Glasberg, Elena, Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change.

Abstract

Glasberg, Elena, Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. 2012. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 174 pp. $85.00 hardcover (978-0-230-11687-0) Antarctica as Cultural Critique adds to rapidly expanding literature on lived aspects of world's polar regions. This relatively short and dense book delves into theoretical aspects of climate change in a way rarely attempted in literature. It moves beyond politics of representation to achieve a better understanding of sheer materiality of snow and in this vast southern region. To do this, it focuses on literature, photography, and even capitalist marketing practices such as IBM's 2000 vision of Antarctica as a location for an E-marketplace (p. 78) and represents a unique contribution to cultural sociology and social theory. This book deconstructs commonly held view of Antarctica as a desolate and inhospitable region, devoid of an indigenous population. Glasberg takes great pains to portray Antarctica as a space of politics connected to unresolved territorial claims (primarily including Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, United Kingdom, and United States), capitalism (through E-commerce and other failed efforts to capitalize on region), and empire (through historic exploration). Against this geopolitical backdrop, Glasberg addresses how Antarctica has been affected by human over centuries and to present. Encapsulating central orientation of book, Glasberg writes that Antarctica, as it usually represented, is a frozen wasteland that according to Western notions of embodied in real time cannot be profitably (p. 33). The author interested in nonrepresentational (or nonrealist) narratives that confront materiality of south while understanding how that materiality has been constituted over past century through spatialization, commodification (photography, bottled water), and conquest as the colony at end of world (p. 104). Antarctica as Cultural Critique develops an ambitious and nuanced thesis that Antarctica a space of hope because it only lightly inhabited (and thus perhaps a possible future frontier for a rapidly expanding global population), while stressing ways it densely populated. This irony highlights symbolic weight attached to Antarctica via visual mediation as a blank space fit for social action (which, I might add, much like Arctic in this sense). She shows the problem of human body on ice through media such as photography that demonstrate the complexity of human presence (p. xvi). This a carefully argued and beautifully written book that defies precise disciplinary location: it considers Antarctica in relation to often-muted human (gendered, racial, materialist, and geographical) constructions of this imaginative region. She implies that we have all been to Antarctica, if only in our (polar) imaginations of environmental consciousness connected to climate change, or through a spatialization (that is, slicing up of space through social constructions [p. 10]) that often makes Antarctica seem closer to outer space than that of rest of planet earth. As already mentioned, book tries to move beyond representation to speak directly to issue of materiality that has preoccupied geographers in recent years. It outlines a compelling and unusual critique of feminism by taking aim at various female explorers who have professed to do polar exploration in ways that subvert men that came before them, such as, most famously, Norwegian Roald Amundsen and British Robert F. Scott and race for pole in 1911-12. It becomes clear that Glasberg suspicious of those subaltern women, such as Bancroft and Arneson's 2001 continental crossing (see: www.yourexpedition.com) (p. 42), who profess to journey across Antarctica and leave no footprints or garbage (both in literal and metaphoric sense), as did their male counterparts who mapped and named space as they travelled. …