EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION. ‘I wanted to approach ice through a critical lens that puts the politics of race and indigeneity and the violence of dispossession and racialization at the center’
Jen Rose Smith is a professor of geography at the University of Washington who researches “the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied knowledges.”
She has a new book out (“Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic,” for a mere $28), and as you’d expect it’s chock full of the vacuous-yet-verbose narrative so common among “studies” academics.
Here’s the book’s description: “Reflections on ice have […] long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty ‘nature’ stripped of power relations.”
Deep.
And if you’re trying to figure out just what the hell Smith means by that, maybe this recent interview will help.
“Part of the goal of writing the book was really to think about ice—glaciers, snow, snowflakes—in material ways, scientific ways, cultural ways,” Smith says. “I wanted to approach ice through a critical lens that puts the politics of race and indigeneity and the violence of dispossession and racialization at the center.
“How can we think of ice and ice geographies as racialized spaces and places? What does that do for the study of ice, or the way we think about ice, or how ice is represented in cultural objects?”
Smith notes that as an Eyak, or Alaska native, she “gr[e]w up around glaciers and cold and the colonial sensibilities that make those categories.”
If you’re still scratching you head, this may assist:
“Putting ice as a comestible as the central frame of analysis for colonialism in Hawai’i and larger projects of Empire more broadly […] ice and temperature feature crucially to all kinds of historical and ongoing projects of power.”
(Note the author had to use “comestible” instead of “food item” because magniloquence, you see.)
If you can actually make it through the entire interview, you may notice the following passage, which to me is Smith basically admitting she tried to shoehorn in the usual “oppression studies” topics to the subject at hand:
“Native studies, Black studies, and ethnic studies scholarship is about how to be in the best kinds of relations you can be with your interlocutors. In my case, that means thinking carefully about ice, a non-human materiality, agent, and worker in the world. And so, I tried to think about how all of these things I have learned and read can apply to something like ice“ (emphasis added).
Amazingly, there also exists a Thematic Network of Critical Arctic Studies, as well as The Arctic Institute which claims it’s Washington DC’s “preeminent think-and-do-tank, we are committed to promoting diverse voices, knowledge, and new ideas on Arctic policy.”
In late 2023, the latter highlighted a “Queering the Arctic” series featuring “the notion of the Arctic as a Hope Spot” for LGBTQ people, “how a safe space is conceptualized in Northern Norway by making art,” how “dealing with queer issues through art against the male-dominated imperial gaze” take shape, and how a trans woman “reconceptualizes” the book “Woman of Labrador” despite it not being queer “per se.”
MORE: ‘What gender is that glacier?’ ponders scholars (in all seriousness)
