The Mediated Arctic - by Johannes Riquet (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book charts emergent geographical imaginaries of the Arctic in twenty-first century cultural production - from literature and cinema to comics, hip hop, and cartography. It is a timely intervention into circumpolar studies at a time when Indigenous Arctic homelands have entered global media and politics to an unprecedented extent.

Book Synopsis

The mediated Arctic analyses the multiple relations between geography and cultural production that have long shaped - and are currently transforming - the circumpolar world. It explores how twenty-first-century cultural practitioners imagine and poeticise various elements of Arctic geography, and in doing so negotiate pressing environmental, (geo)political, and social concerns. From the plasmatic force of ice in Disney's Frozen films to the spatial vocabulary of circumpolar Indigenous hip hop, it addresses Arctic geographical imaginaries in a wide range of media, including literature, cinema, comic books, music videos, and cartographic art. The book brings together a plurality of voices from within and outside the circumpolar North, both in terms of the works analysed and in its own collaborative scholarly practice. The book bridges Indigenous and Southern mediations of the Arctic and combines different epistemologies to do justice to these imaginaries in their diversity.

From the Back Cover

The mediated Arctic charts emergent geographical imaginaries of the Arctic. In the twenty-first century, the Arctic has entered worldwide public discussion to an unprecedented extent in the context of climate change, global scrambles for resources, and new shipping lanes. Alongside this new hypervisibility in environmental, geopolitical, and economic debates, the last two decades have seen an explosion of fictional and artistic mediations of the Arctic.

Responding to these trends, the book analyses twenty-first century works that reimagine and remap the Arctic, from actual cartographic practice to the geographical and spatial possibilities of literature, film, television, animation, comics, visual art, and hip hop. Taking a circumpolar approach, it enquires into the multiple relationships between the material and the medial and asks how elements of Arctic geography such as ice, rivers, wetlands, coastlines, and urban spaces are translated into aesthetic forms that carry political force.

The authors pay special attention to Indigenous cultural production alongside outside perspectives on the Arctic. While the 'Arctic' is a Southern invention steeped in colonial histories, it is increasingly claimed by Indigenous communities to denote circumpolar homelands, forge Northern alliances, and decolonise the spatial imagination.

Grounded in extensive collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from multiple disciplines and different epistemological traditions, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the transformative geographical force of words, images, and stories in a circumpolar context. Like the works it discusses, The mediated Arctic does not merely 'describe' the Arctic but takes part in its ongoing creation.

About the Author

Johannes Riquet is Professor of English Literature at Tampere University