The Empire Critiqued: History and the Ethics of Responsibility in Coetzee’s Disgrace

Abstract

Coetzee’s Disgrace, despite its Booker and Nobel winning feats, has been received with reserved praise, particularly, in South Africa. Said this, it deems that this literary masterpiece doesn’t fit well in the tradition of essentialist and native postcolonial African writing constituted by writers like Chinua Achebe, NgugiwoThiongo, Chinweizu, and Madubuike. Indeed, Coetzee will find his existence more feasible with writers like Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark who write with a syncretic view of modern African culture not reducing their vision to exclusively pan-African models, traditions and norms. While encountering some of the charges laid against the novel, one is reminded of Achebe’s ranting against Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where the latter is ruthlessly accused of dehumanization of Africa by using a Eurocentric white perspective to penetrate into the reality of the colonies in Africa. Though Conrad and Coetzee are separated by a span of a century, one writing at the advent of Colonialism and the other at the end of the same, they have been accused of almost same charges. I, however, believe that instead of valorizing white and Eurocentric perspective in a subtle neo-colonial manner, Coetzee is delineating limitations and failure of the colonial perspective of observing reality by stripping and denuding the dominating colonial urge emblematic of the mighty Empire.