J. M. Coetzee and “Scenes from the South” – Departmental Research Seminar with Kai Easton

On the 10^th of April 2025 Kai Easton presented her research seminar “Scenes from the South.” Easton has curated a travelling exhibition of the same name, focussing on J. M. Coetzee’s itineraries across continents.

Easton beautifully captured the complexities of Coetzee’s relation to the Southern Hemisphere, especially through her short videos. These videos originally accompanied the instalments of the exhibitions. They include archival material Easton has worked with as well as footage of the various landscapes (filmed by Easton) that Coetzee has dwelled in. Static shots of the Western Cape coast and South Australian shores, interspersed with scenes from the south of France, relate Coetzee’s mobility to the South as a fluid concept; the South is both one (the similarities between the landscapes are striking) and multiple (Coetzee stresses that there are many Souths in the North too, for example in France). Easton’s exhibitions in 2020 in Makhanda and in 2024 in Adelaide, Coetzee’s writers’ project in Argentina, as well as Coetzee’s geographically scattered archive (mainly in the US and South Africa) add more layers to the writer’s personal itineraries: Each of these places open up new conversations about Coetzee’s work and about the South.

The closing discussion pointed towards the problematic tension between beauty and violence inherent in the landscape images and towards the effects of the transformation of places, especially the re-homed and renamed Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. This place-centred seminar and discussion show how foregrounding mobility and space in literary studies can engender new approaches to canonical material.