ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Lisa E. Bloom is Scholar-in-Residence at the Beatrice Bain Research Group in the Department of Gender and Women’s studies, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Gender On Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions. Two of the book’s chapters were written with Elena Glasberg, who is the author of Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change.

REVIEWS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. From the Heroic Sublime to Environments of Global Decline  1
I. Disappearing Landscapes: Feminist, Inuit, and Black Viewpoints
1. Antarctica and the Contemporary Sublime in Intersectional Feminist Art Practices  25
2. Reclaiming the Arctic through Feminist and Black Aesthetic Perspectives  54
3. At Memory's Edge: Collaborative Perspectives on Climate Trauma in Arctic Cinema  85
II. Archives of Knowledge and Loss
4. What is Unseen and Missing in the Circumpolar North: Contemporary Art and Indigenous Collaborative Approaches / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg  105
5. Viewers as Citizen Scientists: Archiving Detritus / Lisa E. Bloom and Elena Glasberg 130
III. Climate Art and the Future of Art and Dissent
6. The Logic of Oil and Ice: Reimagining Documentary Cinema in the Capitalocene  153
7. Critical Polar Art Leads to Social Activism: Beyond the Disengaged Gaze  176
Epilogue. Seeing From the Future  195
Notes  201
Filmography  229
Bibliography  235
Index  253

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