E Boehmer
Biographic Data
| ID | 46606 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Boehmer |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Boehmer |
| SIGNATURE | BOEHMER E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0909-4165 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 101 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Southern Imagining
Accelerating achievement for Africa’s adolescents
By 2050, one in four people in the world will live in Africa. The region’s adolescents are our present and future but need effective services to support their holistic health and wellbeing, advance their education, allow them to flourish, and protect them from adversity. This paper reviews evidence for a new concept of ‘development accelerators’: interventions that can help achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals simultaneously. Across 26 …
Laura's living writing
My contribution is a meditation on Laura Marcus's reflections on light – its rhythms and effects – that draws on insights from Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, especially the ‘Time Passes’ interlude in To the Lighthouse. The essay notes in particular Marcus's extraordinary capacity to read light equally in literary writing as in film
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction outlines the long trajectory of the life of Nelson Mandela. It also considers images, narratives, politics, and more critical revisionist literature on Mandela in an effort to create the iconic image of Mandela. Mandela’s life greatly coincides with the historical and political context of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and the post-apartheid period of difficult reconciliation. The VSI feat…
The Invisibility of Southern Migration
This essay explores life-writing and literary fiction as different but related modes of making visible and working through the predicaments and perils of migration in the south, specifically, to or towards Australia and South Africa. Within the framework of J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy in part about migration south (2013, 2016, 2019), I look at how Behrouz Boochani’s translated memoir No Friend but the Mountains (2019), Jonny Steinberg’s creativ…
Interventions in Adolescent Lives in Africa Through Story
This essay sets out to show how stories can help shape and change people’s understanding of their environment and how it impacts upon them. We report on how these ideas of storytelling informed a March 2020 UKRI GCRF funded Accelerate Hub workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, on narrative and adolescence in Africa, and point to related examples of storytelling interventions from elsewhere on the continent. We then explore questions that the worksh…
Time and distance
This short perspective offers meditations on our shared sense of time and distance under the global COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020. It suggests that different kinds of storytelling, including on social media, offered people helpful ways of shaping time, feeling connected, and making it from day to day. Poetic forms, too, provided frameworks for a better understanding of the crisis. The article draws first from research on young South Africans’ experi…
Storying ourselves
Mindful of 2020’s global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko’s ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousness-raising as they impact young people’s empowerment in African countries. In the context of the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF) Accelerate Hub (2019–24), a project exploring interventions in adolescents’ lives …
Cosmopolitan Exchanges
Class, as well as culture, can characterize cosmopolitan solidarity, as Elleke Boehmer’s discussion of the virtual cosmopolitanism experienced by colonial and postcolonial readerships in India suggests.
Publishing, the Curriculum and Black British Writing Today
University was of course in the past the pre-eminent training ground for Britain's colonial officers, while the Faculty, one of the largest and oldest English departments in the world, remains in many ways the formative stable of what we understand to be the English literature canon. 2 Both structures were and are built on deeply embedded funds of traditional cultural capital.The reading groups and workshop we organised, based both in English and…
Mandela and Beyond
This essay probes the value of Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela’s career and life’s work as an ongoing object lesson or theory-in-practice. Using two case studies – of the 2019 ‘Official Exhibition’ and of a poem by Koleka Putuma referencing Mandela – the essay asks how South Africa’s first democratic president’s way of doing politics and his facility of interacting even-handedly with political enemies and friends lay down models for the country in the …
Stories of women
the other fellow writers, friends and scholars with whom I've been privileged to share ideas on gender and the nation -and other topics besides! -over the past several years. Inexpressible
Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel
This essay discusses the activity of reading in three postcolonial novels from three different national contexts (Dangarembga in Zimbabwe, Kapur in India, and Adichie in Nigeria). The essay considers the scenes of focused, respectful, even canonical reading staged in these novels, alongside the more selective or eclectic “reading” and citation taking place at the level of the narration. On the basis of this contrast, it suggests that the postcolo…
Reading between life and work
JM Coetzee has remarked that all autobiography is story-telling and also that all writing is a kind of autobiography. Exploring this link between (auto)biography, and fiction as ‘writing’, this essay will offer critical reflections on J.M. Coetzee's longstanding life-writing or ‘autre-fictional’ project as it intersects with two recent biographical studies, John Kannemeyer's J.M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (2012), and David Attwell's J.M. Coetzee…
African and African American Histories in Europe
African and African American Histories in EuropeJoining the Conversation Stephen Tuck (bio) and Elleke Boehmer (bio) From the time that Nubian soldiers contributed to the defense of Hadrian's Wall, one of the Roman Empire's northern most frontiers, British history has been threaded through with African lives, presences, materials, and objects, as Peter Fryer's research back in the 1980s first showed us (1–5). Indeed, the threading together and in…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
M andela, N elson (1918–2013)
This entry gives an overview of Nelson Mandela's career as an activist and politician and as president of the new democratic South Africa from 1994.
