Visual Representations Of The Arctic

Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region

The Arctic is 5.5 million square miles and has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, yet it is still a frontier of development. But who owns the Arctic? This book charts the history of performances of sovereignty over the Arctic in the policy and visual representations of the US, Canada and Russia. Focusing on narratives of the effective occupation of territory found in postage stamps, it offers a novel analysis of Arctic sovereignty. Issues such as climate change, plastics pollution and resource development continue to impact the future of this space centred around the North Pole. Who is responsible for the region? This book examines how countries have absorbed Arctic territory into their national consciousness, examining the choice of, and use of, symbols and images in postage stamps. It looks at the story of how these countries have represented their Arctic frontiers and territorial peripheries. The book argues that the performance of policy in these regions has caused relative sovereignty to become a reality. It provides an intriguing account of how these countries have, in their distinctive ways, established, legitimised and reinforced their political authority in these regions. This book will appeal to Geographers and is recommended supplementary reading for students in political history and regional studies of the North.

How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, between 1500 and 1700, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North—a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination—offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “non-site,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts—and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates over perception and matter, representation, discovery, and the time of the earth—long before the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea of image itself.

The nineteenth-century fascination with visual representations of the Arctic is illuminated in this history that weaves together a narrative of the major Arctic expeditions with an account of their public reception through art and mass media. Simultaneous.

This book lluminates the nineteenth-century fascination--in Britain and the U.S.--with visual representations of the Arctic, from fine art to panoramas, engravings, magic lantern slides, and photographs. Drawing from letters, diaries, cartoons, and sketches, as well as ephemera such as newspaper advertisements, playbills, and program booklets, Potter shows how representations of the Arctic expressed the fascination, dread, and wonder that the region inspired, and continues to inspire today.

Uncovering a wealth of archival information, Eavan O'Dochartaigh gives fresh and surprising insight into the Victorian image of the Arctic.

Library and Information Studies for Arctic Social Sciences and Humanities serves as a key interdisciplinary title that links the social sciences and humanities with current issues, trends, and projects in library, archival, and information sciences within shared Arctic frameworks and geographies. Including contributions from professionals and academics working across and on the Arctic, the book presents recent research, theoretical inquiry, and applied professional endeavours at academic and public libraries, as well as archives, museums, government institutions, and other organisations. Focusing on efforts that further Arctic knowledge and research, papers present local, regional, and institutional case studies to conceptually and empirically describe real-life research in which the authors are engaged. Topics covered include the complexities of developing and managing multilingual resources; working in geographically isolated areas; curating combinations of local, regional, national, and international content collections; and understanding historical and contemporary colonial-industrial influences in indigenous knowledge. Library and Information Studies for Arctic Social Sciences and Humanities will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students working the fields of library, archival, and information or data science, as well as those working in the humanities and social sciences more generally. It should also be of great interest to librarians, archivists, curators, and information or data professionals around the globe.

For centuries, the Arctic was visualized as an unchanging, stable, and rigidly alien landscape, existing outside twenty-first-century globalization. It is now impossible to ignore the ways the climate crisis, expanding resource extraction, and Indigenous political mobilization in the circumpolar North are constituent parts of the global present. New Arctic Cinemas presents an original, comparative, and interventionist historiography of film and media in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia, Canada, and the United States to situate Arctic media in the place it rightfully deserves to occupy: as central to global environmental concerns and Indigenous media sovereignty and self-determination movements. The works of contemporary Arctic filmmakers, from Zacharias Kunuk and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril to Amanda Kernell and Inuk Silis Høegh, reach worldwide audiences. In examining the reach and influence of these artists and their work, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport reveal a global media system of intertwined production contexts, circulation opportunities, and imaginaries--all centering the Arctic North.