Southern imaginaries, or, thinking across the South

At a time when the focus of economic development is often the so-called Global South, yet when countries of the north continue to grow in geopolitical dominance, this interdisciplinary project offers a series of cultural, historical, and literary reflections on southness. I take southness to refer broadly to southern imaginaries, or the perception of southern lands and seas, still generally considered to occupy the margins of the world and hence generally deemed remote and relatively powerless, unless in terms of exploitable resources. The project will explore how the far south—so often represented as distant and exotic—sees itself in symbolic, spatial, environmental and conceptual terms. In particular, how might southern worlds imagine themselves through and in relation to each other? How are global perceptions pitched from or located in the south interpretatively different from those in the north? What might be the conceptual, political and environmental significance of thinking in lateral southern ways? For this project, the far south will be taken to embrace Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa, and the seas in-between. The project outcome is a research monograph, Southern Imagining, and a novel set in Britain and Antarctica, with the working title Afar. A collection of short stories, To the Volcano, that begins to explore some of these ideas of the south, was published in late 2019 by Myriad Editions, and appears in South Africa in February 2020.