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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the history of Blomstrandhalvøya, an island of solid marble in Svalbard that was, in the early nineteenth century, represented as at once a sublime, ‘otherworldly’ space and a place for potential resource extraction and colonization.

Paper long abstract:

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard was recast as a site of mineral possibility. This paper examines one effort at industrial extraction there: a marble quarry which would, according to the Northern Exploration Company (NEC) that ran it, supply the world with marble of unparalleled quality and beauty for generations. The paper interrogates how Anglo-American perceptions of the Arctic played out at Marble Island: on the one hand, the Arctic as a sublime, ‘otherworldly’ space, on the other, the Arctic as a place for potential resource extraction and colonization. These stories were woven together by the NEC through two visual mediums: evocative images of Marble Island, and polished samples of the marble itself, both of which circulated beyond the polar North.

These notions of Arctic nature fused in a myth explaining the failure of the quarry: the permafrost-infused marble crumbled as it was sailed south, ‘resisting’ human efforts at commodification. The frameworks are both entangled and obfuscating: they ‘sublimate’ the Arctic environment and diminish attention to the hard materiality of ice and rock. That Marble Island failed makes it a useful case study not because it is a site of nonhuman agential resistance, but because it allows us to pry apart the historical impulses that have constrained the deep history of the Arctic to a shallow story of sublime capital, and interrogate how and why the visual extraction of Marble Island was, for a short time, such a powerful currency.