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THE SCRAMBLE FOR THE ARCTICAdriana Craciun aa University of California , Riverside , USAPublished online: 05 Mar 2009.

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situationsT H E S C R A M B L E F O R T H E A R C T I C

Adriana CraciunUniversity of California, Riverside, USA

................This essay situates the intensifying scramble for the Arctic in a larger historical

and disciplinary framework, in order to make a case for the Arctic’s under-

estimated significance in current social and cultural models of the global and the

‘‘planetary.’’ Focusing on circumpolarity as configured in early modern

exploration, Enlightenment science, and twentieth-century indigenous and

governmental institutions, the essay suggests that the circumpolar Arctic’s

unique reorientation of a planetary vision, combined with its pressing humani-

tarian and environmental difficulties, should be incorporated in current

postcolonial cultural and social theory debates on the global.

................

At the turn of the nineteenth century, a Spanish manuscript began to

circulate through the metropolitan archives of Italy, Spain, France and

England, describing a successful voyage through the Northwest Passage in

1588. The manuscript’s author was named as Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado, an

esteemed Spanish navigator, and he urged the Spanish crown to look

northwards to expand its New World empire: ‘I know of no place yet

discovered which thus holds communication with almost all countries of the

world’, he wrote of the Northwest Passage, ‘for from this strait we may sail

......................................................................................interventions Vol. 11(1) 103�114 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)

Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010902752855

CircumpolarArctic

polar studies

planetarity

Enlightenmentexploration

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to all of them; and thus we may presume that in course of time it would

prove a most powerful and rich settlement’ (Barrow 1818 App. II: 36).

As its name suggests, the Northwest Passage has long been regarded not as

a distinct place, but as a threshold to a desired elsewhere, be it the

commercial riches of China, natural resources in the High Arctic, or the

paradise imagined to exist at the ice-free North Pole. When Maldonado

described the Passage as ‘hold[ing] communication with almost all countries

of the world’, he voiced the dream of all adventure capitalists then and now,

of a free-market utopia open to limitless exchange and profit. But he also

identified precisely the beneficial ability of this threshold to reorient the

European imperial imagination along a different imaginary line � not the

Equator, but the Arctic Circle.

Only on a circumpolar map of the planet, argued Maldonado, could

Europeans begin to perceive the significance of this uniquely transnational

communication and commercial matrix: ‘This will easily be perceived on

inspecting a terrestrial globe, or a map having the pole in its centre, though

not apparent on a plain chart’ (Barrow 1818 App. II: 24). The twenty-first

century scramble for the Arctic, and specifically for access rights to the

rapidly melting Northwest Passage, is the product of a global environmental

crisis unfolding in our lifetime. But it is simultaneously part of a centuries-

long struggle to control a transcontinental access point ‘to almost all

countries of the world’. In connecting Asia, North America and Europe, the

circumpolar Arctic peripheralizes all of the imperial centres of the northern

hemisphere, presenting us with a wholly alien planetary vision. This

circumpolar vision is critical to today’s efforts to remap the global in the

face of pressing environmental and human crises.

Maldonado never travelled through the Northwest Passage, of course � the

voyage was a spurious one, one of many since the sixteenth century. But the

Maldonado manuscript did travel through the imperial centres of calcula-

tion, including that of the British Admiralty. In 1818 Britain launched twin

expeditions to conquer both the North Pole and Northwest Passage, a

tradition of Arctic discovery ‘peculiarly British’, according to the Second

Secretary of the Admiralty John Barrow. (Indeed, only a decade earlier,

Joseph Banks of the Royal Society had proposed a British annexation of

Iceland, since, he reasoned, all islands in the North Sea were part of the

British Isles.) Barrow proclaimed an ambitious programme to map a

‘progressive geography of the northern regions’, and in his Chronological

History of the Arctic Regions (1818: 370), the textual component of this new

era of colonial expansion, he included an English translation of the

Maldonado manuscript. Barrow proudly unmasked the manuscript as a

‘German imposture’, one that had fooled the Spanish, Italians and French,

but not the English.

