Colonial imagery of ‘Arctic hysteria’ and its resignification in Pia Arke’s work of counter-memory
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".