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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.
Susi K. Frank is Professor of East Slavic literatures and cultures at Humboldt University Berlin. Her research fields are geopoetology; literature/art and (visual) memory; literature and literary politics in (post-)imperial contexts (Russia and Soviet Union).
Kjetil A. Jakobsen is Professor of history at Nord Universitet Bodo. From 2011 to 2014 he was Henrik Steffens professor at Humboldt University Berlin.
Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction: The Arctic as an Archive 9
On Similarities and Differences between Cultural and Natural Archives 21
Archival Metahistory and Inhuman Memory 37
The Melting Archive: The Arctic and the Archives' Others 49
Landscapes as Archives of the Future? 69
Memory in the Anthropocene: Notes on Slow Archives and Melting Glaciers 93
A Fragment of Future History 107
The Absence of the Arctic 131
The Snowfield as an Archive of Soviet Underground Performance Art 143
Excerpts from Anna Schwartz's Archive 153
Gender in the Twentieth-Century Polar Archive 177
An Arctic Archive for the Anthropocene 197
From Prague to Greenland: Ice Memories in Libuse Moníková's Novel Treibeis (Drift Ice) 221
Myth of Preservation: Images of Ice, Snow and Glaciers as Metaphors for Memory in Post- Holocaust Literature and Art (Sebald, Celan, Baka) 231
Investigating the Labratory of Popular Arctic Narrative in Russian Literature from the 1930s to the 1950s 253
Archives of Knowledge and Endangered Objects in the Anthropocene 269
Natural Archives as Counter Archives: Gulag Literature from Witness to Postmemory 285
Contributors 311