Elleke boehmer wiki

British novelist and literary critic (born 1961)

Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS (born 1961) is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature, history and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.

With her fiction, Boehmer has established an international reputation as a commentator on the impacts and aftereffects of colonial history, in particular in post-apartheid South Africa and postcolonial Britain.

Biography

Elleke Boehmer was born to Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa, in what she has called the "balmy interstitial zone" where the littoral cultures of the Indian Ocean meet in an African city. She studied towards a degree in English and Modern languages in the Eastern Cape, followed by an incomplete year of studying medicine.

In this period, she became profoundly influenced by the Black Consciousness thought of the activist doctor Steve Biko. After a year and a half of teaching English in Mamelodi township, outside Tshwane (formerly Pretoria) in what is now Gauteng, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. She completed an MPhil degree in English Literature 1900 to the present, followed by a doctoral thesis on gendered constructions of the nation in post-independence West and East African literature, both at St. John's College. In 1990, she published her first novel, the bildungsromanScreens Against the Sky.

She taught at St John's College and then at the Univer

It’s my pleasure today to welcome Elleke Boehmer to my blog. She is an acclaimed author, Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and an expert in postcolonial literature. Her latest novel, The Shouting in the Dark, is an intense, moving and honest portrayal of growing up in apartheid era South Africa.

Thank you! Probably
the first thing to say in response to this question is that we all of us I
think still carry our childhood mind somewhere in our memory.  Even though our child’s point of view may
have been overlaid by years of grownup experience, we remember how it was to be
a child and can get back there, to some degree, if we are able to concentrate
really hard, especially when we’re among familiar things, including images like
photos.  But, having said that, it wasn’t
easy entering that world, making sure it was completely believable, sinking
back into that clear uncompromising perspective of the child. I had to be
ruthless with myself whenever I found myself imagining Ella from an external
point of view, or letting a 3 person stance intrude into the
story.  The narrative ‘eye’ had to remain
very focused not only on but in Ella the child.

[2] I was very
interested in how you named Ella’s parents: sometimes Mam and Dad and at other
times they were called ‘the mother’ and ‘the father’. I’m assuming this was
very deliberate and I’m wondering if it has something to do with the child’s
eye view of its parents, that our parents are concurrently knowable and
unknowable to us as children. What were your intentions here?

Yes, I think you’ve
very much picked up on what I was trying to do, capturing the child’s view of
her parents as remote and even unreal figures, whose ways and doings are often
quite alien to her.  Ella’s father