Proposal for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

Special Issue: Counter Stories from the Arctic Contact Zone

Precis

The thematic of the proposed special issue is a postcolonial rewriting of nineteenth-century history of the Western Arctic that brings together, theorizes and contextualizes indigenous and animal ‘micro-histories’ of that space and territory. As Graham Huggan argues, this is a useful strategy to disconnect the region from its continued ‘status as a fixed object of western control and knowledge’ (2016, 7). The texts and images this special issue is concerned with stories that originate in the human and animal contact zones (Pratt 2008; Haraway 2007) that occurred in the Arctic. Their cultural expression generally fall in three main categories: 1) Western art and literature bearing traces, or the clear presences, of Arctic indigenous peoples; 2) Images and texts created by Sámi, Inuit or Greenlandic individuals working in colonial contexts; and, 3) Western and Arctic indigenous art and literature representing animals and their role in colonial and indigenous histories of the Arctic. 

The intensified Arctic imperialism of the nineteenth century led to a boom in textual and visual representations of the region. This material includes diaries, letters and sketches drafted in the Arctic as well as more carefully mediated expedition narratives, illustrations, novels and paintings created back in Europe and North America. Common for this knowledge production is that it was mainly produced or inspired by European and American men who were attached to colonial ventures in the Arctic. The impact this discourse has had on our understanding of the region and its history today should not be underestimated. Arguably, its continued influence on popular and academic perceptions call for decolonizing, feminist and ecocritical approaches to research on the Arctic.  

Building on research such as Emilie Cameron’s Far off Metal River (2015), Dorothy Harley Eber’s Encounters on the Passage (2008), and Cecilia Morgan’s Travellers through Empire (2017), our special issue makes the leap beyond the relative ‘safe place’ of critical deconstruction of white, male narratives to reveal underlying ideologies and stereotypes relating to gender, race and nationality (e.g. Bloom 1993; Hill 2008; Riffenburgh 1994; Spufford 1996). Instead we present a more daring rewriting of Arctic history that moves towards a reclaiming of Indigenous perspectives on the past. 

Investigating traces found in published and archival material to foreground the presences and experiences of Arctic Indigenous individuals and animals that were subject to European colonialism, our analyses make use of current thinking in the field of postcolonial Indigenous methodologies that incorporate Indigenous epistemologies, ecocritical and ecofeminist theory to promote dialogue between Western and Indigenous knowledge systems (Haraway 2008; 2010; Plumwood 2002; Chilisa 2012; Kovach 2009; Gaski 2013; Smith 2006). Bringing in new narratives and perspectives to an Arctic history steeped in colonialist, masculinist and anthropocentric discourses, the ambition with our special issue is to add to the project of decolonizing knowledge. Extending the current scope of empirical material in the field of Arctic studies, the issue also advocates new approaches for textual and visual analyses.