Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T16:05:49.185Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A continent of and for whiteness?: “White” colonialism and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty

Part of: 60th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2019

Alejandra Mancilla Open the ORCID record for Alejandra Mancilla [Opens in a new window]
Alejandra Mancilla*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Norway
*
Author for correspondence: Alejandra Mancilla, Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There are at least four ways in which Antarctic colonialism was white: it was paradigmatically performed by white men; it consisted in the taking of vast, white expanses of land; it was carried out with a carte blanche (literally, “blank card”) attitude; and it was presented to the world as a white, innocent adventure. While the first, racial whiteness has been amply problematised, I suggest that the last three illuminate yet other moral wrongs of the Antarctic colonial project. Moreover, they might be constitutive of a larger class of “white” colonialisms beyond the White Continent.

Keywords

AntarcticaColonialismOuter spaceTerritorial claims1959 Antarctic Treaty
Type
Commentary
Information
Polar Record , Volume 55 , Issue 5 , September 2019 , pp. 317 - 319
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Bloom, L. (1993). Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Chaturvedi, S. (2013). Rise and decline of Antarctica in Nehru’s Geopolitical Vision: Challenges and opportunities of the 1950s. The Polar Journal, 3(2), 301–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collis, C. (2004). The proclamation island moment: Making Antarctica Australian. Law Text Culture, 8, 39–56.Google Scholar
Dodds, K., & Collis, C. (2017). Post-colonial Antarctica. In Dodds, K., Hemmings, A. D., & Roberts, P. (Eds.), Handbook on the politics of Antarctica (pp. 50–68). New York: Edward Elgar Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dodds, K. J. (2002). Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire. London: I.B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Glasberg, E. (2012). Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goh Sui Noi. (2018, February 20). China’s Polar Ambitions Cause Anxiety. The Straits Times. Retrieved from https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinas-polar-ambitions-cause-anxiety.Google Scholar
Gothe-Snape, J. (2019, March 20). China Unchecked in Antarctica. ABC News. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-30/china-in-antarctica-inspection-regime/10858486.Google Scholar
Hayes, J. G. (1928). Antarctica: A Treatise on the Southern Continent. London: The Richards Press Limited.Google Scholar
Howkins, A. (2010). Appropriating space: Antarctic Imperialism and the mentality of settler colonialism. In Mar, T. Banivanua & Edmonds, P. (Eds.), Making settler colonial space (pp. 29–52). London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jara Fernández, M. (2006). India and Antarctica in 1956. Second SCAR Workshop on the History of Antarctic Research, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile, Santiago, 21–22 September.Google Scholar
Kohn, M., & Reddy, K. (Fall 2017 Edition). Colonialism. In Zalta, Edward N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/colonialism/.Google Scholar
Koskenniemi, M. (2011). Histories of International Law: Dealing with Eurocentrism. Inaugural Address on the Occasion of Accepting the Treaty of Utrecht Chair at Utrecht University, 16 November 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, N., & Brooks, C. (2018). China’s changing position towards marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean: Implications for future Antarctic governance. Marine Policy, 94, 189–195.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maddison, B. (2014). Class and Colonialism in Antarctic Exploration, 1750–1920. London: Pickering & Chatto.Google Scholar
Mancilla, A. (2018). The moral limits of territorial claims in Antarctica. Ethics & International Affairs, 32(3), 339–360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reyes, S. (1956). El Continente de los Hombres Solos. Santiago: Ercilla.Google Scholar
Roberts, P. (2017). Modern explorers. In Dodds, K., Hemmings, A. D., & Roberts, P. (Eds.), Handbook on the politics of Antarctica (pp. 152–166). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothwell, D. R. (2012). The Antarctic treaty as a security construct. In Hemmings, A. D., Rothwell, D. R., & Scott, K. N. (Eds.), Antarctic security in the Twenty-First Century: Legal and policy perspectives (pp. 33–50). Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Scott, S. V. (2017). Three waves of Antarctic imperialism. In Dodds, K., Hemmings, A. D., & Roberts, P. (Eds.), Handbook on the politics of Antarctica (pp. 37–49). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spufford, F. (1997). I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
United Nations. (1982). UNGA A/37/PV10, 29 September.Google Scholar
van Der Watt, L. M., & Swart, S. (2015). Falling off the Map: South Africa, Antarctica and Empire, c. 1919–59. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43(2), 267–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ypi, L. (2013). What’s wrong with colonialism. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 41(2), 158–191.CrossRefGoogle Scholar