Contesting Discourses and Transmodalization in J.M.Coetzee’s Fiction

South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.

The Multicultural Cringe

The category of the “Asian Australian” has emerged only in recent years, as the exclusionary “White Australia” policy gave way in the late-twentieth century to substantial waves of Asian immigration. Journals and anthologies from the mid-2000s onward have employed the idea of “Asian” identification with an eye on North American examples and shared history, but also with a discomfort with US-style “identity politics.” Ouyang Yu, among the first and best-known Asian Australian poets, is harshly critical of Australian multiculturalism, seeing it as a means of continuing to exclude non-white writers from Australian writing; remaining suspicious of any notion of belonging, his work instead presents itself as a kind of “invasion literature” that seeks to disrupt the English language.

“The Blackness of Darkness”

This article considers Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racialized Blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men. This article argues that white writers responded to the guides’ knowledge of the cave by reframing it as affinity. In doing so, they transformed Mammoth Cave’s subterranean darkness into a manifestation of racialized Blackness. But the writers’ racialization of Mammoth Cave also had a tendency to slip out of their control. As they associated its spatial darkness with racialized Blackness, the literal underground of Mammoth Cave flickered into an underground that was more than literal—a mysterious Black formation, of unguessed dimensions and certain danger, beneath the world as they knew it. Finally, the article asks what we can glean from the literature of Mammoth Cave about the body of Black thought it sought to disavow: the alternative relations between race and the underground that the guides theorized through their own subterranean explorations.

Do the Right Thing

After almost a century of white writers, actors, and filmmakers telling the stories of people of color—when in fact they chose to do so, Do the Right Thing represents the phase of Hollywood storytelling in which people outside the white mainstream are allowed to tell their own stories. It also tells a powerfully prescient narrative about violence against black bodies and the difficulty of dialogue about race. Although critics feared that Do the Right Thing might prompt riots and violence, this movie about a hot summer day in Brooklyn thoughtfully reflects on racial stereotypes, the prejudice we all bear, and the necessity of community, making it one of the most important films on race and prejudice ever filmed.

Black but Human

I address the origins of the proverb ‘Black but Human’ that emerged from the Afro-Hispanic oral tradition and the ways in which colour and social status are compounded. There is documentary evidence that the word ‘black’ was used as a mark of the inferior social condition of slaves and that it designated a diversity of ethnic backgrounds that included people with contradictory colour classifications. I am concerned with the Afro-Hispanic beliefs that are embodied in this proverb and are conveyed in the recently discovered black carols, written by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves in the Spanish black confraternities, later reappropriated by Hispanic white writers. These work songs centre on the assertion that Africans are human in spite of their legally enforced status as commodified objects with no rights. They focus on the association between being human and the possession of a soul that becomes white as the result of baptism.

White Folks: Literature’s Uncanny, Unhomely Folklore of Whiteness

This chapter looks at moments of constructed uncanniness and unhomeliness in Russell Banks’s Affliction and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, two American novels in which whiteness is inextricably linked to the creation, through acceptance or rejection, of folk groups. Using critical race theory, this chapter argues that the tendency to exempt the literature of white writers from dominant conversations about folklore and literature helps reaffirm a dangerous hierarchical system of power in which whiteness is marked as absence. It argues through a close read of fiction that whiteness is not absent—instead, it is an identity which is guarded and negotiated through negotiations of folk groups. Banks and Welty both construct a whiteness that has stability and variation, that reacts to the presence of a folk Other, and that becomes part of a vernacular language of identity for those inside, outside, and on the borders of their groups.