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Barrow’s Chronological History ostensibly encompasses a pan-European

history of Arctic exploration, though the aggressively nationalist register is

evident immediately. While the Russian Great Northern Expedition of the

1730�1740s, the most elaborate and successful Arctic geographic expedition

before the late nineteenth century, is relegated to a brief chapter, failure after

failure by the English is lingered over. The naked nationalism of Barrow’s

Chronological History is a commonplace in nineteenth-century European

accounts of exploration, of course, but it is interesting to consider how this

nationalist project maps onto its heterogeneous sources, the polyglot

documents it attempts to order into an Anglocentric whole. For Maldonado,

the circumpolar Arctic was Spanish, for Barrow in the nineteenth century it

was British, and in 2007 we were told that ‘The Arctic has always been

Russian’. Searching for the Northwest Passage always begins and ends in the

archive, however, and the archive is a global one.

In recirculating this impassioned claim for the Passage’s significance as the

uniquely transcontinental hub of hemispheric ‘communication’ and surveil-

lance, Barrow awakened post-Napoleonic Britain to a neglected theatre of

imperial competition that demanded intervention. But he was also fascinated

by the complex strata of translation and transmission imbricated in the

provenance of this well-travelled manuscript. There were in fact multiple

copies of the Maldonado manuscript, coursing through European archives

(Barrow’s Spanish copytext, a 1781 copy complete with illustrations, now

resides in the British Library). The labyrinthine paths of these manuscripts in

fact echo the multiple Passages sought as a singularity � the Northwest

Passage (or the Strait of Anian, as part of the Passage was known in the

sixteenth century).

The Northwest Passage, when it exists at all, is a manifold entity, coming

into and out of existence according to changing environmental conditions,

located in different locations at different points in time. What we call the

Northwest Passage varies geographically, historically and textually; it is

mediated through varying discursive formations and environmental factors

that have given the Passage its shifting contours over many centuries. In

searching for a singularity � Passage or Pole � explorers could orient the

chaotic elements of voyages and their narratives through a coherent focal

point, that of northward or westward progress. Charting coastline,

discovering resources and unknown phenomena, encountering exotic people,

all figure in the tally of progress made over predecessors, though this is true

of European exploration as a whole. In Arctic exploration in particular,

‘progress’ becomes unambiguously quantifiable.

Circumpolar maps could best illustrate the progress made in the Arctic, as

Maldonado’s 400-year-old account explained, but they simultaneously

revealed what Michel de Certeau termed ‘the law of the other in the

narrative’ of progress. Linear progress towards an absolute North was

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undeniable, and yet here it was also undeniably circular. A ‘straight line

forms a circle’, writes de Certeau in Heterologies, ‘by virtue of its very

straightness’ (1986: 147). The Northwest Passage sometimes appeared on

circumpolar maps as a trace of linear progress inscribed onto a circular

world. Not only did such maps provincialize the European metropolis that

financed each questing ship, but they disabled the logic of teleological

progress itself. Thus, even on a map supporting the ‘peculiarly British’

discoveries of the British Admiralty in 1818, the circumpolar perspective

revealed instead the clear contours of Russia and Scandinavia, with only the

Celtic fringe of Britain barely visible on the margins of the ‘Countries

Around the North Pole According to the Latest Discoveries’’ (Figure 1).

Europe’s heroic age of Arctic exploration may have been based on

‘progressive geography’, but on circumpolar maps this progress towards

Passage and Pole appeared to circle round the same abstractions and

disasters of predecessors, whether genuine or spurious.

Figure 1 ‘Map of the Countries Around the North Pole According to the

Latest Discoveries’. Frontispiece from Mark Beaufoy (and Daines Barring-

ton), The Possibility of Reaching the North Pole Asserted, By the Hon. D.

Barrington. A New Edition, London: T. & J. Allman, 1818. Reproduced by

permission of the British Library.