Indian Arrivals 1870–1915
This book explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and travel writing. The book's four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of Indi…
The 1990s
The article offers a critical contextualized overview of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the decade of the 1990s, at a time when it was edited at the Universities of Leeds and Hull. It looks at the journal’s relations to the emerging and rapidly changing field of postcolonial literary studies, when JCL shifted from offering fairly predictable close readings of writers still predominantly described as “Commonwealth”, to more prominently …
Ben Okri, My Neighbor and Friend
Ben Okri, My Neighbor and Friend Elleke Boehmer (bio) When in autumn of that year, 1987, our new Cypriot landlady told us, whispering, that a Nigerian novelist would be moving into the ground-floor Finsbury Park flat, just below ours, I felt that my luck was in. My flatmates and I, all of us students with a SOAS association, had just moved into the square built, yellow-brick house ourselves. I was about to embark on a PhD in African literature, o…
The Text in the World, the World through the Text
The World and the Postcolonial
This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature . Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the differe…
Intentional dissonance
Towards a Neerlandophone Postcolonial Studies
Addressing the central question of the round table of DiGeSt, we would like to focus on the challenges that gender and diversity entail for the study of literatures in Dutch.Our contribution is based on the programmatic introduction to The Postcolonial Low Countries (Boehmer & De Mul, 2012), in which we put under pressure the definitive concepts of postcolonial studies in its more conventional anglophone or francophone formation, as well as perce…
Stories of women
Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. 'Stories of women' combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality…
Stories of women
Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. 'Stories of women' combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality…
Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920
This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, this book builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellate…
The World and the Postcolonial
This article examines the increasing competition in the academic market between conventional terms such as postcolonial and anglophone literature and their cognates, and the newly current term world literature . Even in postcolonial studies circles, world literature is increasingly taken to refer not only to ‘the best ever written’, as before, but to literature produced within and in response to a globalizing world. The paper explores the differe…
Global and textual webs in an age of transnational capitalism; or, what isn't new about Empire
The article offers a postcolonial historicization of contemporary globalization theory, by suggesting that the densely networked British empire of the end of the nineteenth century anticipated the interconnected and mediatized world which we inhabit today
Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain
This essay considers the personal political ramifications of the refusal to make a confession, twice enacted in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace . Professor David Lurie refuses officially to apologize for sexually abusing a student; and, later, his daughter Lucy, the victim of a gang rape, refuses to lay charges or speak of what has happened. In a context informed by the recent experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the novel thu…
Storying ourselves
Mindful of 2020’s global focus on questions of systemic racism, this article looks at the continuing salience of the South African activist Steve Biko’s ideas about Black Consciousness and consciousness-raising as they impact young people’s empowerment in African countries. In the context of the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF) Accelerate Hub (2019–24), a project exploring interventions in adolescents’ lives …
Achebe and His Influence in Some Contemporary African Writing
Keywords: African intertextualityChinua AchebeIgbo curse of twinsinfluencereturning baby motifThings Fall Apart
Beside the West
The essay examines two recent postcolonial women writers' delicate negotiations of definitions of the body, home and national identity, in relation to the transnational forces of war and the market which impinge on national integrity and loyalty. Via readings of work by the Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and the best‐selling Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the essay suggests that, contrary to current definitions of the postcolonial novel, women writers migh…
Questions of neo-orientalism
Differential Publics—Reading (in) the Postcolonial Novel
This essay discusses the activity of reading in three postcolonial novels from three different national contexts (Dangarembga in Zimbabwe, Kapur in India, and Adichie in Nigeria). The essay considers the scenes of focused, respectful, even canonical reading staged in these novels, alongside the more selective or eclectic “reading” and citation taking place at the level of the narration. On the basis of this contrast, it suggests that the postcolo…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Networks and Traces
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antiq
Versions of Yearning and Dissent
Tropes of Yearning and Dissent
East Is East and South Is South
