Elleke Boehmer

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Elleke Boehmer
Elleke Boehmer (2011)

Elleke Boehmer (* 1961 in Durban , South Africa ) is a South African-British writer and one of the founding figures of the field of Postcolonial Studies . She conducts research in the field of anglophone literatures and is professor of “English-language world literature” at Oxford University .

Her main areas of interest are colonial and post-colonial literature, African and Southeast Asian literature, modernism, migration and diaspora, feminism, masculine literature and identity, nationalism, terrorism, J. M. Coetzee , Katherine Mansfield and Nelson Mandela, and biographies. With her novels she deals with the effects of colonial history and especially the apartheid regime in South Africa.

biography

Elleke Boehmer was born to Dutch immigrants in Durban , South Africa. She studied English and Modern Languages and, after completing her bachelor's degree, taught in a township in Gauteng for 18 months . During her studies she was heavily influenced by the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement . In 1985 she was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship , which allowed her to study at Oxford University at St. John's College . There she first did an MPhil in English Literature 1900 to the present and then wrote her doctoral thesis.

In 1990 her first book was published, the Bildungsroman Screens Against the Sky (German as The End of Heaven ). She taught at St John's College and then at the Universities of Exeter , Leeds and Nottingham Trent before being appointed Hildred Carlile Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway University . Since 2007 she has been Professor of English-Language World Literature at Oxford University.

Boehmer is married and has two sons.

Preoccupation with postcolonialism

Elleke Boehmer's creative writing as well as her academic work and research deal with topics such as migration, identity, diaspora and nationalism. Her best-known books include the monograph Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford University Press, 1995; 2nd edition 2005) and a biography of Nelson Mandela (2008), which has been translated into Arabic, Kurdish, Malay and Portuguese.

Literary work

Elleke Boehmer identifies herself with the term writer-critic , coined by J. M. Coetzee , which gives the same importance to both critical and creative writing and denotes writers who not only write novels but also academic works - or academics who alongside theirs academic work are also active as a writer. Academic and fictional writing have gone hand in hand for Boehmer since she got her first permanent position at the University of Leeds in 1990, two months after her first novel was published. She is the author of five novels and a collection of short stories: Screens against the Sky (nominated for the David Hyam Prize, 1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000, nominated for the SANLAM prize, 2001), Nile Baby (2008) , The Shouting in the Dark (2015, nominated for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize), and Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010).

Other activities and honors

Boehmer is currently Director of the Oxford Research Center in the Humanities (TORCH) (as of 2017). In 2009 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linnaeus University in Sweden, and from 2013 to 2015 Elleke Boehmer was a jury member for the Man Booker Prize . She is also the director of the Oxford Center for Life-Writing at Wolfson College . In 2013 Elleke Boehmer introduced the World Literatures in English course at Oxford University. She leads the fortnightly Postcolonial Seminar to which well-known authors and academics are invited.

Publications

Monographs

  • Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors . Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995, 2nd edition 2005)
  • Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction . Oxford: Oxford University Press (2002)
  • Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation . Manchester: Manchester University Press (2005)
  • Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press (2008)
  • Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire . Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015)

Published books

  • Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918 . Oxford: Oxford University Press (1998)
  • Scouting for Boys: Robert Baden-Powell. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004)
  • JM Coetzee in Context and Theory (with Robert Eaglestone and Katy Iddiols). London: Continuum (2009)
  • Terror and the Postcolonial (with Stephen Morton). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell (2010) ISBN 978-1-4051-9154-8
  • The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, and Multiculturalism (with Sarah de Mul). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (2012)

Novels and short stories

  • Screens Against The Sky . London: Bloomsbury (1990)
  • An Immaculate Figure . London: Bloomsbury (1993)
  • Bloodlines . Cape Town: David Philip (1997)
  • Nile baby . Banbury: Ayebia Clarke (2008)
  • Sharmilla, and Other Portraits . Johannesburg: Jacana (2010)
  • The Shouting in the Dark . Dingwall: Inverness: Sandstone Press (2015)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elleke Boehmer: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005.
  2. ^ Elleke Boehmer: The Shouting in The Dark . Sandstone Press, Dingwall, Inverness 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Boehmer, Elleke
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African-British writer, one of the founders of Postcolonial Studies
DATE OF BIRTH 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Durban