Antarctic Archives: Expanding the Living Sphere into the Frozen Continent

Antarctica acutely registers the accelerating rate of anthropogenic climate change with the melting of polar ice, and stores past climate data. Devoid of Indigenous populations and framed as a peaceful frontier for scientists, this frozen continent is often seen as if it stands outside territorial conflicts. Yet, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this continent was integral to the expansion of Western and non-Western empires. Building on research from my recently published book, Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (2022), this talk examines two types of media – architecture and cinema – that physically and visually mediate the harsh environments of Antarctica. In so doing, I explore the significance of the continent in the Japanese geopolitical discourse of expanding the so called “living sphere” alongside experiments in climatic control. More specifically, this talk examines Japan’s two Antarctica expeditions: the 1910-1912 expedition taking place during Japan’s colonization of its northern islands, and the 1957-1958expedition during Japan’s participation in the International Geophysical Year. Doubly mediated by the storage medium of cinema and the climatic medium of architecture, these expeditions allow us to think critically about the planetary future through the settler colonial past of Antarctica.

Dr. Yuriko Furuhata is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her first book, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013),won the Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Japan Council