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.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Island at the Edge of the World

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What We Are Reading Today: Island at the Edge of the World

  • Pitts has gone deeper than any other writer in cutting through the miasma of misperceptions that shrouds the island, even if his work sometimes bogs down in numbing detail

Author: Mike Pitts

In his ‘Island at the Edge of the World,’ British archeologist Mike Pitts delves into the misconceptions and legends surrounding a complex ancient culture.
The book is a work of historical revisionism that re-examines the history of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, using new archeological evidence, a fresh reading of 18th-century European accounts, and the long-overlooked work of early 20th-century anthropologist Katherine Routledge
Pitts’ investigation offers authoritative new insights into what really happened on the island.
Pitts has gone deeper than any other writer in cutting through the miasma of misperceptions that shrouds the island, even if his work sometimes bogs down in numbing detail.
Many questions still remain, but this is the most compelling and comprehensive account yet published of the extraordinary story of Easter Island.