Analysing the Danish-Greenlandic debate on Greenland’s plans to extract and export uranium, the article advocates bringing the fields of extraction studies and cultural studies into dialogue. Drawing on discourse analysis, critical theory and the “emotional turn” in social sciences, the article demonstrates how the current discussion about secession is linked to a Danish-Greenlandic affective economy instituted during the colonial era. Conceived as the antithesis to the unhappy condition of present postcoloniality, independence has become the ultimate political goal for the Greenlandic nation. The reasoning is that history has made the Greenlanders citizens in a foreign nation, which has left them in a state of alienation. In order to lock colonialism away firmly in the past and attain future happiness, the Greenlanders must attain statehood. Uranium is supposed to promote this goal and is thus circulated as a “happy object”, positioning opponents of uranium mining as “affect aliens” or “killjoys” in the independence discourse. In Denmark, the Greenlandic detachment has led to “postcolonial melancholia” – and to a greater receptiveness to the Greenland desire for equality. In Greenland, disappointed expectations of rapid economic progress and growing distrust of large-scale projects have sparked a discussion about the significations of the concept of “independence”.

This paper concerns affective relations and unexpected interruptions as the planned expansion of an extractive open-pit mining site gathers momentum. The site is a mountain in Varanger, North Norway, criss-crossed by a sand-coloured meshwork of roads that are part of the current infrastructure of a quartzite quarry. Recently purchased by Chinese investors, the mining company Elkem plans a massive expansion of the operations, which will interrupt a wide range of practices and projects, including the migratory movement of reindeer, as well as their grazing patterns. Known as Giemaš amongst Sámi speakers, the mountain is also alluded to as a site of other powers, manifesting as unexpected accidents. In this article, I explore how the planned expansion evokes this contested site as more than a singular mountain, and how divergent epistemic formations interrupt the making of extractive resources in multiple ways.

Wollar is a small village located in the Mid-Western Region in New South Wales, Australia. Geographically removed, climatically different and culturally distinct from the Arctic, it might seem as a distant case for the exploration of Arctic Uchranotopias and resource extraction; the topic of this Special Issue. Yet, the affective and temporal dimensions of mining are not necessarily restricted to distinct regions, and there are theoretical opportunities for cooperative analysis across diverse regions. By bringing forward this case study, I aim to illustrate how the concepts of mining emotions and Uchranotopia have applicability beyond the polar region and how a broader theory of mining emotions may be advanced. Through the notion of “mining voids,” I investigate how discourses of extraction as prosperity clash with lived experiences at the coal face. Mining voids—both present and future—have become markers for physical and social landscapes and, as a metaphor, it embeds the contradiction between utopian narratives of a coal-sponsored future and dystopian imaginings at the coal face. Through analysis of the discourses of mining voids and how, as the voids materialise, emotions are mined, I will tie this case study to the debate of Arctic resource extraction and community making, affect and temporality.

Mining activities in the Arctic often have a strong impact on people living here and the sustainability of their communities. The article takes as its point of departure two widely different cases relating to Arctic communities: the former mining city of Qullissat in the Greenlandic Disko Bay area and the rural village of Sakajärvi, which is threatened by expansions of the Aitik copper mine in the Norbotten County, Sweden. The cases differ in terms of time span, the number of people affected and the intensity of the affective economies, but they go through comparable processes of giving rise to emotional communities as a result of the termination or expansion of mining activities. Based on field observations and social and web-based media, the author argues that various actors with diverging purposes here compete to install their respective temporalities and narratives in the processes of communitification, i.e., by articulating borders or performing as community. In both cases, the communities employ narrative strategies of uchronotopia: aiming towards better futures by narratively breaking with the past. The agency of these communities depends to a high extent on the intensity of their affective economies, a symbolic capital that may hold considerable potential for creating desirable futures.

As a collaborative production, the exhibition New Arctic aspired to explore postcolonial versions of the Arctic. For this purpose, the exhibition included, among others, an installation called a map machine, seeking to display the Arctic as a site of ongoing ontological politics. To our audiences, the map machine visualised how an inhabited Arctic continues to become a periphery, open to new resource exploitation, a Dreamland “out of space and time.” In this text, I mimic the work of this map machine by describing a series of outside interventions on the Varanger Peninsula, in the Sámi core areas of Norway. The case that initiates the set of actions described in this text is a proposed expansion of a quartzite mine in the small village of Austertana. I illustrate how maps and bureaucratic processes as working political technologies introduce new cartographic visions of this land–water interface, counteracting other existing versions of the same landscape. The case illustrates how exactly such new visions impose urgently meaningful single-action landscapes, or how the Tanafjord was literally reworked from a landscape of endangered species to a landscape defined by an issue of maritime security.

In the ambitious strategy of Greenland to attract foreign companies to engage in extractive industries as a means to create increased national independence the question of minerals emerges as pivotal. The article investigates how two prominent Greenlandic premiers (2009–2014) translated hard rock into soft human welfare in a complex post-colonial context. The article develops the concept of “brokers of hope” which points the analytical attention to the entrepreneurial activities of future- and people-makers in a dense field of indigenous politics. By linking this concept to the idea of “resource materialities” it becomes possible to see resources as relational assemblages that are in a constant state of becoming and also to examine how different engagements with substances can make certain political struggles and political systems legitimate. Furthermore, the article investigates how these “brokers of hope” use the Chinese interests, and ideas of new cooperation with Chinese partners to underpin the intrinsic motivation to create new beginnings and thus to transform existing asymmetrical relations between Denmark and Greenland. This process is conceptualised as “double orientalism”. The article points out how hope and promise in two quite different ways are creatively used to make the future work in the present and how people and nations are made up in that process.

This study aims to understand the emotional labour and relationship building in connection to the expected mining industry in Greenland. Greenland mining is often portrayed as something that could create an economic basis for national independence which makes politicians curious about what a potential “partnership” could make possible. Envisioning future relationships (in debates about mining in Greenland) also set the framework for reinterpretation and redefinition of the past, to give meaning to promised new development; hence, this kind of future-making tends to be contested. The analysis centres around stories of what could be (if Greenland really was a place of mining), and the theoretical framework makes use of Ahmed’s and Wetherell’s interpretations of affective economies. Thus the study discusses emotional labour with a special focus on partnership, emotions and filtration, while visiting affective scenes and sites related to the mining of Greenland’s minerals. Greenland’s current position as a state in formation, while still reconciling with experiences from the past, affects relationship building, the openness to flirtation, and sometimes creates conflicts and hieratical structures between the potential partners to be.