Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere

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.

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.

• List of ContributorsI.IntroductionElleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins, University of OxfordII.Reading the south1.Life-writing and imagining across southern spaceElleke Boehmer, University of Oxford2.Prosthetics, Souvenirs, and Settlement: South-South Connections in Janet Frame’s and Doris Lessing’s Life WritingEmma Parker, University of Bristol3.Antarctic Futures: Francisco Coloane and Literary NationalismElizabeth Chant, University of Warwick4.Cross-cultural Life-Writing: Juxtaposing Adivasi/Tribal Indian and Indigenous Australian TextsPriyanka Shivadas, University of MelbourneIII.Imagining spaces and spatiality5.Unknowing a southern life: writing around the abyssKatherine Collins, University of Oxford6.Minority Life in Nigeria’s South-South: Ken Wiwa’s In the Shadow of a SaintObari Gomba University of Port Harcourt 7.Southwards from the NortheastArchie Davies, Queen Mary University of London8.The South as a continuous spacePablo Wainschenker, University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wananga o Waitaha9.J.M. Coetzee’s Hispanic SouthCristóbal Pérez Barra, University of OxfordIV.Reading and writing in southern waters10.Tsunami, Tornado, Tide: Life and Writing of the Oceanic South in Selected Nonfiction by Amitav GhoshCharne Lavery, University of Pretoria11.The representation of water-spirits in southern African LiteratureConfidence Joseph, University of the Witwatersrand12.All water has a perfect memory: In search of Dambudzo Marechera's streamTinashe Mushakavanhu, University of OxfordV.Sounds, images and resonances in the Far South13.The plankton net at the door: Scott’s hut and the poetics of ‘intimate immensity’Joanna Price, Liverpool John Moores University14.The Musical Lives of Mawson’s MenCarolyn Philpott, University of Tasmania15.Signals from the South: Decoding the life of an Antarctic radio operatorElizabeth Leane, University of Tasmania16.Remote imag(in)ing the Antarctic: life-writing and the resonant pageElizabeth Lewis Williams, University of East AngliaVI.Embodying the south17.The Fugitive Lives of David StuurmanSarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis, University College Dublin18.Recovering a biography of a Southern city, BulawayoIsaac Ndlovu, University of Pretoria19.From the Far Bank: Two-Body Problem in the SouthLouis Rogers20.MOGAU-GraceKhutso Mabokela, University of PretoriaIndex