Literature and Theatre
The Arctic frequently takes centre stage in public media debates on climate change. Through common visual tropes such as calving icebergs and hungry polar bears on ice floes, the region functions as a material stand-in for a highly complex phenomenon. As the proverbial canary in the coalmine, the circumpolar North is frequently perceived as announcing the future in terms of global climate change and its implications. Literary depictions of the Arctic, however, have a long tradition of conceiving the circumpolar North not only as an empty blank space but also as standing ‘outside of time’ or as ‘running late’, especially in Western colonial understandings of economic and cultural progress. Such differing temporal perceptions converge in depictions of the Arctic in climate change fiction, where they need to be renegotiated. The phenomenon of climate change entangles past events and histories with the present and is always already tied to the future; the pervasiveness of its temporal scale is one of its defining characteristics. This chapter analyses fictionalised geographies of the Arctic in contemporary climate fiction in order to examine how these narratives mediate the warped temporalities that define climate change as well as the literary history of writing the Arctic. By reading Laline Paull’s The Ice (2017) and Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009) alongside Rachel Qitsualik’s ‘Nalunaktuq’ (2006) and Bibi Lund Olsen’s ‘Mattussaq’ (2015), it seeks to work out different temporal challenges and possibilities for the mediation of Arctic climate change in literature.
The introduction contextualises the research presented in the book and establishes its theoretical and methodological premises while also situating it in relation to existing research on Arctic imaginaries. The introduction has three primary aims. First, it demonstrates the environmental, geopolitical, and social relevance of studying Arctic geographical imaginaries in the early twenty-first century by drawing attention to the rapidly evolving body of fictional and artistic works that mediate a rapidly changing polar landscape. In doing so, it also historicises these present-day imaginaries by arguing that they frequently respond to, transform, and re-invent earlier mediations of Arctic geography from both within and outside the circumpolar North. Second, it provides a theoretical discussion of the links between material and medial realms, between geography and cultural production, that run through the book. It thereby draws on both Western theoretical approaches (such as literary geography and theories of space) and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies (such as Indigenous conceptions of the land and cosmologies). The third aim of the introduction is to establish the circumpolar, boundary-crossing, and collaborative dimensions of the book on various levels: on the level of its overall contents, on the level of individual chapters (each chapter spans different parts of the circumpolar world), and, finally, on the level of the collaborative processes involved in conceptualising and writing the book across disciplinary, cultural, and geographical boundaries.
This book addresses the often-invisible figure of the kept mistress in Victorian literature, and is part recovery project, part strategy for how to read for mistresses when they are not explicitly included. The book examines the cultural work that kept mistress characters perform when they do appear, and offers a queer reading practice to locate them when merely implied. In both cases, the authors of these characters work to elicit empathy from their readers. The book applies Suzanne Keen’s work on narrative empathy to discuss both authorial strategies for nineteenth-century readers, and how readers today might read empathetically. The book uses the term “kept woman” to read these characters and their experiences alongside those of women characters in socially sanctioned relationships of keeping (i.e., without the sexual component). Doing so draws on Talia Schaffer’s work and reconsiders keeping as an act of care work, and allows readers to recognize the women characters’ decisions to enter a keeping relationship as one of survival in the nineteenth century. When the kept woman herself does not appear, readers can appreciate the disruption to conventional narrative form offered by authors working to make kept women sympathetic. This content, narrative disruption, and reader engagement in reading into absences for disprivileged experiences are all queer in nature. Readers can invest characters with narrative agency in making survival decisions, and offer “narrative justice” via their own reading practices to characters and experiences previously marginalized by conventional narrative.
This article explores the history of Baldwin Studies in the USSR and post-Soviet countries (Azerbajian, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine), which is illustrative of literary approaches and interpretations characteristic of Soviet scholarship. First translations of his short stories, essays, and the play Blues for Mr. Charlie appeared in the early 1960s, followed by commentaries in leading Soviet literary and popular journals. For ideological reasons, in the 1960–70s the focus was on the writer’s public stance and involvement in the civil rights movement. It was only in the years of perestroika—“openness”—and the 1990s that his oeuvre in its entirety began to be discussed without taboos, omissions, or ideological bias. In the 2000s, the focus shifted to discussions of aspects of Baldwin’s method and peculiarities of his style. At present, James Baldwin is regarded as a key personality in contemporary US literature, though interest in his literary heritage has somewhat subsided.
Cornel West was interviewed by Christopher Lydon for Radio Open Source; the interview was originally broadcast in September of 2017. They discuss the works of Baldwin, the condition of America, and Baldwin’s relevance to that condition today. The interview is reprinted here by permission of the interviewee.