Paper short abstract:

This paper combines analysis of recent uses of imperial representations of the Karakoram alongside a genealogy of the colonial and postcolonial concept of an ‘anomalous’ climate. It argues that othering particular climates was and is also a process of criticising alternative ways of knowing climate.

Paper long abstract:

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the enormous glaciers of the Karakoram located between the Russian and British empires in Central and South Asia became object of innovative climate theorising. The ideas and representations that resulted have enjoyed long afterlives, informing the development in recent decades of the idea that the relatively stable mass of these icy masses warrants a special status: ‘the Karakoram anomaly’. This paper combines analysis of recent uses of imperial representations of the Karakoram alongside a critical assessment of the recapitulation of the mid-nineteenth century notion of the climatic ‘anomaly’. On the basis of these paired case studies and their convergence in 21st-century glaciology and climatology of High Asia, the paper advances three main arguments. First, othering particular climates was and is also a process of criticising alternative ways of knowing climate. Second, the occlusion of non-Western knowledge tradition in recent climate sciences makes them, in a specific respect, more colonial than actual colonial sciences of climate. And finally, framing climate as ‘anomalous’ implicitly requires particular types of temporal and spatial scaling that should be exposed to critical reflection.