‘Wisselbare Woorde’
Carrol Clarkson’s chapter wrestles with the contentious question of Coetzee’s relation to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa of the 1970s and early 1980s, which took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon and found expression in the writings of Steve Biko. Clarkson focuses on the ways in which Coetzee departed from the ideas about writing and resistance that were circulating in his contemporary South Africa, particularly as articulated by novelist Nadine Gordimer. Clarkson discusses two related literary-critical problems: an ethics and politics of representation, and an ethics and politics of address, showing how Coetzee explores a tension between freedom of expression and responsibility to the other. In the slippage from saying to addressing we are led to further thought about modes and sites of consciousness—and hence accountabilities—in the interlocutory contact zones of the post-colony. The chapter invites a sharper appreciation of what a postcolonial philosophy might be.