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The Northwest Passage and the North Pole continue to be sought today:

each is multiple and available to an endless series of unique ‘discoveries’. The

North Pole incorporates the geographic pole, the magnetic pole, the pole of

inaccessibility, the pole of cold, and has been ‘conquered’ on foot, on sled,

and by diverse groupings of ‘explorers’, retracing previous routes with new

combinations of equipment and personal hardships. They have come by

airship, plane, balloon, nuclear submarine, and most recently by Russian

minisub, complete with visual ‘documentation’ silently recycled in the

Russian media from our modern archive of exploration, that of Hollywood

films (specifically, from Titanic) (Parfitt 2007). These circular discoveries are

endless and utterly in keeping with the popular tradition of fabricating Arctic

‘discoveries’ like Maldonado’s. The most famous modern fabrication is

Cook and Peary’s race to the Pole in 1908�9, both men’s claims to be first

now disqualified, either through deception, error, or possibly both (see

Bloom 1993). Discovering the Northwest Passage is likewise a recursive,

open-ended enterprise: Victorian Britain credited John Franklin with

discovering the Passage in the disaster that cost the lives of all 129 of his

crew, and then Robert McClure in searching for Franklin, for discovering the

final link in the Passage; Roald Amundsen’s Gjoa was the first ship to sail

through the Passage in 1906 after a three-year voyage; in 2000 the Canadian

St Roch II sailed through the Passage in a mere month without encountering

any pack ice. Scientists predict an ice-free Arctic Ocean in a few decades, at

which point one might think that ‘the Northwest Passage’ will cease to mean

anything.

In fact, by then the Passages through the Arctic archipelago may be

increasingly fortified and militarized in the scramble for the Arctic

accelerating in the twenty-first century. The Maldonado manuscript

included drawings of suggested fortifications and settlements along the

Northwest Passage, to allow Spain to regulate commercial access to the

riches and ‘communication’ uniquely available through it (Figure 2). At this

moment Canada is rushing to build two major military bases along the

Passage, in Resolute (Qausuittuq) on Cornwallis Island and Nanisivik on

Baffin Island, while Russia is preparing to claim virtually half of the Arctic

Ocean seabed as its own under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, the

legal framework governing such access. Meanwhile, Denmark and Canada

are squaring off over tiny Hans Island off the northwest coast of Greenland;

in recent years both countries have sent military ships and high-ranking

officials to this barren rock, to plant flags and perform rituals of possession

for the benefit of the seabirds. The militarization of the Arctic has been long

in the making, as long as Europeans have travelled there, in ships or in

imaginings, as in Maldonado’s case.

The August 2007 Russian spectacle of planting a flag on the North Pole

seabed by submarine was greeted with an unconvincingly brave front by the

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Canadian Foreign Minister who declared that ‘This isn’t the fifteenth

century’. Yet we have not moved far beyond the early modern scramble

for the Arctic, when England attempted to establish its first North American

colony � before Roanoke and Jamestown � off Baffin Island, the site of

Martin Frobisher’s failed ore mines. We still circle around the same ends

(resources, commerce, communication) with even greater potential destruc-

tive effects. At the geographic North Pole a solar day lasts 12 months,

making all temperate and tropical registers of temporal progress, whether in

Figure 2 Untitled drawing of proposed military fortifications along the

Strait of Anian, as engraved for the translated Maldonado manuscript

published in John Barrow’s Chronological History of Voyages in the Arctic

Seas (1818), Appendix II, p. 47. There are slight variations between this

published version and the Spanish manuscript drawing on which it is based

(British Library MS Add. 17,622). Reproduced by permission of the British

Library.

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technology or civilization, irrelevant. Some may wish to imagine that when it

comes to the Arctic we no longer live in an age of naked colonial aggression

and land grabs. This may have been the official Canadian position, but the

Canadian government has ignored the attempts of Inuit and local leaders to

consult on the new military developments in Nunavut (Woodard 2007). And

Canada has a troubled history of forced relocation of Inuit from the 1930s to

the 1960s, in order to bolster its territorial claims to the High Arctic that it is

defending anew. The record of the other powers involved is generally worse.

