Imagining Alternative Arctics

Abstract

The Arctic is central to our understandings of environmental science: It is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet. Even before the current moment of crisis, the far north's remoteness to much of the global population has meant that literature, long shaped by well-known white male explorers' imperialist accounts, played a crucial role in mediating scientific knowledge of the region. This chapter takes a different approach to the Arctic's literary history, examining the entanglement of literature and science since 1900 in writings by people of color, women, and Inuit writers, as well as through critically neglected genres such as theatrical spectacle and children's literature. By situating these works within the institutional and cultural contexts through which Arctic knowledge circulated, the chapter shows how they contest imperial models of exploration and expose the racial and cultural hierarchies embedded in scientific authority.