Brand Antarctica

This book looks excellent!

Out now from Hanne Nielsen. 

Happy #AntarcticaDay! The anniversary of the signing of the #AntarcticTreaty was the perfect date to launch my new book #Brand #Antarctica - published in the @UnivNebPress #Polar series https://t.co/PU1SLAXx9h pic.twitter.com/5CEa0wb6Ke

— Dr Hanne Nielsen (@WideWhiteStage) December 1, 2023

Cover image is here:

Description of the book from Hanne:

Antarctica is, and has always been, very much “for sale.” Whales, seals, and ice have all been marketed as valuable commodities, but so have the stories of explorers. The modern media industry developed in parallel with land-based Antarctic exploration, and early expedition leaders needed publicity to generate support for their endeavors. Their lectures, narratives, photographs, and films were essentially advertisements for their adventures. At the same time, popular media began to use the newly encountered continent to draw attention to commercial products. These advertisements both trace the commercialization of Antarctica and reveal how commercial settings have shaped the dominant imaginaries of the place.

By contextualizing and analyzing Antarctic advertisements from the late nineteenth century to the present, Brand Antarctica identifies five key framings of the South Polar continent: 

a place for heroes, 

a place of extremity, 

a place of purity, 

a place to protect, and

 a place that transforms. 

Demonstrating how these conceptual framings of Antarctica in turn circulate through our culture, Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen challenges common assumptions about Antarctica’s past and present, encouraging readers to rethink their own relationship with the Far South.

Hanne has clearly been developing this book for a while as there is a range of papers on ResearchGate exploring some of the stories from the last century which connect with this idea of Antarctica as a brand, and her PhD thesis from 2017 (available from this link) forms the backbone of the book one imagines, with some more recent additions.

At the moment it's out of my price range, but I've downloaded the PhD thesis and will be exploring this over the Christmas break.

Windrush food stories

We are now underway on the 3rd read through of Benjamin Zephaniah's 'Windrush Child'. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush's arrival at Tilbury Docks in London.

I noticed these meals in my local Tesco earlier in the week and wondered about their origins.

I was interested in whether this was cultural appropriation of the flavours of the Caribbean with the Windrush marketing. We have previously discussed the story of Jamie Oliver's Jollof Rice, as featured in Dipo Faloyin's 'Africa is not a Country'.

They were actually created by Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones for Black History Month. They are a tribute to the Windrush Generation.

They feature some traditional Caribbean flavours.

There is a very personal story here too.

Anyone tried the meals?

Food

What are the most popular British dishes?

A resource ready for our Year 7 unit on Geographies of Food 'You are what you eat' - to be taught in the next term...

Cultural Geography of the Fens

Thanks to Steve Brace of the RGS-IBG for letting me know about this new addition to the Caught by the River website.

It's a short film which has been made by Rowan Jaines as part of her work on the Cultural Geography of the Fens. It focuses on the Cambridgeshire Fens, through which I travel on a normal work day and have done for the last eight years.

This video essay is part of a four-year research project exploring the cultural geography of the Fen region in the East of England. 

The film is made up of a bricolage of clips of the Fen region, scavenged from the internet and put together in a piecemeal fashion so that the images on screen both intensify and disrupt the linear arc of the narration. 

This is a film that aims to show the Fens as haunted by both the past and those things that have not yet come to be.