Charne Lavery
Biographic Data
| ID | 904682 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charne Lavery |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charne |
| FAMILY NAME | Lavery |
| SIGNATURE | LAVERY C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9907-4143 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World
The Briny South is a book about how it has felt to be forcibly far from home—or, at least, what it is possible to say or know about the feelings of displacement, particularly when the displaced are also far away in time and from power. It focuses on forced displacement in the context of the Indian Ocean world, exploring what its archives reveal about the experiences of enslavement, indenture, and penal transportation. The term “the briny south” i…
“The Only Almost Germ-Free Continent Left”
This article examines the role of pandemics and viruses in cultural perceptions of Antarctica over the past century. In the popular imagination, Antarctica has often been framed as a place of purity, refuge, and isolation. In a series of fiction and screen texts from the nineteenth century to the present, viruses feature prominently. The texts fall into two categories: narratives in which Antarctica is the sole source of safety in a pandemic-rava…
Water/colour/bead
Keywords design, embodied modes, humanities, interdisciplinary, materiality, multimodal practices, visual, oceanic
White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that expression of space, through examining ways in which the author’s structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argue…
Reading for Water
This introduction provides a wide-ranging framing for a set of essays that explores the topic “Reading for Water” in southern African literature. The introduction begins by demonstrating this method through snapshots of three seminal South African novels: Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006), A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980) and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983). This is followed by a discussion of Sarah Nuttall’s ess…
Postcolonial Plumbing: Reading for Wastewater in Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue
Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue is a book about political transition, the new South Africa, and the challenges of transformation, but it is also a book about sewage. Toilets, outhouses and worms feature prominently, as do sewerage systems and wastewater treatment facilities, particularly in small towns and rural areas. Scatological themes are a staple of postcolonial fiction, constituting what has been called “excremental postcolonialism”. Krog’…
The Southern Indian Ocean and the Oceanic South
The southern Indian Ocean constitutes a distinct oceanographic region that offers useful links, connections, and perspectives as an area of inquiry, in the domain of colonial and postcolonial literature but also more widely. The region is both particularly oceanic and particularly southern, making it a key part of the ‘oceanic South’, a formulation which overlays the postcolonial poverty of the Global South with its oceanicity. As an area of inqu…
Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s African Ocean
The Literary Indian Ocean: An Introduction
Wakanda Phambili!: African Science Fiction for Reimagining the Anthropocene
This chapter develops and articulates an African futurist approach to framing and meeting the challenges of social-ecological futures. It advocates a broader conception of futures as lived practice embedded within specific places (e.g. Africa) and their histories, and explores how such practice can form an alternative model to current (Western) climate and environmental scenarios. It proposes that narratives from non-Western cultures offer more n…
Reading in Antarctica
In April 2019, Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, colleagues from the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based in Johannesburg, undertook a trip to the Antarctic peninsula. In this article, they discuss their shared yet distinct experiences of the same ten-day cruise, focused on the experience, history, literature, indispensability, and impossibility of reading in Antarctica. The article proceeds in three steps: ‘Not Reading in Antarc…
On Water
Thinking Oceanically: Ilha de Moçambique/Island of Mozambique
This special issue hosts a conversation between Ilha de Moçambique and its surrounding oceans and coastlines, convening a globally-oriented set of questions around a rich engagement with the local, and in so doing among material culture and new materialisms, maritime archaeology and poetry. Most significantly, it takes the idea of ‘East Africa’, as a region, underwater. Through shipwrecks, shells and sounds, it explores the possibility of incorpo…
Diving into the Slave Wreck: The São José Paquete d’Africa and Yvette Christiansë’s Imprendehora
The first slave wreck to be definitively identified is the São José-Paquete de Africa, a slave ship from Mozambique Island wrecked off the coast of Cape Town. This paper takes that wreck as case study and context for the southern slave geographies and elongated histories addressed also in Yvette Christiansë’s Imprendehora. Both memorialise the ‘long middle passage’ — between east Africa and South America across the Southern Hemisphere, and well i…
The Oceanic South
This essay proposes the category of the oceanic South. It presents the Southern Hemisphere’s blue expanses as one of its defining features and elaborates from this a framework that brings into agitated contention the extractive economies of the North, the persistent legacies of settler colonialism in the South, and other interlocking human and more-than-human itineraries. Tracking a drift into the Southern Ocean in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, t…
Antarctica and Africa: Narrating alternate futures
Africa has been marginalised in the history of Antarctica, a politics of exclusion (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) reflected unsurprisingly by a dearth of imaginative, cultural and literary engagement. But, in addition to paleontological and geophysical links, Antarctica has increasing interrelationship with Africa’s climactic future. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, and Antarctica an…
