Jen Rose Smith, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2025.
In a time of unprecedented environmental and political change across communities around the globe, a rush to identify and solve pressing problems can often leave crucial contexts uncomplicated, untheorized, and understudied. More specifically, the politics of race, racialization, indigeneity, and dispossession often go softened or overlooked to simplify power relations to solve invented crises. In the context of the Arctic, Alaska, and polar spaces more broadly, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic intervenes in some of these conversations, not necessarily to clarify matters with certainty, but instead to add more productive questions and question marks.
Building out from the central understanding articulated in the text, that ice is and are racialized geographies, Ice Geographies charts out just how those present histories have been shaped and enacted violently and attends to how ice is never just violence alone. To counter some colonial and imperial ongoing practices, the book is preoccupied with the importance of slowness, careful forms of guessing and consensual research methodologies, and thus leaving some questions unanswered in an attempt to embrace the concept of emptiness that is identified and practiced across the text.
In part a methods text, Ice Geographies asks, if researchers begin with the understanding that one cannot nor should they strive to know everything and report out in full, explicit, “objective” detail, then how does that shape how ice and geographies of ice are studied? If the racial politic of ice is taken just as seriously as ice’s material composition, what productive forms of study are then able to be imagined and enacted?
“Taking Indigenous literature, theory and tradition as central modes of analysis and sensibility, Ice Geographies worries productively about how land, ice, water, and air meet in ways that are both never outside and of course always outside of human history and intellectualizing.”
Taking Indigenous literature, theory and tradition as central modes of analysis and sensibility, Ice Geographies worries productively about how land, ice, water, and air meet in ways that are both never outside and of course always outside of human history and intellectualizing. Its five chapters focus on ice as analytic, data, imaginary, terrain, and ice among the stars and move among methods of literary and discourse analysis, archival research, and embodied knowledges. The chapters take up materials of fiction, essay, poetry, political cartoons and speeches, ice core data, popular Science discourse, and philosophy. This interdisciplinary text contributes to critical conversations not only about the Arctic and Alaska, but centrally to how race relations, ethnic studies, human geography, and literary criticism are taken up and play out in material polar spaces and beyond. Ice Geographies is an academic text that keeps both politics and poetics at the fore.
Feature Image Credit: Jen Rose Smith.
Jen Rose Smith