Imperialism and Gender in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
Abstract
Considering how power relations govern the construction of race and gender, this article looks at the ambivalent relationship between the Magistrate and the "barbarian" girl in J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), exploring intersections between imperialism and gender and negotiating how issues of representation are implicated in questions of identity construction. It highlights how identities inflicted by gender are constructed in imperial discourse: first by the colonizer who speaks the language of power and inscribes on the colonized meanings serving imperialism; second by the humanist colonizer who fails to relate to the other on equal terms except for a position of "feminized" weakness; and third by the resistant colonial subject eluding imperial constructions yet still manipulated in language. Between the discourses of pain and humanism, the colonized body remains a malleable yet impenetrable object of colonial discourses. Coetzee subverts dominant gender boundaries, aligning oppressive patriarchal practices with imperialism while undermining hegemonic ideologies that construct gender through the figure of the enigmatic other.
References
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (1995). The Post-colonial studies reader. Routledge.
Bahri, D. (2009). Feminism and postcolonialism in a global and local frame. Vents d'Est, vents d'Ouest: Mouvements de femmes et feminismes anticoloniaux. (pp. 193-212). Graduate Institute Publications. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheid.6321
Bressler, C. (2011). Literary criticism: An introduction to theory and practice (5th ed.). Longman.
Butler, J. (2000). Subjects of sex/gender/desire. In S. Saguaro (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and woman: A reader (pp. 309-322). MACMILLAN.
Castle, G. (2007). The Blackwell guide to literary theory. Blackwell.
Coetzee, J. M. (2000). Waiting for the barbarians. Vintage.
Cuddon, J. A. (2013). A dictionary of literary terms and literary theory (5th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Dobie, A B. (2012). Theory into practice: An introduction to literary criticism (3rd international ed.). Wadsworth.
Fisher, L. (1990). "Colonization and feminism in J. M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe." Chancellor’s Honors
Program Projects. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/8
Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, afterword by Michel Foucault. By Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. (2nd ed.). U of Chicago P.
Foucault, M. (1984). Truth and Power. An interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino. In Ed. P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (pp. 51-75). Pantheon.
Freud, S. (1999). A child is being beaten: A contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (pp. 179-181), Vol. 2. Trans. James Strachey, Vintage.
Hassan, W. S. (2003). Gender (and) imperialism: Structures of masculinity in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. Men and Masculinities, 5(3),309-324. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X02238529
Hooks, B. (1982). Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Pluto Press.
Hooks, B. (1984). Feminist theory from margin to center. South End Press.
Hutcheon, L. (1989). 'Circling the downspout of empire': Post-colonialism and postmodernism. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 20(4), 149-175.
Katrak, K. (1995). Decolonizing culture: Toward a theory for post-colonial women's texts. In Ashcroft et al. (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 255-258). Routledge.
Lloyd, G. (2005). Gender. In J Ree and J. O. Urmson (Eds.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy (3rd ed.), (pp. 143-145). Routledge.
Lugones, M. (2008). The Coloniality of gender. Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (pp. 1-17).
Memmi, A. (2003). The colonizer and the colonized (trans. H Greenfeld). Earthscan.
Minh-ha, T. Writing postcoloniality and feminism. In Ashcroft et al. (Eds.), The Post-colonial Studies Reader (pp. 264-268). Routledge.
Mohanty, C. T. (1984). Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonialdiscourses. Boundary 2, 12(3), 333-358. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/302821
Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage.
Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). Macmillan.
Spivak, G. (2002). Ethics and politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of teaching. Diacritics, 32(3-4), 17-31.
Stoler, A. L. (1998). Making empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in twentieth-century colonial cultures. In A. McClintock et al. (Eds.), Dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives (pp. 344-373). U of Minnesota P.
Suleri, S. (1995). Woman skin deep: Feminism and the postcolonial condition. In Ashcroft et al. (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 273-280). Routledge.
Tyson, L. (2006). Critical theory today: A user-friendly guide (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Blackwell.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