The Indian Ocean Meets the South Seas: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Beachcombers
The Darker Side of Durban: South African Crime Fiction and Indian Ocean Underworlds
Ad hoc, illegal and invisible links between the coasts and countries of the Indian Ocean persist in the late 20th and 21st centuries. These can be discerned, from the perspective of South Africa, through a reading of their fictional traces. Rather than considering the more established canon of South African Indian writing, which elaborates familial and migratory links to south Asia, I discuss connections of illegality that appear in the resurging…
Outsides and outsiders: Environmental critique in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef
In Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, the jungle is depicted as a great sea. It represents a potent outside, an unknowable, unconquerable boundary zone characterized by natural and supernatural evils. Romesh Gunesekara’s Reef depicts the island-surrounding Indian Ocean in similar terms — the undersea world is described as an ungovernable jungle, and the ocean an ever-encroaching danger. Both novels highlight the metaphoric importance of t…
White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space
Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that expression of space, through examining ways in which the author's structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argue…
Antarctica and Africa: Narrating alternate futures
Africa has been marginalised in the history of Antarctica, a politics of exclusion (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) reflected unsurprisingly by a dearth of imaginative, cultural and literary engagement. But, in addition to paleontological and geophysical links, Antarctica has increasing interrelationship with Africa’s climactic future. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, and Antarctica an…
White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space
Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that expression of space, through examining ways in which the author's structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argue…
The Darker Side of Durban: South African Crime Fiction and Indian Ocean Underworlds
Ad hoc, illegal and invisible links between the coasts and countries of the Indian Ocean persist in the late 20th and 21st centuries. These can be discerned, from the perspective of South Africa, through a reading of their fictional traces. Rather than considering the more established canon of South African Indian writing, which elaborates familial and migratory links to south Asia, I discuss connections of illegality that appear in the resurging…
Outsides and outsiders: Environmental critique in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef
In Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, the jungle is depicted as a great sea. It represents a potent outside, an unknowable, unconquerable boundary zone characterized by natural and supernatural evils. Romesh Gunesekara’s Reef depicts the island-surrounding Indian Ocean in similar terms — the undersea world is described as an ungovernable jungle, and the ocean an ever-encroaching danger. Both novels highlight the metaphoric importance of t…
The Southern Indian Ocean and the Oceanic South
The southern Indian Ocean constitutes a distinct oceanographic region that offers useful links, connections, and perspectives as an area of inquiry, in the domain of colonial and postcolonial literature but also more widely. The region is both particularly oceanic and particularly southern, making it a key part of the ‘oceanic South’, a formulation which overlays the postcolonial poverty of the Global South with its oceanicity. As an area of inqu…
On Water
Diving into the Slave Wreck: The São José Paquete d’Africa and Yvette Christiansë’s Imprendehora
The first slave wreck to be definitively identified is the São José-Paquete de Africa, a slave ship from Mozambique Island wrecked off the coast of Cape Town. This paper takes that wreck as case study and context for the southern slave geographies and elongated histories addressed also in Yvette Christiansë’s Imprendehora. Both memorialise the ‘long middle passage’ — between east Africa and South America across the Southern Hemisphere, and well i…
The Indian Ocean Meets the South Seas: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Beachcombers
White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space
Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that expression of space, through examining ways in which the author's structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argue…
Outsides and outsiders: Environmental critique in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle and Romesh Gunesekera’s Reef
In Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle, the jungle is depicted as a great sea. It represents a potent outside, an unknowable, unconquerable boundary zone characterized by natural and supernatural evils. Romesh Gunesekara’s Reef depicts the island-surrounding Indian Ocean in similar terms — the undersea world is described as an ungovernable jungle, and the ocean an ever-encroaching danger. Both novels highlight the metaphoric importance of t…
The Darker Side of Durban: South African Crime Fiction and Indian Ocean Underworlds
Ad hoc, illegal and invisible links between the coasts and countries of the Indian Ocean persist in the late 20th and 21st centuries. These can be discerned, from the perspective of South Africa, through a reading of their fictional traces. Rather than considering the more established canon of South African Indian writing, which elaborates familial and migratory links to south Asia, I discuss connections of illegality that appear in the resurging…
The Indian Ocean Meets the South Seas: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Beachcombers
The Oceanic South
This essay proposes the category of the oceanic South. It presents the Southern Hemisphere’s blue expanses as one of its defining features and elaborates from this a framework that brings into agitated contention the extractive economies of the North, the persistent legacies of settler colonialism in the South, and other interlocking human and more-than-human itineraries. Tracking a drift into the Southern Ocean in the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, t…
