SOUTHERN IMAGINING, a literary and cultural history of the far southern hemisphere

308pp., illus., paperback, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781776149858

First published in the USA in 2025.

Elleke Boehmer considers how influential northern imaginative norms and tales of mythical southern lands have moulded global perceptions of these worlds, and explores the environmental consequences of these imaginings, inviting us to inhabit our globe differently.

She examines writing from across southern continents and islands - from Luís de Camöes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luis Borges and ancient Indigenous scribes - to find writers that capture the edgy and austere experiences of the far south.

“The southern oceans have been presented as a space of the limitless beyond, an untamed blank space inscribed on by imperial voyagers and writers in search of vastness. Boehmer brings erudition, passion and poetry to the project of generating a vast archive of filiations between indigenous cosmologies and the literary imagination. This book shows how transhemispheric conversations can move us beyond a northern solipsism to think with the planetary.” Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand

“Elleke Boehmer places readers imaginatively and critically in the global south, pulling our centre of gravity into Australia, southern Africa and the extended Pacific. Her book is beautifully and accessibly written, welcoming readers to complex southern mind-worlds, where histories, cultures, geographies and voices intersect so vividly. This book looks afresh at critical and imaginative ways of being in the southern hemisphere, and welcomes new readers to a crucial paradigm for literary teaching and scholarship.” Sophie Gee, author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and Extraordinary Professor in English at the 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.