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This chapter examines how Antarctic history, and the ways in which it is told, provide frames in which Antarctica Rather than being a 'safe" subject in Antarctica's past, Glasberg argues that narratives of heroism in Antarctic exploration continue to resonate into the present. Antarctic ice extends an orientalist imaginary not through indigenous populations to be controlled, but rather through scientific categorization of nonhuman species, of neo- and nonbiological materials such as ice, wind, and sunlight, and under a Treaty System of environmental science management as de facto territorial control for resource potential. In this chapter, Glasberg makes provocative connections between the Heroic Era expeditions of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and others and the imperial politics that followed, using the concept of biopolitics as developed by Michel Foucault.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-54575-6_9

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