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.

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