Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere

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.

From Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South, and polar studies, and presents works on human, animal, and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts, and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the south has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, allowing us to better conceptualise the planet ‘from below’.