European penetration into the circumpolar Arctic is consistently defeated

in the attempt to chart a linear course to progress. This centuries-long record

of failure punctuated by full-blown debacles has wedded disaster to success

in Arctic exploration, with disasters increasingly proving profitable in

popular culture, from books, to panoramas, to newspapers. (One of the

nineteenth century’s bestsellers was the 1859 Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the

Arctic Seas, narrating the discovery of the Franklin disaster relics sought by

international rescuers, lovingly enumerated down to the last brass button,

and then publicly exhibited to fee-paying spectators.) The stakes in the

twenty-first century scramble for the Arctic are much higher than in previous

times, truly of planetary proportions, but the scramble itself is nothing new.

It does not represent a shift in priorities or international awareness � it is a

small blip in a centuries-long mad pursuit that has not diminished in interest

for the colonial and commercial powers involved.

As the dangers of globalization proliferate, so too do our longings for a

utopian discourse of ‘planetarity’ untouched by the ills of universalism and

globalization, as evoked in the recent work of cultural and social theorists

like Paul Gilroy, Mary Louise Pratt and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Like

their recent postcolonial, paranational and feminist gestures towards the

planetary, circumpolarity works both through and against the universalizing

reach of Enlightenment narratives of modernity. In fact, circumpolar views

of our world have offered a planetary vision for centuries, though humanistic

academia has been slow to investigate this. For too long the circumpolar

Arctic has been regarded as the domain of the earth and social sciences, and

of regional special pleading. But the Arctic is not an uninhabited, timeless

waste found on the fringes of the planet � it inhabits a centre. The most

obsessive Northwest Passage seekers always recognized this.

Circumpolarity should be an orientating principle for our current

discussions of the planetary. My sketch of circumpolarity is visibly heir to

an Enlightenment scopic regime, but then so are the planetary discourses

currently circulating in the academy, despite their utopian (and often

anti-Enlightenment) aspirations. Circumpolarity is inseparable from the

imperial designs of European figures like Maldonado and Barrow, but it is

simultaneously a material presence in the cultural, linguistic and historical

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connections amongst indigenous peoples spanning three continents and

many centuries.

The circumpolar Arctic intrigued Enlightenment thinkers because of the

puzzles its cultural, linguistic and racial circuits posed to debates about the

linear paths of global civilizing processes. While twenty-first century

‘planetary’ consciousness is often animated by a futurism intended to escape

the destructive history of Enlightenment universalism, there is renewed

interest in ‘pluralizing ‘‘the’’ Enlightenment’ and its visions of ‘the global’

(Muthu 2003: 260). Gottfried von Herder’s conflicted synthesis of nativism

and cosmopolitanism is a well-known case in point (see Young 1995: 36�43). Regarding the transcontinental connections glimpsed between diverse

Arctic peoples, Herder observed that ‘we perceive the most different races

brought under the same yoke of the northern form, and forged as it were into

a chain of the north pole’ (Herder 1800: 136). Not one vertical chain of

being favoured by theorists of racialized hierarchies, but multiple curvilinear

‘chains of cultivation . . . flying off in extremely divergent curves’ was

Herder’s preferred metaphor for the ‘multitudinous harmony’ of humanity

(Herder 1800: 453, 164). Circumpolarity and its resistance to linear

historical progress also intrigued the French philosopher and linguist

Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, for whom the complex connec-

tions between Arctic peoples in North America, Greenland and Eurasia

undermined emerging European categories of distinct races and continents

(Anquetil-Duperron 1993). Herder and Anquetil-Duperron produced the

kind of encyclopedic ‘universal histories’ that have become synonymous with

an Enlightenment Eurocentrism (and ‘environmental determinism’, visible in

the Arctic’s power to blend diverse peoples into one ‘northern form’), but for

both thinkers the circumpolar Arctic offered a potentially radical challenge

to the solidifying borders of racial and geographic categories.

