Body as a Site of Justice and Expiation in J. M. Coetzee's Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the centrality of an ontological discourse to attempts at reparation by white characters in J.M.Coetzee’s fiction: Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Age of Iron (1990), and Disgrace (1999). These novels address the issues of justice and expiation in relation to a set of racialized, gendered, and sexualized encounters between the colonizer and the colonized, whites and non-whites, or self and other. As means of making amends for the political violence that seems to be inherent in these (uneven) encounters, Coetzee’s novels deploy a discourse of justice that hints at the potentialities of reparation (to a large extent, at a personal level) located in the body, but, at the same time, complicates such a possibility.