"Ice Geographies explores the multivalent qualities of Arctic ice within the North American cultural imaginary. The liminal nature of ice-a substance which cannot easily be classified as land or water, living or nonliving, imaginary or material-led it tobe enlisted in myriad colonial projects. During the Enlightenment, ice served as an index of Indigenous people's inferiority. Arctic landscapes were represented as an uninhabitable no man's land compared to temperate European climates. In the contemporary moment, ice indexes a disappearing world from which Indigenous peoples are surreptitiously erased because of their cultural and geographic proximity to ice. Weaving together historical and contemporary archives dealing with ice's scientific and literarysignificance to the colonial imaginary, Jen Rose Smith shows simultaneously how ice has been central to how we understand the planet and that ice exceeds any colonial, racializing projects imposed onto it"--
Jen Rose Smith centers ice, both material and imaginary, to critically study racialization, land dispossession, and Indigenous knowledge production about icy places historically and in the modern moment of climate change.
Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award
