Abstract
Imagining a future in Antarctica has never been easy. British explorer James Cook on his third voyage around the globe in 1775, frustrated by the frozen seas, the absence of arable land, mineral wealth, or anything he saw as valuable, declared the imperial territorial quest ended: “no man will ever venture further than I have done … the lands which may lie to the south will never be explored.”1 Cook’s impulse was based on his extensive experience in the region. Indeed, the preceding centuries of Antarctic exploration had seemed more like un-exploration in that every new mark south erased a fantasy of a warm, habitable, and most importantly, profitable region to the south. Seeking to extricate himself from an increasingly bad investment, Cook staked the bottom of the map, overwriting the Greeks’ previous imaginary, terra australis incognita (the unknown southern land), with his own terminus of impassable ice.2 Cook’s mark stood for barely 40 years before a frenzy of sealing voyages gave way, once the seal population was dispatched, to further territorial conquest. His instinct to make Antarctica the limit of modernity’s drive to know the world is echoed in the persistent need to place a future—a concept that insists upon some sort of value to be produced—in Antarctica, a future that Antarctica’s materiality thwarts.
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Notes
Quoted in Walter Chapman, The Loneliest Continent: The Story of Antarctic Discovery (Greenwich 1964), p. 31. Countless writers on Antarctica begin their narratives of Antarctica’s (European) exploration citing Cook’s premature sense of an ending to earth’s southern geography.
Books on Antarctica typically open with a gesture to the continent’s earliest speculative conceptualizations by the Egyptian Ptolemy, whose second-century map of the world introduced the area he labeled terra australis incognita. See, for example, P. I. Mitterling, America in the Antarctic to 1840 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1959), p. 4.
See Stephen Pyne, “The Extraterrestrial Earth: Antarctica as Analogue for Space Exploration,” Space Policy 23 (2007): 147–149, for a discussion of the limitations of human inhabitation in Antarctica and its repercussions for science policy and cultural development, including resource extraction, in Antarctica. Pyne’s exceptionalism is also discussed in Chapter 2.
Throughout the 1990s, routine praise for the Treaty’s ability to negotiate the needs of the most powerful signatories and to control the challenges of upstarts has been somewhat balanced by scholarship discussing persisting problems, including the Treaty’s lack of ability to regulate tourism. See for example, A. Jorgensen-Dahl and W. Ostreng (eds), The Antarctic Treaty System in World Politics Oslo: Fridtjof Nansen Institute, 1991), and Beck (2004): 205–212, for tensions developing between original signatory states and emerging states and global interest, and Dodds (2006): 59–70 for a geopolitical assessment that names the condition of the postcolonial. More recent accounts have been more critical of the ATS, not as a treaty in itself, but as it has materially been able to control or even predict human intervention and change in the region. See for example, Scott (2003): 473.
For the neo-foundational reassessments of the role of repressed empire in the American imaginary and of the transnational discussion, see Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan (eds), Cultures of United States Imperialism Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1993.
For recent discussions of internal and external rearrangements of American Studies within a global field imaginary, see Paul Giles, “Commentary: Hemispheric Partiality,” American Literary History 18(3) (2006): 648–665, and B. T. Edwards, “Preposterous Encounters: Interrupting American Studies with the (Post)Colonial, or Casablanca in the American Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2003): 70–86. On how ideologies have produced a particular rendering of the world map or “metageographies,” see R. Lewis and K. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Nor could any other nation’s acts qualify, including the Third Reich’s New Schwabenland claim anchored by swastika droppings. M. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay New York: Picador, 2000) invents an Antarctic US military installation (modeled on actual US-German tension in Greenland) and an encounter with a rival German fighter: WWII is thus played out in Antarctica.
R. E. Byrd, Alone, Afterword by D. G. Campbell. New York: Kodansha International, 1995).
Of course, within the hegemony of science, many other forces contend. While the NSF is the de facto authority for US activities associated with its science agenda (which accounts for the majority of human activity on the continent), the NSF itself operates the Antarctic Artists and Writer’s Program and a journalist program in order to foster non-scientifically trained persons’ knowledge and reporting. The majority of the people working in Antarctica are in fact nonscientists. The substantial tourism industry as well fosters nonscientific routines and action. For a more critical assessment of US science in Antarctica, see J. Spillers, “Re-imagining United States Antarctic Research as a Defining Endeavor of a Deserving World Leader: 1957–1991,” Public Understanding of Science 13 (2004): 31–53.
