‘The Fugitive Lives of David Stuurman’ (Comyn and Fermanis)

Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis, “The Fugitive Lives of David Stuurman”, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances, ed Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 239-56.

Focusing on the plural and fragmented lives of the Indigenous Khoi resistance leader David Stuurman, this chapter questions the privileging of interiority models of life writing and in particular the normative association between the self-possessed, literate subject and autonomous individual subjectivity. Foregrounding instead Stuurman’s participation in a larger, collective tradition of Indigenous marronage and resistance, it demonstrates how the geopolitics of northern knowledge formation tends to construct exemplary lives that elide the un-individuated experiences of collective struggle. Stuurman’s life is therefore both distinctively southern in its fugitivity and incompleteness, and one fashioned in many respects by the norms and values of the global north. As such, this chapter views the north/south hemispheric divide as a metaphor for other presumptive dichotomies such as white/Black, enslaved/Indigenous, and voiced/unvoiced. Yet it also argues that fugitive lives require fugitive modes and methods of reading that cut across or act aslant to these dichotomies, understanding life writing from the south as a means of resisting the naturalisation of subaltern status.

DOI: 10.5040/9781350360792.ch-17

This chapter is part of Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances, ed Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins:

Exploring lives lived, written and narrated in and from the Global South, the far South and the ultimate South, Antarctica, this book asks how life writing from southerly compass points impact both how we understand and read life narratives, and ultimately how we perceive our planet.Southern geographies, histories and lives have often been overlooked and defined by northern perspectives;Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphereredresses this North/South alignment in its critical examination of life stories, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies from the southern hemisphere, providing a countervailing and alternative perspective that will unsettle, challenge and enrich the imaginative norms that inform life writing studies. From Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South and polar studies, and presents works on human, animal and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the south has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, allowing us to better conceptualize the planet ‘from below’.