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Brand Antarctica

This book looks excellent!

Out now from Hanne Nielsen. 

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.

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