable as a fantasy of either climate change denial or climate change reversal, exemplifies this dynamic force. The second level is the films’ own technology of animation, which offers the possibility of new landscapes from one frame to the next. In the era of climate change, these two levels of mediation can be seen as fundamentally intertwined. In the Frozen films, they express multiple cryocultures connected to different forms of empowerment, agency, memory, reconciliation, and social justice.
This chapter maps changing imaginary geographies of the Arctic through the comic book medium, paying special attention to the work of Inuit artists and their collaborators in the twenty-first century. Drawing on the links between comics and cartography (Peterle 2017; 2019), it charts multiple ways in which twenty-first-century Indigenous artists have leveraged the form’s spatial fluidity to create popular, educational, and artistic geographies of the circumpolar North. These works include the graphic novel series Oqaluttuat on the early history of Greenland, created by Nuka K. Godtfredsen in collaboration with a team of archaeologists, and works by comic book artists from Nunavut, which has been at the forefront of the emergent twenty-first-century global Indigenous comics movement. In addition, we analyse Southern artists’ transformations and remediations of earlier Arctic imaginaries, including Kevin Cannon’s Army Shanks books. These changing comic book geographies allow for Indigenous writers and allies to remap the Arctic through artistic cartographies. The chapter is particularly interested in what may be called both the medium-specificity of the form and its pedagogical specificity. The form, which ‘taught’ two generations of children about the Arctic as an empty space of exploration and heroism, has been turned on its head to tell stories in a popular idiom – and in Indigenous languages as well as English – that speak not of white settler imaginaries but of the lived experiences and histories of Indigenous peoples and their neglected stories, from autobiographical narratives to those that work in the superhero genre.
Rap music and hip hop culture have been conventionally associated with the urban subculture that originated in the Bronx, New York in the 1970s, which later little by little turned into a significant part of the Western music industry. Conversely, the Indigenous nations living in the Arctic regions have often been portrayed, in a stereotypical manner, as ‘nature peoples’ living at a far distance from the Western world. Taking its cue from the documentary film WE UP: Indigenous Hip-Hop of the Circumpolar North (2019), directed by Priscilla Naunġaġiaq Hensley and David Holthouse, this chapter discusses how the narratives of exclusion articulated in the African American context are currently being transposed to circumpolar spaces and adapted to the local experiences of Indigenous communities. Hip hop’s trajectory from the Bronx to the Arctic regions functions as a communicative impulse from North to South, a desire to put the circumpolar world on the global map through hip hop, at the same time actively transforming the genre to suit the needs and priorities of the artists and the communities they represent. Drawing on the notion of ‘connective marginalities’ (Osumare 2009), the chapter takes a journey across the circumpolar hip hop nation and explores the complex urban and non-urban geographies mapped in words and music videos by five artists from Sakha (Suus Bies Suus), Greenland (Tarrak), Nunavut (Hyper-T), Sápmi (Maxida Märak), and Alaska (AKU-MATU). These hip hop geographies take place at different but intersecting scales: the local, the circumpolar, and the global.
Eulogy delivered at James Baldwin’s funeral. Published in The New York Times, December 20, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 29, Column 2; Book Review Desk.