Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere - (New Directions in Life Narrative) by Elleke Boehmer & Katherine Collins (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book asks how life writing from the southern hemisphere impacts how we understand and read life narratives and perceive our planet. Redressing global alignments that champion the north, it critical examination of life stories provide a countervailing and alternative perspective that unsettles, challenges and enriches the imaginative norms that have informed life writing studies so far. Looking at writing from South America, southern Africa, 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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 Hemisphereredresses 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 Hemisphereconvenes 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'.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

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.