LIFE WRITING AND THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE, texts, spaces, resonances

299pp., illus., paperback, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2024  

ISBN: 781350360808

An examination life stories, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies written and narrated in and from the Global South.

Contributions include:

"Life writing and imagining across southern space" by Elleke Boehmer

"Unknowing a southern life: writing around the abyss" by Katherine Collins

"Prosthetics, Souvenirs, and Settlement: South-South connections in Janet Frame's and Doris Lessing's Life Writing" by Emma Parker

"J.M. Coetzee's Hispanic South" by Cristóbal Pérez Barra

"The representation of water-spirits in southern African Literature" by Confidence Joseph

"The Fugitive Lives of David Stuurman" by Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis.

"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

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, a Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, and Extraordinary Professor in English, University of Pretoria. She is the author of over 20 books, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literature; Empire Writing, an anthology of colonial literature 1870-1918; Stories of Women: Gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation, as well as of five novels, two collections of short stories and a biography of Nelson Mandela.

Katherine Collins is a poet and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.