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If Pegg followed through on his reassessment of Scott and Amundsen, he might point out that it was the natives, absent at the South Pole, who deserved the prize, or who should today be acknowledged as the proper winners of the race. But neither Pegg nor Alvarez is able to question the goals or the concepts of the “race” or to detach from the task of reviling or defending the white men endlessly within the frame of history. ” Here, the conservative reviewer Alvarez and the liberal critics of Scott collude in producing a new white hero from the demise of the Scott legend: first Shackleton and now Wilkins, a “colonial” yes, but also a member of the white settler class of a nation that incidentally claims 42% of the Antarctic continent, some of it based on Wilkins’s exploits.

Although only one form of mapping Antarctica, I argue the sector map is the most powerful and undertheorized representation of the continent that renders Antarctica as excessively subject to rationalized spatiality—or, to being “sliced up”—open to fair and rational competition, stable as territory, and clearly bounded by a naturalized border. This overpowering A N TA R C T I C C O N V E R G EN C E 11 map has silently restricted geopolitical, aesthetic, and temporal conceptualizations of Antarctica.

These are some of the reasons that I argue Antarctica and the South Pole are distinct from other remote locations. Antarctic Convergence thus is the potentially open, shifting directionl flow associated with Antarctic geophysics, or what I call the ontology of ice. Destabilizing this anthropomorphism of biopolitical population construction, Convergence situates ice as a material actor, highlighting the disjuncture between the mapped projection and the ongoing disjunction nature of ice and human time.