A northern viewpoint is most often the default, while the south鈥攖he far southern latitudes occupied by Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and southern Africa, among others鈥攕eems far away and ignorable. In Southern Imagining, Elleke Boehmer offers an alternative perspective, using literary, scientific and cultural material to explore how we look at the world from the south. Reading, she argues, is a transformative means of reversing our usual planetary orientation and rearranging our perceptual geography. Boehmer examines writing from across southern continents and islands, considering how we imaginatively inhabit the farthest reaches of our planet. Creators ranging from the Portuguese epic poet Lu铆s de Cam玫es to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luis Borges and ancient Indigenous storytellers capture the edgy and austere experiences of the far south.
For Boehmer, imaginative work stimulates and shapes our phenomenological understanding. Southerners often see themselves as far away from where things count, as outsiders, internalising the wider global sense of their relative insignificance. Conversely, when northerners read or hear legends, narratives, songs and poems from the south, it is as if they are located in the south, at least for the duration of the reading or listening. Boehmer suggests that the south-tilted world map, re-centred through song and story, invites us to claim a more involved sense of belonging to our planet, both its north and its south. The writers of the south disrupt conventional ways of seeing and invite us to inhabit our globe differently.
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria and in 2024 she was Visiting International Fellow at the University of Adelaide. She is the author of, among other books, Postcolonial Poetics; Indian Arrivals 1870–1915, winner of the ESSE Book Award; and the field-defining Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors; as well as the collection of short stories To the Volcano and the novel The Shouting in the Dark, winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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“Groundbreaking and globe-flipping, this powerfully persuasive and dynamically written book marks a paradigmatic shift in literary and cultural criticism and needs to be added to every reading list.”—Bernadine Evaristo, author of the Booker Prize–winning Girl, Woman, Other
“A remarkable book, ranging across the literary and historical worlds of the South Seas with tremendous brio. Covering everything from Frankenstein and Moby-Dick to the expeditions of Captain Scott and the travels of D. H. Lawrence, Elleke Boehmer’s admirably bold book glitters with surprising and provocative insights.”—Dominic Sandbrook, presenter of The Rest is History
“Elleke Boehmer places readers imaginatively and critically in the global south, pulling our centre of gravity into Australia, southern Africa and the extended Pacific. Her book is beautifully and accessibly written, welcoming readers to complex southern mind-worlds, where histories, cultures, geographies and voices intersect so vividly. This book looks afresh at critical and imaginative ways of being in the southern hemisphere, and welcomes new readers to a crucial paradigm for literary teaching and scholarship.”—Sophie Gee, author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
“The southern oceans have been presented as a space of the limitless beyond, an untamed blank space inscribed on by imperial voyagers and writers in search of vastness. Boehmer brings erudition, passion and poetry to the project of generating a vast archive of filiations between indigenous cosmologies and the literary imagination. This book shows how transhemispheric conversations can move us beyond a northern solipsism to think with the planetary.”—Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand
“Southern Imagining presents us with lines of flight that take off from here, in the Global South. This reorientation creates new pathways of exchange and influence that reconfigure the horizon not only for literary criticism but also for humanities scholarship more generally.”—Gillian Whitlock, University of Queensland
“It’s a virtuoso performance, a tour de force, in form and content. There’s no question about the expertise and erudition and scholarly apparatus underpinning the book, but Boehmer wears it lightly in service to illuminating the sheer wonder and power of words in all of their infinite genres and modes to conjure cosmologies and inner worlds.”—Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign
“Beautifully written, shaped and expressed. In parts it is as pleasurable as a very good novel. Elleke Boehmer reads an astonishing range of writers—English and Indigenous, as well as a Portuguese Renaissance epic—with extraordinary sensitivity and insight.”—Warren Boutcher, Queen Mary University of London
