1st Edition
Visual Representations of the Arctic Imagining Shimmering Worlds in Culture, Literature and Politics
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
0. Introduction: Visualising the Arctic (Markku Lehtimäki, Arja Rosenholm and Vlad Strukov)
Part One: Visual poetics and historic cartographies
1. Maija Ojala-Fulwood: Arctic Regions in Early Modern Maps
2. Markku Lehtimäki: The Arctic That Was: Visual Poetics, Historical Narrative and Ian McGuire’s The North Water
3. Lieven Ameel: Balloon Explorers, the Panorama, and the Making of an Arctic Nomos in Contemporary Fiction
Part Two: Mobile visuality and visual storytelling
4. Tintti Klapuri: The Winners of the Globe? The Russian Imperial Gaze at the North in Late Nineteenth-century Travelogues
5. Leena Romu: Dystopian Comics as Cautionary Tales about the Future of the Arctic
6. Elina Arminen: Come to Lapland! Changes and Continuities of Lapland Imagery in Finnish and International Travel Posters
7. Heidi Hansson and Ann-Catrine Eriksson: Cover Art and Content: Selling Arctic Crime Fiction
Part Three: The politics of Arctic visuality
8. Johannes Riquet: Cinema, Geopolitics, and Arctic Landscapes: The Cold Cold War in Orion’s Belt
9. Klaus Dodds and Elana Wilson Rowe: Red Arctic? Affective Geopolitics and the 2007 Russian Flag-planting Incident in the Central Arctic Ocean
10. Robert A. Saunders: Arctic Bodies: Sights/Sites of Necrocorporeality in Nordic Noir Television Series
Part Four: Visual worlds of the Russian Arctic
11. Arja Rosenholm: The Masculine North in Popular Russian Film: Territoriia as a Case Study
12. Jane Costlow: Women Look North: Domesticities and the Sublime in Three Contemporary Russian Artists
13. Vlad Strukov: The Arctic on Display: Museums, Art and Haptic Visuality of the North
Part Five: Visual documentation and ethnography
14. Ivan Golovnev and Elena Golovneva: Traditional Ethno-Cultural Communities in the Modern Russian North: Oil Field as a Documentary Film Case
15. Dmitry Zamyatin: Geocultural Space of the Arctic: Landscape Visualization and Ontological Models of Imagination
16. Niko Partanen, Michael Rießler and Joshua Wilbur: Envisioning Digital Methods for Fieldwork in the Arctic
Biography
Markku Lehtimäki is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland.
Arja Rosenholm is Professor of Russian Language and Culture at Tampere University, Finland.
Vlad Strukov is an Associate Professor at the University of Leeds, UK, and a researcher at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia.
