Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances

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Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, UK) Dr Katherine Collins (Research Fellow, University of Oxford, University of Oxford, UK)

Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere

Texts, Spaces, Resonances

Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, UK), Dr Katherine Collins (Research Fellow, University of Oxford, University of Oxford, UK)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
09 January 2025

Prose: non-fiction; Literary studies: post-colonial literature

Series: New Directions in Life Narrative

Exploring lives lived, written and narrated in and from the Global South, the far South and the ultimate South, Antarctica, this book asks how life writing from southerly compass points impact both how we understand and read life narratives, and ultimately how we perceive our planet. Southern geographies, histories and lives have often been overlooked and defined by northern perspectives; Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere redresses this North/South alignment in its critical examination of life stories, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies from the southern hemisphere, providing a countervailing and alternative perspective that will unsettle, challenge and enrich the imaginative norms that inform life writing studies.

From Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South and polar studies, and presents works on human, animal and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the south has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, allowing us to better conceptualize the planet ‘from below’.

Edited by: Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford UK), Dr Katherine Collins (Research Fellow, University of Oxford, University of Oxford, UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350360754
ISBN 10: 1350360759
Series: New Directions in Life Narrative
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 09 January 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Contributors I.Introduction Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins, University of Oxford II.Reading the south 1.Life-writing and imagining across southern space Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford 2.Prosthetics, Souvenirs, and Settlement: South-South Connections in Janet Frame’s and Doris Lessing’s Life Writing Emma Parker, University of Bristol 3.Antarctic Futures: Francisco Coloane and Literary Nationalism Elizabeth Chant, University of Warwick 4.Cross-cultural Life-Writing: Juxtaposing Adivasi/Tribal Indian and Indigenous Australian Texts Priyanka Shivadas, University of Melbourne III.Imagining spaces and spatiality 5.Unknowing a southern life: writing around the abyss Katherine Collins, University of Oxford 6.Minority Life in Nigeria’s South-South: Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of a Saint Obari Gomba University of Port Harcourt 7.Southwards from the Northeast Archie Davies, Queen Mary University of London 8.The South as a continuous space Pablo Wainschenker, University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha 9.J.M. Coetzee’s Hispanic South Cristóbal Pérez Barra, University of Oxford IV.Reading and writing in southern waters 10.Tsunami, Tornado, Tide: Life and Writing of the Oceanic South in Selected Nonfiction by Amitav Ghosh Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria 11.The representation of water-spirits in southern African Literature Confidence Joseph, University of the Witwatersrand 12.All water has a perfect memory: In search of Dambudzo Marechera's stream Tinashe Mushakavanhu, University of Oxford V.Sounds, images and resonances in the Far South 13.The plankton net at the door: Scott’s hut and the poetics of ‘intimate immensity’ Joanna Price, Liverpool John Moores University 14.The Musical Lives of Mawson’s Men Carolyn Philpott, University of Tasmania 15.Signals from the South: Decoding the life of an Antarctic radio operator Elizabeth Leane, University of Tasmania 16.Remote imag(in)ing the Antarctic: life-writing and the resonant page Elizabeth Lewis Williams, University of East Anglia VI.Embodying the south 17.The Fugitive Lives of David Stuurman Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis, University College Dublin 18.Recovering a biography of a Southern city, Bulawayo Isaac Ndlovu, University of Pretoria 19.From the Far Bank: Two-Body Problem in the South Louis Rogers 20.MOGAU-Grace Khutso Mabokela, University of Pretoria Index

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, UK, and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Internationally renowned for her research in post-colonial theory and the literature of empire, Professor Boehmer currently works on questions of migration, identity, and resistance in both colonial and post-colonial literature (sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia). She has published over eighteen books, including four novels; her best-selling biography of Nelson Mandela has been translated into Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai. She obtained her doctorate from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Katherine Collins is a poet and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research spans the creative and critical practices involved in the writing of marginalised lives, such as the politics and poetics of life writing, testimonial cultures and witnessing, and autobiographies of resistance.

Reviews for Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances

This fine and lively collection offers a wide range of reflections on human (and non-human) life in southerly climes, explored with due attention to the linguistic, poetic and epistemological contours of writings that take their bearings from beyond the limited purview of the global north. The textured imaginaries that come into view in these pages (readers encounter water spirits, musical lives, tsunamis, and the teeming life of seemingly frozen worlds) have implications for cultural theory: they promise to enrich the work of southern theory, as well as to invigorate memory studies, in part by complicating the individualised self that has tended to shape northern cultures of memory, historically. This is not simply by virtue of the attention given to southern life writing in all its complexity, but also in the invitation to recognise the fragmenting effects of colonial modernity, and to take heart from the non-linear temporalities of lives lived in sync with tidal energies and seasonal rhythms. Though it bears witness to the disproportionate effects of climate crisis and extractionist consumerism across an unequal world, this collection is above all a hopeful one: it affirms the renewal, resistance and solidarity that are possible when southern perspectives are allowed to shape the inquiry. * Sandra Young, Professor of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa *