Southern Imagining: A Literary and Cultural History of the Far Southern Hemisphere

Southern Imagining questions and reshapes influential northern imaginative norms. 
It considers how tales of mythical southern lands have moulded global perceptions 
of these worlds and explores the environmental consequences of these imaginings, 
thereby inviting us to inhabit our globe differently.
 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 perspective 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. Writers ranging from 
the Portuguese epic poet Luís de Camöes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Darwin, 
Katherine Mansfield, Jorge Luis Borges and ancient Indigenous scribes, Boehmer finds, 
capture the edgy and austere experiences of the far south.
 Boehmer argues that imaginative work stimulates and shapes our phenomeno
logical understanding. She 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.