What We Are Reading Today: Southern Imagining

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Updated 04 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Southern Imagining

  • 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

Author: Elleke Boehmer

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 orientation and rearranging our perceptual geography. Boehmer examines writing from across southern continents and islands.