Southern Imagining

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature at Oxford, and in this highly original, bold and wide-ranging study she invites readers to flip their perspective from the predominance of the north and explore how we look at the world from the south by rearranging our perceptual geography at a time when we need to develop a sense of the planet as a whole. Since the 1500s, Westerners have gradually explored and often colonised the global south, while also gaining a sense of the vastness and perils of the Southern Ocean evoked by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – the author also explores the work of Darwin, Melville and Mary Shelley. We are brought up short on our geo-linguistic bias to see and imagine in a different fashion.