Circumpolarity has already been institutionalized in practice for over a

century, by numerous scientific, artistic, educational, non-governmental,

indigenous and intergovernmental groups. Among the most important is the

Inuit Circumpolar Conference established in 1977, a unique transcontinental

NGO building on centuries of contact between Arctic peoples. The ICC

coexists with other transnational entities like the new University of the

Arctic, the intergovernmental Arctic Council, and the scientific International

Polar Year. The first IPY in 1882�3 was intended to replace imperial

competition with scientific collaboration, materialized in a circumpolar ring

of scientific stations supported by eleven nations; it ended in disaster thanks

to the US team that set out unilaterally to conquer the Pole, descending

instead into madness and cannibalism. The fourth IPY underway in 2007�8has been marred only by the Russian submarine stunt, but its collaborative

field science strategies remain entangled with larger national claims to

sovereignty and access rights (Bravo 2009).

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Today’s collaborative circumpolar bodies overlap with the usual suspects

in global capital: from oil and gas multinationals moving into the Arctic

National Wildlife Refuge, to De Beers, enjoying a boom in conflict-free

diamonds in their recently opened mines in the Canadian North. Circumpo-

larity converges the full range of geopolitical ambitions, from environmental

and educational, to the nakedly aggressive and exploitative, and it has done

so since the sixteenth-century vision attributed to Maldonado. Such

collaborative circumpolar bodies (for example, the eight-nation Arctic

Council) were often established upon the region-building tensions of Cold

War conflict and militarization (Keskitalo 2004). North American geogra-

phers during the Second World War even put forward the Arctic as a new

‘World Mediterranean’ that would surpass ‘the Old World’s lesser Medi-

terranean’, allowing the US to bypass continental Europe in its pursuit of

new circumpolar contacts with Asia and Russia: ‘In the Arctic’, proposed

these twentieth-century Maldonados, ‘we are free now to use the roundness

of the earth in the solution of our transportation problems’ (Stefansson

1944a: 265; 1944b: 311). Despite the radical marginalization of the ‘Old

World’ in Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s vision of a new Arctic Mediterranean

above, the parochialism of European geographic tradition remains inescap-

able. These diverse twentieth- and twenty-first-century Arctic actors, with

their complex political interests, share in the making of modern circumpolar

traditions, even as the supposedly ‘disinterested’ ideals of international

scientific collaboration in the current IPY build on Enlightenment models of

global scientific collaboration.

More ambitious than La Condamine and Maupertius’s 1735 synchronized

efforts to determine the shape of the planet by making similar longitudinal

observations on the Equator and in Samiland (Lapland), Anquetil-Duperron

proposed an academie ambulante (traveling academy) consisting of 80

scavans voyageurs (voyaging scholars) to encircle the planet, from Hudson

Bay to Chile, and Kamchatka to the Cape of Good Hope (Anquetil-

Duperron 1997: 66�7). Naturally, Paris would serve as the nerve centre of

this global network, but the Asian and North American Arctic regions would

form important knowledge circuits. The conflicted planetary visions

descended in part from these Enlightenment endeavours included a valuable

Arctic dimension, and it is this ideologically impure history of circumpolar-

ity that, when combined with its indigenous dimensions, make the

circumpolar a uniquely valuable orientation for planetarity. The circumpo-

lar is central to any notion of the planetary because it is not ‘just’ a region, a

continent, an ocean, a hemisphere, a direction (‘Northernness’) � it is not a

supplement but a reorientation of an entire world. Circumpolarity is

inseparable from the European imagination of disaster driving the pursuit

of the Passage and Pole, an exploitative tradition that coexists with ongoing

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indigenous forms of circumpolar contact unfolding in incommensurable

historical scales.

