A new compass for global reading: looking at the world from the far southern latitudes

A northern viewpoint is most often the default, while the south—the far southern latitudes occupied by Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and southern Africa, among others—seems far away and ignorable. In Southern Imagining, Elleke Boehmer offers an alternative perspective, using literary, scientific and cultural material to explore how we look at the world from the south. Reading, she argues, is a transformative means of reversing our usual planetary orientation and rearranging our perceptual geography. Boehmer examines writing from across southern continents and islands, considering how we imaginatively inhabit the farthest reaches of our planet. Creators ranging from the Portuguese epic poet Luís de Camões to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luis Borges and ancient Indigenous storytellers capture the edgy and austere experiences of the far south.

For Boehmer, imaginative work stimulates and shapes our phenomenological understanding. Southerners often see themselves as far away from where things count, as outsiders, internalising the wider global sense of their relative insignificance. Conversely, when northerners read or hear legends, narratives, songs and poems from the south, it is as if they are located in the south, at least for the duration of the reading or listening. Boehmer suggests that the south-tilted world map, re-centred through song and story, invites us to claim a more involved sense of belonging to our planet, both its north and its south. The writers of the south disrupt conventional ways of seeing and invite us to inhabit our globe differently.

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria and in 2024 she was Visiting International Fellow at the University of Adelaide. She is the author of, among other books, Postcolonial Poetics; Indian Arrivals 1870–1915, winner of the ESSE Book Award; and the field-defining Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors; as well as the collection of short stories To the Volcano and the novel The Shouting in the Dark, winner of the Olive Schreiner Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.