There is much work to be done in approaching this question of the redeployment of science as a territorial, spatial force, and some of it has been underway, for example, Christy Collis and Quentin Stevens, “Cold Colonies: Antarctic Spatialities at Mawson and McMurdo Stations,” Cultural Geographies 14 (2007): 234–254. For an account of the construction through the performance of the law of Australian Antarctic space, see C. Collis, “The Proclamation Island Moment: Making Antarctica Australian, Law Text Culture 8 (2004): 1–18.
D. A. Stuart, Astounding Science Fiction (1938): 62.
One exception is Elle Leane, “Locating the Thing: The Antarctic as Alien Space in John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’,” Science Fiction Studies 32(2) (2005): 225–239. Arguing that the Thing “serves as the embodiment of the continent itself,” Leane understands Antarctic space not as geographic but as a body under abjection, which is precisely the point of A. M. Butler’s reading of the 1982 John Carpenter film remake The Thing in “Abjection and The Thing” Vector 24(3) (2000): 10–13.
Jason Kendall Moore, “Bungled publicity: Little America, Big America, and the Rationale for Non-claimancy, 1946–61,” Polar Record 40 (2004): 19–30, cites a 1946 proposal to nuke the Antarctic ice cap to get at its minerals and the subsequent New York Times op-ed piece pointing out the disaster of a rise in sea levels (p. 21). The discussion of the possibilities of anthropogenic change to the ice cap and its effects is eerie given the reality of climate change today.
See P. Beck above and K. Dodds, Geopolitics in Antarctica: A View from the Southern Rim (London, 1998).
For a social science assessments of The Thing as remake, see M. Katovich and P. Kincaid, “The Stories in Science Fiction and Social Science: Reading The Thing and Other Remakes from Two Eras,” Sociological Quarterly (1993): 619–639. For an excellent filmic analysis of medium and remakes, see P. Crogan, “Things Analog and Digital,” Film and Philosophy (2001): 13–23, as well as S. Kneale, “You’ve Got to Be Fucking Kidding!’: Knowledge, Belief, and Judgement in Science Fiction,” in: A. Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (New York and London, 1990).
Recent assessments of the tangled histories of science and politics include S. Naylor et al., “Science, Geopolitics and the Governance of Antarctica,” Nature (March 2008): 143–145 and F. Kormo, “The Genesis of the International Geophysical Year,” Physics Today (July 2007): 38–43.
While this chapter suggests a reading of US empire in the interstices of representation, policy, and physical presence, an excellent analysis of US cultural imperialism in films is by John Hegglund, “Empire’s Second Take: Projecting America in Stanley and Livingstone,” in: H. Michie and R. R. Thomas (eds), Nineteenth Century Geographies: Anglo-American Tactics of Space (New Brunswick, 2002), pp. 265–277, in particular his discussion of how representation enacts a new form of imperialism without a need for territorial acquisition: “the shift from map to film as the most culturally resonant representation of geographical space and, second, the transition from the British form of imperialism based on territorial acquisition to a United States form of imperialism based on the manipulation of image and spectacle … [Stanley and Livingstone 1939] justifies a more mobile, influential, ‘disinterested’ global presence, paving the way for an empire that could prosper without imperialism” (267).
Aant Elzinga, “Antarctica: The Construction of a Continent by and for Science,” in: Crawford and Sinn (eds), Denationalizing Science: The Contexts of International Scientific Practice (Kluwer, 1993) argues that one by-product of international science is the “partial foreclosing of alternative concepts and approaches” (98). A self-published report dated August 17, 1988 by Bruce Manheim, Jr. of the Environmental Defense Fund (Washington, D.C.), On Thin Ice: The Failure of the National Science Foundation to Protect Antarctica, is a reminder of relatively early criticism of the science regime of the ATS in terms of its environmental negative effects.
Nicholas Johnson, Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2006), is the only extended treatment of worker culture in the contemporary US McMurdo base, discussing Raytheon’s personnel policies and the way they clash with non-US territorial service and with US-based tax law, and individual worker rights.
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© 2012 Elena Glasberg
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Glasberg, E. (2012). “Who Goes There?”: Science, Fiction, and US National Belonging in Antarctica. In: Antarctica as Cultural Critique. Critical Studies in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014436_3
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