Colonial imagery of ‘Arctic hysteria’ and its resignification in Pia Arke’s work of counter-memory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The figure of the ‘Arctic hysteric’ emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the discourses of polar explorations and Arctic colonisation as part of photographic and narrative archive of Westerners’ encounter with Greenlandic populations. This racialised and gendered trope made a mark on the European collective memory of Arctic explorations, solidifying an image of native Greenlanders as infantile, frail and in need of protection from the deleterious effects of civilisation. As such, post-colonial scholars have suggested that ‘Arctic hysteria’ cannot be regarded as a solely psychological diagnostic, but needs to be historicised in the context of colonisation and the social disruptions and hardship it brought about for the Inuit. This article, first, undertakes an analysis of the photographic figurations of ‘Arctic hysteria’ to investigate their place in the collective memories of polar explorations, including erasing the role of Indigenous people in these explorations, and, more broadly, construing imaginary geography of the Arctic as an uninhabited and empty place, a canvas for colonial projections, rather than a native homeland. Next, it focuses on artistic resignifications of ‘Arctic hysteria’ in the work of Greenlandic-Danish artist, Pia Arke, and argues that these resignifications are an example of a decolonial project of counter-memory of the Arctic, which is based on a refusal of regarding colonisation as past. Tracing coloniality and its effects in the domains of the body, affect and intimacy, Arke explores the possibilities of creating a shared and relational Arctic memory.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it