Description: "This book asks how life writing from the southern hemisphere impacts how we understand and read life narratives and perceive our planet. Redressing global alignments that champion the north, it critical examination of life stories provide a countervailing and alternative perspective that unsettles, challenges and enriches the imaginative norms that have informed life writing studies so far. Looking at writing from South America, southern Africa, 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"-- Provided by publisher.
Brief description: Katherine Collins is a poet and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research spans the creative and critical practices involved in the writing of marginalised lives, such as the politics and poetics of life writing, testimonial cultures and witnessing, and autobiographies of resistance.
Review Quotes: "This fine and lively collection offers a wide range of reflections on human (and non-human) life in southerly climes, explored with due attention to the linguistic, poetic and epistemological contours of writings that take their bearings from beyond the limited purview of the global north. The textured imaginaries that come into view in these pages (readers encounter water spirits, musical lives, tsunamis, and the teeming life of seemingly frozen worlds) have implications for cultural theory: they promise to enrich the work of southern theory, as well as to invigorate memory studies, in part by complicating the individualised self that has tended to shape northern cultures of memory, historically. This is not simply by virtue of the attention given to southern life writing in all its complexity, but also in the invitation to recognise the fragmenting effects of colonial modernity, and to take heart from the non-linear temporalities of lives lived in sync with tidal energies and seasonal rhythms. Though it bears witness to the disproportionate effects of climate crisis and extractionist consumerism across an unequal world, this collection is above all a hopeful one: it affirms the renewal, resistance and solidarity that are possible when southern perspectives are allowed to shape the inquiry." --Sandra Young, Professor of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa