The Southern Lives Network at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing is convened by Professor Elleke Boehmer and rises out of her British Academy funded Southern Imagining and Tracing Southern Latitudes projects. The Network brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial and Global South studies and polar studies, to explore how the high southern latitudes are imagined through life-writing. We will be meeting online for the first time in December 2020 and will convene in person in December 2021 at OCLW. We are interested in how southern worlds (the southern extremities of the large continents, including Australia, and the southern oceans and islands) are often seen as interconnected or in relation to each other, including in biography, memoir and auto-fiction. This reciprocity forms an important part of the imaginative mapping that life-writing stimulates.
Our research questions include:
- What does it mean to view the world from a southern hemisphere perspective?
- What perspectives do global southern writing and story-telling offer to northern imaginative norms, including that of the ‘Global South’?
- How might the postcolonial and world literature fields be approached from a consciously antipodean or about-face viewpoint?
- How do we build comparative and lateral links across southern spaces and lives, and what is the epistemological and environmental traction of doing so?
The inaugural meeting of the network will take place on Zoom, 8th December, 11:00 – 13:00
Agenda
Southern Lives
Preliminary conversation
11:00:
Elleke Boehmer – greeting and introduction
Dan Hicks – southern objects
11:10-11:40
Carolyn Philpott
Porscha Fermanis
Sarah Comyn
Elizabeth Leane
Confidence Joseph
11:40-12:05
Katherine Collins
Emma Parker
Archie Davies
Priyanka Shivadas
Isaac Ndlovu
12:05-12:10: Short ‘cushion’ space – comfort break
12:10-12:35
Phindezwa Mnyaka
Louis Rogers
Bernhard Schirg
Pablo Wainschenker
Elizabeth Lewis Williams
12:35-12:50
Charne Lavery
Joe Shaughnessy
Cristobal Perez Barra
Khutso Mabokela
12:50-12:59
Further comments and close
