Abstract:
The relationship between humans and ice is newly urgent in the twenty-fi rst century,our enmeshed future with ice having become a central aspect of climate-changediscourse. Environmental historian Sverker Sörlin, for example, describes our currentmoment as ‘cryo-historical’ , and notes that ‘The fate of ice as a sign of the fate of oursocieties invites new readings and interpretations of ice that can be provided by thesocial, cultural and historical sciences – the humanities.’ Answering Sörlin’s call for thehumanities to provide new readings and interpretations of ice, and infl uenced byFrancis Spuff ord’s I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, in which heoutlines the aesthetic and cultural pull of ice in bringing British explorers to the poles,this presentation will think through what it means to talk about ice instead from theperspective of the Global South, and the African continent in particular. In doing so, itsearches for a Southern version of what Spuff ord describes as the ‘intangible history ofassumptions, responses to landscape, cultural fascinations, aesthetic attraction to thecold regions’ that runs alongside the technical and scientifi c history of the polar regions.
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