Opera in the Arctic: Knud Rasmussen, Inside and Outside Modernity

Abstract

This article examines how modernity is inscribed in Inuit culture, specifically in Igloolik in 1922, and how it is represented within different temporalities: Knud Rasmussen’s account of his time among the Iglulingmiurt, Across Arctic America (1927), and Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn’s Inuit film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), which revisits that historical moment via a critical appropriation of Rasmussen’s narrative. Reading these texts as distinct configurations but also in relation to each other affords a look at modernity as an event that effects adverse change at the same time that it posits itself as a rebuttal to the negative impact it has. Thus, through attention to such tropes as anachronism and opera as a sign of modernity, the article addresses, via Rasmussen, the colonial determinations that inform modernity as well as the decolonizing methods employed in the film that re-purpose modernity while at the same time exposing its limits.

Keywords

• colonialism
• Inuit
• The Journals of Knud Rasmussen
• Knud Rasmussen
• modernity