The 1990 map of ‘Davvialbmogat: Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic’

(Figure 3) drawn by Sami artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen beautifully illustrates

the anti-colonial potential uniquely embodied in circumpolar maps. Known

for his maps of Sapmi (Samiland) that cite and subvert its history of

exploration and colonization (Storfjell 2003: 158), Mathisen presents us

with an Arctic radiant with colour, evoking the aurora. Instead of the blank

spaces awaiting inscription and national incorporation common in Enlight-

enment-era Arctic maps (e.g. Figure 1), the fluid contours of Mathisen’s

Arctic are inscribed with the names of circumpolar indigenous peoples.

‘Davvialbmogat’ inhabits a European cartographic tradition, but by centring

indigenous Arctic peoples in the ‘here and now’ Mathisen’s map also offers a

vision ‘space as the sphere of a dynamic simultaneity’, that Doreen Massey

also urges us to pursue (Massey 2005: 107). Mathisen’s vision of the

circumpolar Arctic, inhabited by humans and non-humans, remains open to

the future even as it inhabits heterogeneous historical traditions.

Figure 3 Hans Ragnar Mathisen (Keviselie), ‘Davvialbmogat: Indigenous

Peoples of the Arctic’ (1990). Reproduced by permission of the artist.

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The circumpolar Arctic, defined from both within and without, using both

indigenous and alien knowledge, sustains a powerful incarnation of the

planetary, one that reaches out beyond territoriality in ways uniquely

possible in a polar world encircling an ocean. Between Canada’s two

projected new military bases along the Northwest Passage lies Devon Island,

the largest uninhabited island on Earth, and home to the Haughton Mars

Project, an international scientific station designed to create in the High

Arctic a so-called ‘terrestrial analogue for Mars’ � a training ground for

Martian exploration. NASA’s involvement in the project links the militar-

ization of the Arctic to that of space, but it also expands our sense of what a

planetary awareness might encompass. The Arctic invites us beyond the

terrestrial ‘global human’ ideal on which current ‘planetary longings’

typically depend, offering allegiances with non-anthropocentric alterity on

an extreme scale.

Though I have focused on the distinctiveness of the circumpolar Arctic, a

circumpolar orientation is also significant, with asymmetrical configura-

tions, for current formulations of the ‘Global South’, its Southern Ocean,

mythic Great Southern Continent, and postcolonial struggles in the looming

‘Question of Antarctica’. Despite the stark differences in governance,

history, industrialization and populations involved in the Arctic and

Antarctic, ‘bipolar’ approaches can be very useful, for my purpose here, in

part due to the ideologically impure strata of knowledge making circumpo-

larity visible. For example, James Cook’s Voyage Towards the South Pole

(1777) introduced its imperial project with a magnificent circumpolar ‘Chart

of the Southern Hemisphere’, exemplifying an Enlightenment scopic

universalism even as it radically defamiliarized the planet for Northern

and European eyes. Two hundred years after Cook’s circumpolar voyage,

satellite images of the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica catalyzed

global awareness of our human-made environmental crisis in the 1980s.

Although Antarctica lacks an indigenous population, the upcoming 2009

renegotiation of the Antarctic Treaty should be followed closely by

humanistic and particularly postcolonial scholars, in part because it includes

impending claims by postcolonial nations like Malaysia and India (Dodds

2006). The centuries-long scramble for the Arctic, re-visible today, can

similarly focus new efforts to reshape the global with radical effects, an

example of what Mary Louise Pratt describes as the unpredictable effects of

‘Enlightenment’ planetarity being ‘invented and reinvented in more times

and places than we will ever know’ (Pratt 2004: 23).

The quest for Northwest Passages and their dangerous rewards is

relentless, and it is accelerating faster than the ice is melting. Its domain is

the planet, not a region or even a continent � our planet seen anew from a

perspective no more arbitrary than a meridian or the Equator. Our planet

appearing as uncanny as if seen from another, a ‘terrestrial analogue’ of

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itself. Although borne disproportionately by Northern peoples, the con-

sequences of the 400-year-old quest for Northwest Passages are our shared

responsibility. The circumpolar Arctic, made visible and knowable as such in

part through this destructive quest, is central to any planetary consciousness.

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