Southern Imagining: how and why to see the world upside down - STIAS Public lecture by Elleke Boehmer

Register here by 14 March 2025

Abstract: For many, a northern viewpoint is the default and the south is faraway and ignorable. This lecture will explore a geo-historic understanding of the planet from the vantage point of the southern hemisphere. I call this approach southern imagining and suggest that, though counter-intuitive for most, a southern lens is becoming increasingly more important for how we might see our heating world more holistically. Drawing on a range of writings, photographs and paintings, from the  Cape of Good Hope counter-clockwise through Cape Huon to Cape Horn, the lecture offers literary reading and imagining as a transformative means of reversing our planetary perspectives. As the most influential traditions of knowledge are dominated by northern institutions, I set aside southern theorists who to date have  arguably not been able to shift their northern biases (Connell, the Comaroffs,  Sivasundaram, inter alia). Instead, I turn to indigenous southern languages and  myth-systems for heuristic metaphors and methodologies of reading south. In particular, I look at southern legends of the skies and the seas that were used to map countries, scry the stars, and navigate the wide ocean. An array of authors, from ancient storytellers through Camões and Coleridge to Katherine Mansfield, J.L. Borges and Alexis Wright, also offer models of geophysical and lateral (south-south) thinking, as a selection of case studies will show. Biography: Elleke Boehmer is STIAS Fellow and Professor of World Literature in English and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Oxford, UK. She is a Fellow of the English Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. She is a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is a member of the Netherlands Society of Letters and a Rhodes Trustee. Her work includes literary and cultural history, criticism and fiction. She is the author of Postcolonial Poetics (2018); Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016); Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (2008, 2023); Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002); Stories of Women (2005); and the field-defining Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005). Southern Imagining, a literary history of the Southern Hemisphere, and her seventh monograph, will appear from Princeton University Press, in 2025. Elleke’s fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories (2019; commended for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize), which is her second collection of short stories, and The Shouting in the Dark (winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize 2018). Her novel Ice Shock is forthcoming. Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin. In 2024 she held an International Visiting Fellowship award at the University of Adelaide, Australia.