Boehmer begins by outlining suggestive parallels between the doubly orientalizing reception of an Indian woman poet, Sarojini Naidu, in 1890s London, and the publicity and critical enthusiasm surrounding the appearance of Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things , in the 1990s. Building on these century-broad connections, she goes on to observe how, despite its liberatory agendas, certain constructions within postcolonial criticism ap…
Mandela and Beyond
This essay probes the value of Nelson Rohihlahla Mandela’s career and life’s work as an ongoing object lesson or theory-in-practice. Using two case studies – of the 2019 ‘Official Exhibition’ and of a poem by Koleka Putuma referencing Mandela – the essay asks how South Africa’s first democratic president’s way of doing politics and his facility of interacting even-handedly with political enemies and friends lay down models for the country in the …
African and African American Histories in Europe
African and African American Histories in EuropeJoining the Conversation Stephen Tuck (bio) and Elleke Boehmer (bio) From the time that Nubian soldiers contributed to the defense of Hadrian's Wall, one of the Roman Empire's northern most frontiers, British history has been threaded through with African lives, presences, materials, and objects, as Peter Fryer's research back in the 1980s first showed us (1–5). Indeed, the threading together and in…
The 1990s
The article offers a critical contextualized overview of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature in the decade of the 1990s, at a time when it was edited at the Universities of Leeds and Hull. It looks at the journal’s relations to the emerging and rapidly changing field of postcolonial literary studies, when JCL shifted from offering fairly predictable close readings of writers still predominantly described as “Commonwealth”, to more prominently …
Intentional dissonance
Towards a Neerlandophone Postcolonial Studies
Addressing the central question of the round table of DiGeSt, we would like to focus on the challenges that gender and diversity entail for the study of literatures in Dutch.Our contribution is based on the programmatic introduction to The Postcolonial Low Countries (Boehmer & De Mul, 2012), in which we put under pressure the definitive concepts of postcolonial studies in its more conventional anglophone or francophone formation, as well as perce…
How to Feel Global
Elleke Boehmer’s ‘How to Feel Global’ responds to the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms by exploring some of the variations and differences in the meaning of the global and the modern that are thrown up by bringing these terms into critical conjunction. In particular, the review examines the different conceptions of the world that underlie the Handbook’s readings of global modernism, and the contradiction that is produced when a close focus on…
Postcolonial Writing and Terror
This is an electronic version of an article published as Boehmer, Elleke (2007) 'Postcolonial Writing and Terror', Wasafiri, 22:2, 4-7. Wasafiri is available online at \thttp://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=0269-0055&volume=22&issue=2&spage=4
Postcolonial terrorist The example of Nelson Mandela
The essay discusses the 1950s-early 1960s militant phase in Mandela's political career, as he moved from a Gandhian passive resistance approach to a commitment to armed struggle. From a postcolonial critical perspective, this phase, labelled 'terroristic' by some of his detractors, rather appears as nuanced and conflicted
Introduction to Special Issue Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance
Introduction
(1995). Introduction: new representations out of neglected spaces: changing paradigms in South African writing. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 21, South African literature: paradigms forming and reinformed, pp. 557-560
Speaking from the periphery
White Boy Running. Christopher Hope London: Secker and Warburg. 1988. 273pp. £10.95hb The House Next Door to Africa. Denis Hirson London: Carcanet. 1987. 99pp. £9.95hb Bloodsong and Other Stories of South Africa. Ernst Havemann London: Hamish Hamilton. 1988. 134pp. £10.95hb/£5.95pb The Trap, and A Dance in the Sun. Dan Jacobson Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988. 205pp. £3.95pb Selected Plays: Master Harold... and the Boys, Bloodknot, Hello an…
The Master's Dance to the Master's Voice
Books reviewed
Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead: the Social Biography of an African Family (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 1991), xi, 211pp, £30 Norma J. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), x, 303pp, £35 K. Spink, Black Sash: the Beginning of a Bridge in South Africa (Methuen: London, 1991), xvi, 336pp, £14.99 Vernon February, The Afrikaners of South Africa (Kegan Paul International: London a…
Ginger
Report
In South Africa at election time
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
Wole Soyinka, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee - postcolonial writers from around the world now enjoy wide popularity. In this book, Elleke Boehmer looks challengingly at the history of such writing, how it developed and how it departs from writing in the Empire in the Victorian period. Throughout this literature key themes and images - journeying, loss, the search for community, the arrival of the stranger - are expande…
Introduction
(1995). Introduction: new representations out of neglected spaces: changing paradigms in South African writing. Journal of Southern African Studies: Vol. 21, South African literature: paradigms forming and reinformed, pp. 557-560
