Arctic Archives: Ice, Memory and Entropy

✍ Scribed by Susi K. Frank (editor); Kjetil A. Jakobsen (editor); Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung (editor)

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 318
• Series: Edition Kulturwissenschaft; 194
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This pioneering volume explores the Arctic as an important and highly endangered archive of knowledge about natural as well as human history of the anthropocene.
Focusing on the Arctic as an archive means to investigate it not only as a place of human history and memory - of Arctic exploring, 'conquering' and colonizing -, but to take into account also the specific environmental conditions of the circumpolar region: ice and permafrost. These have allowed a huge natural archive to emerge, offering rich sources for natural scientists and historians alike.
Examining the debate on the notion of ('natural') archive, the cultural semantics and historicity of the meaning of concepts like 'warm', 'cold', 'freezing' and 'melting' as well as various works of literature, art and science on Arctic topics, this volume brings together literary scholars, historians of knowledge and philosophy, art historians, media theorists and archivologists.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Arctic as an Archive
WHAT IS A ›NATURAL ARCHIVE‹?
On Similarities and Differences between Cultural and Natural Archives
Archival Metahistory and Inhuman Memory
The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archives’ Others
Landscapes as Archives of the Future?
Memory in the Anthropocene: Notes on Slow Archives and Melting Glaciers
PERFORMING ARCTIC ARCHIVES
A Fragment of Future History
The Absence of the Arctic
The Snowfield as an Archive of Soviet Underground Performance Art
Excerpts from Anna Schwartz’s Archive
Gender in the Twentieth-Century Polar Archive
An Arctic Archive for the Anthropocene
ICE – MESSAGE(S) OF A MEMORY MEDIUM
From Prague to Greenland: Ice Memories in Libuše Moníková’s Novel Treibeis (Drift Ice)
Myth of Preservation: Images of Ice, Snow and Glaciers as Metaphors for Memory in Post- Holocaust Literature and Art (Sebald, Celan, Bałka)
Investigating the Labоratory of Popular Arctic Narrative in Russian Literature from the 1930s to the 1950s
Archives of Knowledge and Endangered Objects in the Anthropocene
Natural Archives as Counter Archives: Gulag Literature from Witness to Postmemory
Contributors