This paper examines the problem of the Other’s agency as a space of tension and contention betwee... more This paper examines the problem of the Other’s agency as a space of tension and contention between, on the one hand, a dominant discourse that tends to subjugate the Other’s voice through either modulation or obliteration and, on the other, silence as a strategy of resistance to the hegemonic discourse of apartheid in J. M. Coetzee’s early novels. The authority’s stratagem of using violence, whether it be corporeal or discursive, to coerce its (ex)colonial subjects to speak, confess, and even consent to the authorized versions of truth is impugned by the Other’s provocative reticence to communicate with the Self. To achieve its autonomy in the face of such a totalizing authority, which relentlessly seeks to suppress any disrupt voice of alterity, the Other resorts to silence as an act of evasion and possibly liberation. The speechlessness of the Other in Coetzee’s early novels, then, is not presented as a mere act of relinquishment the agency; it is rather eloquently staged as an aporetic state of incommensurability that disarticulates colonial and imperialist modes of representation tending to normalize and assimilate the colonized within its cognitive framework
The present paper examines the spatial and metaphorical representation of border-crossing experie... more The present paper examines the spatial and metaphorical representation of border-crossing experience and its ethical significance in (re)shaping the hybrid subjectivity in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Age of Iron. Along with their encounters with the racially and culturally different Other(s), many Coetzeean protagonists undergo an identity crisis that leads them “to be rid of old self” (Coetzee 2002, 111). These characters respectively undertake perilous journeys to the other’s territories for the sake of not simply escaping what they deem as dysfunctional and autochthonous forms of identity but above all-embracing a hybrid identity capable of offering an enabling space of belonging. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate encounters a captive barbarian girl, and probably out of human compassion, he takes it upon himself to return her to her tribe across the border. After the trip, he faces disgrace and imprisonment as he openly expresses his disavowal o...
This paper examines the problem of the Other’s agency as a space of tension and contention betwee... more This paper examines the problem of the Other’s agency as a space of tension and contention between, on the one hand, a dominant discourse that tends to subjugate the Other’s voice through either modulation or obliteration and, on the other, silence as a strategy of resistance to the hegemonic discourse of apartheid in J. M. Coetzee’s early novels. The authority’s stratagem of using violence, whether it be corporeal or discursive, to coerce its (ex)colonial subjects to speak, confess, and even consent to the authorized versions of truth is impugned by the Other’s provocative reticence to communicate with the Self. To achieve its autonomy in the face of such a totalizing authority, which relentlessly seeks to suppress any disrupt voice of alterity, the Other resorts to silence as an act of evasion and possibly liberation. The speechlessness of the Other in Coetzee’s early novels, then, is not presented as a mere act of relinquishment the agency; it is rather eloquently staged as an aporetic state of incommensurability that disarticulates colonial and imperialist modes of representation tending to normalize and assimilate the colonized within its cognitive framework
The present paper examines the spatial and metaphorical representation of border-crossing experie... more The present paper examines the spatial and metaphorical representation of border-crossing experience and its ethical significance in (re)shaping the hybrid subjectivity in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Age of Iron. Along with their encounters with the racially and culturally different Other(s), many Coetzeean protagonists undergo an identity crisis that leads them “to be rid of old self” (Coetzee 2002, 111). These characters respectively undertake perilous journeys to the other’s territories for the sake of not simply escaping what they deem as dysfunctional and autochthonous forms of identity but above all-embracing a hybrid identity capable of offering an enabling space of belonging. In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate encounters a captive barbarian girl, and probably out of human compassion, he takes it upon himself to return her to her tribe across the border. After the trip, he faces disgrace and imprisonment as he openly expresses his disavowal o...
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