“I must admit I have recently thought, what’s the point of this work in the light of the crisis in the US, but perhaps we need southern imagining more than ever before,” said Elleke Boehmer. “I’m hoping with this work to build translocal, transnational, transregional and transcontinental axes. This is an invitation to work together to do so.”
“For many, a northern viewpoint is the default, and the south is faraway and ignorable. I will rather 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.”
Boehmer was presenting the second STIAS public lecture of 2025.
Boehmer is 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, the subject of her 2020 STIAS seminar (see https://stias.ac.za/2020/03/southern-imagining-a-cultural-and-literary-history-of-the-far-southern-hemisphere/) will appear from Princeton University Press this year.
Boehmer’s fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories (2019; commended for the Elizabeth Jolley Prize) 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 at the University of Adelaide, Australia.
Her lecture drew on a range of writings, photographs and paintings starting with Gabeba Baderoon’s poem Hangklip and Richard Flanagan’s memoir Question 7 as well as the incredible painting The Edge of the Skirt of the World by South African artist Lola Frost who was in the audience.
“I invite you to sink into the photos, paintings, poetry and prose – they begin to create an immersive experience,” she said. “By immersing in artforms we can start to understand how the world can tune itself differently, be laterally connected.”
“I hope to offer literary reading and imagining as a transformative means of reversing our planetary perspectives,” she added.
Reading and looking South
She outlined that by south she refers to the lands of the south of the world, those facing the Southern Ocean from around 23° S latitude: “Distinct from the Global South, this is a geo-epistemic concept.”
“Southern imagining offers a different conceptual approach because the spin of the earth and inclination of the sun are different in the southern hemisphere. Temporality and the sense of history are put together differently,” she explained. “To write about these not-often-visited parts of the world, relatively speaking, you have to think outside of Western frameworks and timelines, think more of the world as a whole – both conceptually and in the imagination.”
“The south has 10% of the world’s people but 80% of the oceans,” she continued. “To the north, the south is over there and far away. It’s the underside, upside down, contrariwise, the ‘wrong’ way round, the ‘bottom’ of the planet. Water spirals counter-clockwise, the seasons are the opposite way around. From the north, the southern skies are upside down. But it all depends on where you are looking from. To the south, these things are the right way up, everything is in its place.
“So what I’m encouraging us to see is not the world upside down but rather otherwise, through southern conceptual frames, or through the idea of hereness, of southern haecceity,” she said. “Though a counter-clockwise world is an oddity to north readers, to us here it is close and immediate. We are aware of the specifics of this world. By seeing and claiming its hereness, we claim a sense of southern belonging.”
But, she asked, how do we get to this point when the institutions of learning and knowledge, and the dominant systems of understanding are all oriented north, when the most widely spoken world languages all have northern roots, when northern writers mostly cover northern subjects. Everywhere, northern perspectives institutionally embedded. Politics, economics and even media are all north-dominated and modernity is seen as coming from the technologically superior north.
“Given this, 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.”
“Considering the world from the southern edges especially through the cosmologies of indigenous peoples can provide a lens for more holistic planetary understanding,” she continued. “And literary writing offers a potent way of thinking south. In this sense, I take literature as form-giving, as shaping our understanding. Therefore, we might say, poetry, memoir, narrative and travel writing can give us maps for southern imagining.”
Some of the mythologies through which to forge southern lateral connection predate current continental divisions. Boehmer pointed out that the night sky in the southern hemisphere has more stars – we see the entire arc of the Milky Way because the South Pole points into the Milky Way, the north only sees half. This has led to a recent revelation – “Indigenous Australians have a myth of an emu in the starry sky that helps to mark out the change of the seasons from autumn to winter. I’ve found out that the Khoikhoi have a similar myth about the ostrich and the Mocovi People of southern Brazil about the rhea.”
Southern case studies
To tackle this mammoth task of foregrounding southernness, Boehmer explained that rethinking the south using southern languages, experiences and lives, can offer ways of reawakening southern knowledge, or, “seeing the south from the south.” She is therefore delving into several case studies – the works of writers Zoë Wicomb, Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame, Alexis Wright and J. M. Coetzee. “Four of the five are women and three of those are from New Zealand,” she noted. She included readings from the work of each and went into detail on J. M. Coetzee.
“Coetzee is a major writer and thinker of southern imagining. He has started to articulate these ideas explicitly it in the last ten years or so, but the thread has been present in his work from the beginning and is reflected in various movements in his life,” she explained.
“He has always described himself as coming from a minor country and a minor language. I focus here on a few of the moments of south-south connection and awareness he has been signalling throughout his work.”
She also noted that from 2010 he has been collaborating with writers, publishers and translators in Buenos Aires – “using his great stature to try to circumvent the behemoth northern publishers”.
“I believe that south-south and north-south solidarities are more important than at any time in history. As one example, the southern oceans are warming faster than any other. Antarctica contains 90% of the world’s frozen water. I’ve recently read that the famous Simonstown penguin population at Boulders Beach is reducing by 8% per annum because the colder water is further away and they need to swim further for food. It’s time to pay attention to southern spaces. I’m trying to build that identification. Even events that seem to lie far away are in fact incredibly and urgently close by – like the melting ice caps.”
She ended with an inscription from a stone wall in Patagonia looking out onto the Southern Atlantic which translates as: ‘My sky, why do the clouds follow us?’ – an apt metaphor for connection across distance.
In an exciting update, Boehmer provided information on the launch of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in South-South Literary Engagements of which she is editor to be published by Edinburgh University Press. The series, born of her STIAS fellowship, will publish keynote comparative scholarship by both established and early career researchers on the emergent and rapidly expanding area of southern hemisphere writing, embracing nineteenth-century settler writing through to Indigenous literatures in the present-day. See: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-edinburgh-critical-studies-in-south-south-literary-engagements
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: SCPS Photography