Thomas Mohnike, Full Professor for Sacndinavian Studieus at the Univrsity of Strasbourg and Dean of the Faculty of Langues will give this lecture as a part of the Jean Malaurie guest lecture series at the Malaurie Institute of Arctic Research Monaco-UVSQ.
What happens to us when the North melts? Not only from an ecological, medical and climatic perspective, but from a perspective of identity? To us who have construed the Far North as a central anchoring point in the geographies of our narratives of identity? When the innocent, untouched ice of our dreams can no longer be simulated as existing? To understand this, we should go back and look at how the North became what it is today in imaginative geography in a long-term perspective. We should analyze how European geographies of identity were reconfigured in the long 19th century from vertical to horizontal, from a counterspace filled with merveilles, magic and metaphysical dangers inherited from premodern times to a frontier of humanity opposed to the fallacious modern national and its state-colonial imaginaries. We should understand the North as part of the religion of nationalism, filled with heroic nostalgia for loss. My paper will reflect on these transformations, proposing a dynamic approach based on the concept of Imaginative Geographies, first proposed by Edward Said as a conceptual tool adapted to the general view on narrative, thus socially constructed geographies on four levels: the detail, the intertext, the ethics and the metaphysics.
The guest lecture will be given at UVSQ’s Amphi Gerard Megie, Tuesday, January 30, 2025, 13:00-14:30, 11 boulevard d'Alembert, 78280 Guyancourt (France). If you wish to participate, please contact Joanna Kodzik (
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