Borderscape Antarctica: The uncanny geographical imaginaries of Terra Australis Incognita

Abstract

The harsh beauty of the Antarctic continent has always fascinated explorers, scientists, policymakers, and global audiences alike. From the 18th century onwards, national expeditions competed to discover and claim Terra Australis Incognita, the fantastical Great Southern Land believed to be located in the southern Asia-Pacific. This article investigates the worldmaking potential of Antarctica as an uncanny borderscape where humans confront the familiar yet otherworldly ice. I argue this encounter produces a double-sided imaginary of Antarctica as a geography of exception – both as a utopian world elevated above the everyday politics that dominates international relations elsewhere and as a dystopian world where monsters and madness lurk just beneath the icy surface. This double-sided imaginary enabled diplomatic agreement at the 1959 Washington Conference that froze competing sovereignty claims and preserved Antarctica as a frozen laboratory for collaborative science. At the same time, it inspires fears of a potentially thawed Antarctica as a place of horror where alien forces threaten to overwhelm human rationality. Drawing on primary accounts of exploration, archival material, and science and speculative fiction, my intertextual analysis demonstrates how this imaginary was created, represented, and reproduced to create utopian and dystopian visions of our collective planetary future.