Witi Ihimaera

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, the essay takes this “most neglected of oceans” as a vantage point from which to draw the contours of the oceanic South and engage its troubled surfaces and lively depths. Thinking through the roiling and hostile, fecund, and unbounded nature of this ocean, the essay follows “the lives of whales” in novels by Witi Ihimaera and Zakes Mda. Sounding the ocean’s imaginative depths, these fictions offer illuminating ways of thinking the South while maintaining an unsettling planetarity.

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, the essay takes this “most neglected of oceans” as a vantage point from which to draw the contours of the oceanic South and engage its troubled surfaces and lively depths. Thinking through the roiling and hostile, fecund, and unbounded nature of this ocean, the essay follows “the lives of whales” in novels by Witi Ihimaera and Zakes Mda. Sounding the ocean’s imaginative depths, these fictions offer illuminating ways of
thinking the South while maintaining an unsettling planetarity.

Postcolonial Literary Geographies examines how ideas about place and space have been transformed in recent decades. It considers the ways in which postcolonial writers have contested views of place as fixed and unchanging and are remapping conceptions of world geography. Individual chapters deal with cartography, botany and gardens, spice, ecologies, animals and zoos, and cities, and the book also considers the importance of archaeology and travel in such debates. Writers whose work receives detailed attention include Amitav Ghosh, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Kroetsch. Challenging both older colonial and more recent global constructions of place, the book argues for an environmental politics that is attentive to the concerns of disadvantaged peoples, animal rights and ecological issues. Preview extracts are available on Amazon -- see below.

The article critiques the historical fiction of Maori New Zealand author Witi Ihimaera, particularly examining the 2009 novel "The Trowenna Sea" and comparing it to his earlier work "Whanau II." The author comments on a shift to a more global perspective in Ihimaera's works. The fiction is analyzed in terms of philosopher Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory and philosopher Georg Lukacs' concept of historical realism.