Antarctica and Africa: Narrating alternate futures
Africa has been marginalised in the history of Antarctica, a politics of exclusion (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) reflected unsurprisingly by a dearth of imaginative, cultural and literary engagement. But, in addition to paleontological and geophysical links, Antarctica has increasing interrelationship with Africa’s climactic future. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, and Antarctica an…
Thinking Oceanically: Ilha de Moçambique/Island of Mozambique
This special issue hosts a conversation between Ilha de Moçambique and its surrounding oceans and coastlines, convening a globally-oriented set of questions around a rich engagement with the local, and in so doing among material culture and new materialisms, maritime archaeology and poetry. Most significantly, it takes the idea of ‘East Africa’, as a region, underwater. Through shipwrecks, shells and sounds, it explores the possibility of incorpo…
Diving into the Slave Wreck: The São José Paquete d’Africa and Yvette Christiansë’s Imprendehora
The first slave wreck to be definitively identified is the São José-Paquete de Africa, a slave ship from Mozambique Island wrecked off the coast of Cape Town. This paper takes that wreck as case study and context for the southern slave geographies and elongated histories addressed also in Yvette Christiansë’s Imprendehora. Both memorialise the ‘long middle passage’ — between east Africa and South America across the Southern Hemisphere, and well i…
Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s African Ocean
The Literary Indian Ocean: An Introduction
Wakanda Phambili!: African Science Fiction for Reimagining the Anthropocene
This chapter develops and articulates an African futurist approach to framing and meeting the challenges of social-ecological futures. It advocates a broader conception of futures as lived practice embedded within specific places (e.g. Africa) and their histories, and explores how such practice can form an alternative model to current (Western) climate and environmental scenarios. It proposes that narratives from non-Western cultures offer more n…
Reading in Antarctica
In April 2019, Isabel Hofmeyr and Charne Lavery, colleagues from the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based in Johannesburg, undertook a trip to the Antarctic peninsula. In this article, they discuss their shared yet distinct experiences of the same ten-day cruise, focused on the experience, history, literature, indispensability, and impossibility of reading in Antarctica. The article proceeds in three steps: ‘Not Reading in Antarc…
On Water
Water/colour/bead
Keywords design, embodied modes, humanities, interdisciplinary, materiality, multimodal practices, visual, oceanic
White-washed Minarets and Slimy Gutters: Abdulrazak Gurnah, Narrative Form and Indian Ocean Space
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels map a distinctive East African coastal space interlinked with the Indian Ocean littoral through travel, trade and culture. This article considers the form given to that expression of space, through examining ways in which the author’s structural and formal choices relate to his writing of the Indian Ocean. Drawing on the Lefebvrean distinction between representations of space and representational space, this paper argue…
Reading for Water
This introduction provides a wide-ranging framing for a set of essays that explores the topic “Reading for Water” in southern African literature. The introduction begins by demonstrating this method through snapshots of three seminal South African novels: Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2006), A. C. Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors (1980) and J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983). This is followed by a discussion of Sarah Nuttall’s ess…
Postcolonial Plumbing: Reading for Wastewater in Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue
Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue is a book about political transition, the new South Africa, and the challenges of transformation, but it is also a book about sewage. Toilets, outhouses and worms feature prominently, as do sewerage systems and wastewater treatment facilities, particularly in small towns and rural areas. Scatological themes are a staple of postcolonial fiction, constituting what has been called “excremental postcolonialism”. Krog’…
The Southern Indian Ocean and the Oceanic South
The southern Indian Ocean constitutes a distinct oceanographic region that offers useful links, connections, and perspectives as an area of inquiry, in the domain of colonial and postcolonial literature but also more widely. The region is both particularly oceanic and particularly southern, making it a key part of the ‘oceanic South’, a formulation which overlays the postcolonial poverty of the Global South with its oceanicity. As an area of inqu…
“The Only Almost Germ-Free Continent Left”
This article examines the role of pandemics and viruses in cultural perceptions of Antarctica over the past century. In the popular imagination, Antarctica has often been framed as a place of purity, refuge, and isolation. In a series of fiction and screen texts from the nineteenth century to the present, viruses feature prominently. The texts fall into two categories: narratives in which Antarctica is the sole source of safety in a pandemic-rava…
The Briny South: Displacement and Sentiment in the Indian Ocean World
The Briny South is a book about how it has felt to be forcibly far from home—or, at least, what it is possible to say or know about the feelings of displacement, particularly when the displaced are also far away in time and from power. It focuses on forced displacement in the context of the Indian Ocean world, exploring what its archives reveal about the experiences of enslavement, indenture, and penal transportation. The term “the briny south” i…
History (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (12 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Geology (9 works) · Oceanography (9 works) · Indian ocean (8 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (7 works) · Travel Writing and Literature (7 works)