Writing South Africa
During the final years of the apartheid era and the subsequent transition to democracy, South African literary writing caught the world's attention as never before. Writers responded to the changing political situation and its daily impact on the country's inhabitants with works that recorded or satirised state-enforced racism, explored the possibilities of resistance and rebuilding, and creatively addressed the vexed question of literature's rel…
Questions of neo-orientalism
Without the West
Postcolonialism and Autobiography (review)
Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds. Postcolonialism and Autobiography. Studies in Comparative Literature 19. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1998. 264 pp. ISBN 9-0420-0685-4, $49.50
East Is East and South Is South
Boehmer begins by outlining suggestive parallels between the doubly orientalizing reception of an Indian woman poet, Sarojini Naidu, in 1890s London, and the publicity and critical enthusiasm surrounding the appearance of Arundhati Roy's first novel, The God of Small Things , in the 1990s. Building on these century-broad connections, she goes on to observe how, despite its liberatory agendas, certain constructions within postcolonial criticism ap…
Introduction to Special Issue Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance
Not Saying Sorry, Not Speaking Pain
This essay considers the personal political ramifications of the refusal to make a confession, twice enacted in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace . Professor David Lurie refuses officially to apologize for sexually abusing a student; and, later, his daughter Lucy, the victim of a gang rape, refuses to lay charges or speak of what has happened. In a context informed by the recent experience of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, the novel thu…
Tropes of Yearning and Dissent
Skin
Beside the West
The essay examines two recent postcolonial women writers' delicate negotiations of definitions of the body, home and national identity, in relation to the transnational forces of war and the market which impinge on national integrity and loyalty. Via readings of work by the Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and the best‐selling Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the essay suggests that, contrary to current definitions of the postcolonial novel, women writers migh…
Global and textual webs in an age of transnational capitalism; or, what isn't new about Empire
The article offers a postcolonial historicization of contemporary globalization theory, by suggesting that the densely networked British empire of the end of the nineteenth century anticipated the interconnected and mediatized world which we inhabit today
‘But Transmitters’?1
‘Able to Sing their Songs’
This chapter observes how the over-determined nationalist energies of the black South African politician and writer Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje in the time extending from the Boer War to the aftermath of the First World War generated both a pan-nationalist identification with W. E. B. Du Bois's African America, and a silent borrowing from South African Indian, most notably Gandhian, strategies of passive resistance. It focuses on the nationalist's …
India the Starting Point
This chapter investigates the anti-imperial collaboration between Aurobindo Ghose and Sister Nivedita during the critical time in the fortunes of the British Empire. It considers some of the definitive aspects of Nivedita and Aurobindo's anti-colonial self-making or self-translation, focusing on their different investments in the cross-border nationalism of Bengal. Particular notice is given to Nivedita's militancy and to her Kali-worship as the …
‘Immeasurable Strangeness’ between Empire and Modernism
This chapter highlights cross-border interaction into the interdiscursive, late-imperial formation that was early 20th-century modernism. By examining in particular the salient cross-cultural (Europe-Asia) associations investigated in the work of Anglo-Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the cosmopolitan writer, publisher, and anti-imperialist Leonard Woolf, the chapter determines whether the cross-border (‘cosmo-national’) contacts pursued by nationalist…
‘The master's dance to the master's voice’
In Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981), the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o points to the strong position that women characters have held in his work over the years. Beginning with the writing of the epic-length Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi came unequivocally to identify with the plight of the neo-colonially betrayed Kenyan peasantry. His nationalism of the 1960s thus turned increasingly revolutionary and openly Marxist. With respect to his…
The hero's story
Narratives give form to and legitimate the process of post-colonial and national coming-into-being. In nationalist movements in India and Africa, leaders' tales operate as inaugural symbolic texts shaping and justifying configurations of status and power in the post-colonial nation(-to-be), including the interconnection of nationalist ideology and gender politics. Looked at more closely, the leader's autobiography effectively sets in motion a pro…
Sociology (46 works) · History (44 works) · Art (40 works) · Political science (35 works) · Literature (30 works) · Law (28 works) · Politics (23 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (23 works) · South African History and Culture (22 works) · Gender Studies (20 works)