Antarctica as Cultural Critique

Abstract

Antarctica as Cultural Critique arrives at an auspicious time in history and on earth. Amid the centennial celebrations of the European 'race' to the last place on earth, Antarctica - a continent of ice lacking natives - is finally emerging as a center of global concern. Antarctica as Cultural Critique connects the ice of environmental crisis to its past as an impediment to progress through visualizations and photographs of what Ursula Le Guin calls the 'living ice.' Glasberg opens new ways of thinking human/ non-human divides that disturb assumptions about gender and progress under scientific management, and about attachments to a heroic past that does not take into consideration the radically non-human and shifting ontology of ice itself.