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.

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Published by Bloomsbury Press, 2024

Edited with Katherine Collins

Exploring lives lived, written and narrated in and from the Global South, the far South and the ultimate South, Antarctica, this book asks how life writing from southerly compass points impact both how we understand and read life narratives, and ultimately how we perceive our planet. Southern geographies, histories and lives have often been overlooked and defined by northern perspectives; Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere redresses this North/South alignment in its critical examination of life stories, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies from the southern hemisphere, providing a countervailing and alternative perspective that will unsettle, challenge and enrich the imaginative norms that inform life writing studies.

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Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages.

This finger-on-the-pulse book re-aligns postcolonial poetics and politics, reading and form and returns us to postcolonial concerns via new pathways. A series of finely-calibrated readings range across regions and genres. Written with Boehmer’s characteristic elegance and lucidity, this highly-teachable volume will be around for some time to come.

—Isabel Hofmyer

Elleke Boehmer brings a much-needed emphasis on readerly engagement to the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. In these lucid essays, Boehmer argues eloquently for a pragmatic poetics: one that is attuned to the affordance of form as well as the dynamic and charged relations between readers and literary works.

—Rita Felski

For those of us who’ve been trying for decades to drag the aesthetic into postcolonial studies, Elleke’s Boehmer’s lively, lucid, and wide-ranging book finally pushes it across the line. Postcolonial Poetics makes the spirited yet judicious argument that attention to form and literary structure need not shortchange political or material content. With its commanding knowledge of the field, this book reveals the aesthetic means by which literature illuminates the historical violence and material inequalities of the postcolonial world. Elucidating the relation between literature’s mimetic what and its formal how, Boehmer’s important intervention opens new futures for postcolonial studies.

—Jahan Ramazani

Throughout Postcolonial poetics, Boehmer’s careful examination of “reading” practices allows for not only a deeper understanding of the formal, aesthetic dimension of postcolonial writing, but our role as readers in decoding and experiencing a text. It constitutes an invigorating relocation of attention in postcolonial studies.

—Karina Magdalena Szczurek

Boehmer’s book is … a vindication of postcolonial studies and of the potential of postcolonial literature to change the world. She agrees with Okri’s suggestion that the writer’s task is to remake the world, and sees the potential of the reader to activate the work’s resistant power.

—Jenni Ramone

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Winner: 2016 ESSE Book Award for Literatures in the English language

Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. The book’s four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal, to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration.

In this luminous literary history of Indians’ encounter with English metropolitan culture, Elleke Boehmer asks us to dwell in the poetics of arrival itself. In its symbolic structures she traces not simply aesthetic forms or micro-dispositions of power but the very psychic life of the cross-border spaces that Indians in diaspora set into motion. It’s this dynamic terrain which, she argues, configured English modernity—that inimitable mesh whose recesses she illuminates with authority and affinity. All those who seek to understand the work of India and Indians in the making of imperial Britain will have to reckon with this book.

—Antoinette Burton

Written with a rare combination of subtlety, style and psychological nuance, Indian Arrivals 1870–1915 is as remarkable a work of literary and cultural history as it is a meditation on what it is to ‘arrive’—in all senses of the word—in the strange familiarity of the imperial metropolis.

—Santanu Das

[A] lucid study of the complicated—but not necessarily riven—landscape of intercultural contacts between Britons and Indians on British soil at the height of the Empire . . . a luminous literary history.

—Tabish Khair

Boehmer discovers in the writings of these figures a poetics of arrival and uncovers the ways in which these travelers from India changed the culture of their new home.

—Jeffrey N. Cox

The range of texts examined is impressive, and includes not only literary works, but also correspondence, journals and memoirs … [a] carefully researched and beautifully written book […] which sensitively and empathetically explores the multi-layered meanings of ‘arrival’.

—Amelia Bonea

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The Postcolonial Low Countries is the first book to bring together comparative approaches to the emergent field of neerlandophone postcolonial studies. Each one of the essays puts under pressure the standard postcolonial concepts in their more well-known Anglo-American or francophone forms, as well as perceptions of the Low Countries, Belgium and the Netherlands, as lying outside the postcolonial domain.

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India has often been at the centre of debates about the postcolonial and transnational condition. Offering a challenging new direction for the field, this Reader confronts how theory in the Indian context is responding in vital terms to our understanding of that condition today.

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Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial literature and culture.

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Nobel Laureate 2003 and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the world’s leading living novelist writing in English. This innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee’s work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing, and places it in the historical, political and cultural context of South Africa.

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As well as being a remarkable statesman and one of the world’s longest-detained political prisoners, Nelson Mandela has become an exemplary figure of non-racialism and democracy, a moral giant. Once a man with an unknown face, he became after his 1994 release one of the most internationally recognizable images of our time.

Set within a biographical frame, this Very Short Introduction explores the reasons why his story is so important to us in the world at large today, and what his achievements signify. It shows how our picture of Mandela is a great deal more complicated than the legend suggests: his quality of character is combined with his talents as a performer, his maverick ability to absorb transnational influences, his proximity to outstanding colleagues, his steely survival skills, and his postmodern ease with media image. It shows how many different interconnected stories, histories, values, and symbols combine in the famous name Nelson Mandela.

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Elleke Boehmer’s work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical. ‘Stories of women’ combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, ‘daughter’ writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer offers fine close readings of writers ranging from Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with theorists of the nation like Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee.

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