The mediated Arctic

The mediated Arctic

Author: Johannes Riquet

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 527

ISBN-13: 1526174006

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The mediated Arctic analyses the multiple relations between geography and cultural production that have long shaped – and are currently transforming – the circumpolar world. It explores how twenty-first-century cultural practitioners imagine and poeticise various elements of Arctic geography, and in doing so negotiate pressing environmental, (geo)political, and social concerns. From the plasmatic force of ice in Disney’s Frozen films to the spatial vocabulary of circumpolar Indigenous hip hop, it addresses Arctic geographical imaginaries in a wide range of media, including literature, cinema, comic books, music videos, and cartographic art. The book brings together a plurality of voices from within and outside the circumpolar North, both in terms of the works analysed and in its own collaborative scholarly practice. The book bridges Indigenous and Southern mediations of the Arctic and combines different epistemologies to do justice to these imaginaries in their diversity.


Churchill's Arctic Convoys

Churchill's Arctic Convoys

Author: William Smith

Publisher: Pen and Sword Maritime

Published: 2022-09-21

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1399072307

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The threat of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s surprise invasion of Russia in June 1941, succeeding prompted Churchill to decide to send vital military supplies to Britain’s new ally. The early sailings to Northern Russia via the Arctic Ocean between August 1941 and February 1942 were largely unopposed. But this changed dramatically during the course of 1942 when German naval and air operations inflicted heavy losses on both merchantmen and their escorts. Problems were exacerbated by the need to divert Royal Navy warships to support the North African landing. Strained Anglo-Soviet relations coupled with mounting losses and atrocious weather and sea conditions led to the near termination of the program in early 1943. Again, competing operational priorities, namely the invasion of Sicily and preparations for D-Day, affected the convoy schedules. In the event, despite often crippling losses of lives, ships and supplies, the convoys continued until shortly before VE-Day. This thoroughly researched and comprehensive account examines both the political, maritime and logistic aspects of the Arctic convoy campaign. Controversially it reveals that the losses of merchant vessels were significantly greater than hitherto understood. While Churchill may not have described the convoys as ‘the worst journey in the world’, for the brave men who undertook he mission often at the cost of their lives, it most definitely was.


Contours of the Nation

Contours of the Nation

Author: Deborah McPhail

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-10-31

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1442660732

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The obesity epidemic that is said to plague nations around the world, including Canada, is not solely a medical condition to be managed. In Canada, the discourse on obesity emerged during a time of social upheaval in the postwar period. Contours of the Nation is the first book which historically explores obesity in Canada from a critical perspective. Deborah McPhail demonstrates how obesity as a problem was affixed to particular populations in order to separate true Canadians from others. She reveals how the articulation of obesity contributed to the Canadian colonial project in the North; where Indigenous peoples were viewed as modern Canadians due to their obesity, thereby negating any special claims to northern lands. Contours of the Nation successfully demonstrates how histories can trace the actual materialization of bodies through relations of power, particularly those pertaining to race, gender, and nation.


Curious Naturalists

Curious Naturalists

Author: Dr. Niko Tinbergen

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1787209016

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Dr. Niko Tinbergen was well known as a naturalist and a student of animal behaviour in England, on the Continent and in the United States. Ever since he was a young student in Holland he had been curious about nature, and in this book he sets out some of the facts that 25 years of curiosity gave him. As a biologist, anything living was his province—the bee-killing wasps and the digger wasps of the Dutch sand dunes; the Snow Bruntings and Phalaropes of Greenland; Hobbies and other hawks; moths and butterflies in various parts of England and Holland; Black-headed Gulls of the Ravenglass nature reserve, Cumberland, the Kittiwakes and Eider Ducks of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland. Readers cannot fail to be struck—and possibly sometimes amused—by the patience and ingenuity shown in the field studies undertaken by Dr. Tinbergen and his fellow naturalists—and which are now passed on for the benefit and interest of his readers. The studies were always undertaken seriously, but this did not prevent Dr. Tinbergen from writing about them in the liveliest way; he realised that quite often he and his friends must have seemed to onlookers to be very curious naturalists indeed.


Stalin's Slave Ships

Stalin's Slave Ships

Author: Martin J. Bollinger

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2003-09-30

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0313052026

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Between 1932 and 1953, a fleet of ordinary cargo ships was pressed into extraordinary service. The fleet's task was to relocate approximately one-million forced laborers to the Soviet Gulag in Kolyma, located along the Arctic Circle in far northeastern Siberia. The Kolyma Gulag, the most infamous in the Soviet Union, was accessible only by sea, and the fleet became the lifeblood of the entire operation. As one of the largest seaborne movements of people in history, this transport took a devastating toll on human lives. Bollinger presents the often-horrific stories of the Gulag fleet and its passengers and reveals the unwitting role of the United States government in the operation. U.S. shipyards built most of the Gulag fleet, and the U.S. government sold many of the ships used in the transport directly to an agent of the Soviet Union. The United States also overhauled and repaired many ships in the Gulag fleet free of charge at the midpoint of their Gulag careers. In some cases, free ships provided to the Soviet Union under the Lend Lease military assistance program were diverted into Gulag transport duties. How much did Washington know about the deadly duty of these ships? How many prisoners made the voyage? How many never made it out alive? Bollinger details this tragic tale using firsthand testimony from those involved in the operation and materials from both American and Russian archives.


Life Beside Itself

Life Beside Itself

Author: Lisa Stevenson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-08-23

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0520958551

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In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend’s newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is "somewhere else," and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.


Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam

Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam

Author: Adam Piette

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2009-05-25

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0748635289

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This is a ground-breaking study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. The Literary Cold War examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring cold war fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period.