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'.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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 *
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 234 mm
Breite: 156 mm
Dicke: 20 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-350-36080-8 (9781350360808)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
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.
Herausgeber*in
University of Oxford, UK
Research Fellow, University of OxfordUniversity of Oxford, UK
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
Cristobal Perez 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
