University of Oklahoma Graduate College J. M. Coetzee's ‗Postmodern' Corpus: Bodies/Texts, History, and Politics in the Ap
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UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE J. M. COETZEE‘S ‗POSTMODERN‘ CORPUS: BODIES/TEXTS, HISTORY, AND POLITICS IN THE APARTHEID NOVELS, 1974-1990 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By SHADI NEIMNEH Norman, Oklahoma 2011 J. M. COETZEE‘S ‗POSTMODERN‘ CORPUS: BODIES/TEXTS, HISTORY, AND POLITICS IN THE APARTHEID NOVELS, 1974-1990 A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY ____________________________ Dr. Ronald Schleifer, Chair ____________________________ Dr. Daniel Cottom ____________________________ Dr. Timothy Murphy ____________________________ Dr. Nyla Khan ____________________________ Dr. Robert Lemon © Copyright by SHADI NEIMNEH 2011 All Rights Reserved. Dedication For my family in love and gratitude; For knowledge seekers; For those who know the meaning of love and suffering. Acknowledgments I owe debts to many people for making this dissertation possible. I owe special thanks to Dr. Ronald Schleifer, my director, for his insightful readings and perceptive comments. I also thank Dr. Schleifer for his patience and valuable time. I learned from Dr. Schleifer as an amiable person and an accomplished academic. Sincerely, I want to thank the members of my Ph. D. committee one by one. The reviews I received from them have informed my chapters and positively influenced my writing style. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Daniel Cottom for his characteristically careful and professional readings. Having such an avid reader on my committee was a big asset for me. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Timothy Murphy who supported me throughout my study years at OU. This dissertation benefited from his literary talents. Dr. Nyla Khan joined us late, but her enthusiasm, efficient reading, and positive attitude provided me with new energy to complete this project. I thank her for the lively discussions we had about my chapters with relation to global politics. Dr. Robert Lemon kindly accepted to serve on this committee and always impressed me as an astute reader. The insights of this committee and their dedication have inspired me to finish this work. Indeed, this dissertation would have been different without their comments. I carry a prop from each and every one of them, and I cannot thank them enough. I am solely responsible for any misjudgments. I want to thank my family for their continued patience, support, and belief in me. I also wish to thank American and Arab friends and families who facilitated my stay here with my wife and twins. They were our family at a time when our families were thousands of miles overseas. I have incurred debts I cannot repay. Finally, I have had the help, patience, and support of extraordinary department personnel. I am grateful to them. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Preface 1 Chapter One: Introduction 9 I. Apartheid Writing and South African Politics: History and the ―Real‖ 10 II. Postmodernism and the Politics of Representation 28 III. Postmodernism and the Periphery 39 IV. Coetzee‘s Postmodern Bodies: Bodily Events and Estrangement 48 V. Supportive Coetzee Scholarship and the Body 61 VI. Postmodern Allegory and the Body 75 Chapter Two: Transgressive Bodies/Texts: Age of Iron 79 and In the Heart of the Country I. The Female Body between Complicity and Subversion 79 II. Age of Iron: A Cancer Narrative 88 III. In the Heart of the Country: Writing the Body 124 IV. Coda: Feminine Bodies/Texts 157 Chapter Three: Leaky Bodies: Waiting for the Barbarians 159 and Life and Times of Michael K I. Introduction: ―Leaky Bodies‖ and the Problematic of Postmodern 159 Representation II. Waiting for the Barbarians: The Body vs. the Empire 163 i. Manichean Dualisms and the Barbarian Body 164 ii. ―Real‖ Bodies: Beyond and Back to Discourse 179 v iii. Imperial Bodies: Personal Pain and the Institutionalized Body 198 III. Life and Times of Michael K: The Body vs. the State 216 i. Institutional and Discursive Bodies 219 ii. ―Real‖ Resistant Bodies 226 IV. Conclusion: Complicating Bodily Materiality 251 Chapter Four: Estranging and Framing the Body: Dusklands and Foe 252 I. Introduction: Complicating Material History 252 II. Dusklands: Metafictionality and Historiography 256 i. ―The Vietnam Project‖ 259 ii. ―The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee‖ 270 III. Foe: The Body between Doubt and Estrangement 291 IV. Conclusion: Toward Allegorizing the Body 320 Chapter Five: Conclusion: Postmodern Allegories and the Politics 322 of Representation I. Postmodernism and Allegory 322 II. Intellectual Allegories/Constructed Bodies 329 i. The Postcolonial and the Postmodern 335 ii. Allegorical Doubling 339 III. Visceral Allegories/Material Bodies 346 IV. Coda: Coetzee‘s Post-apartheid Novels 356 Works Cited 360 vi Preface: The Violated Body in a Global Context The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence, and bodies put us at risk of becoming the agency and instrument of all these as well. Judith Butler, Precarious Life In times of political conflict, like the apartheid years in South African history, it is the material body as flesh and blood that suffers and makes history. Imprisonment, torture, rape, abuse, injury, starvation, control, and killing are variations on what touches the body under oppressive regimes. Under apartheid, black bodies were—among other things—segregated, disenfranchised, shot, imprisoned, and sometimes killed in detention. During the years of the National party in government, 1948-1994, the main premise behind apartheid was ―the division of all South Africans by race‖ (Worden 105). Through a series of legislative acts, Africans were forcibly removed from their residence locations to townships and segregated in public amenities.1 The Sharpeville shootings in 1960 killed and injured many protesters against the pass laws, with many demonstrators shot in the back as they fled the firing police. What began as a campaign called for by the Pan African Congress ended as a massacre.2 The township revolts in the 1970s, like those of 1 Two particular acts that enforced residential and social segregation were the Group Areas Act (1950) and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953). The former officially separated races through distinct residential areas. The latter enforced separation in, among others, transportation, restaurants, public services. Other acts like the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) prohibited marriage across racial lines. The Population Registration Act (1950) divided people according to race: white, colored, African, and Indian. See Worden, especially the chapter on “The Heyday of Apartheid,” pp. 115-133. 2 Another resistance movement against apartheid was the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC carried out guerilla acts of warfare and sabotage in the 1960s and 1970s in response to attacks against blacks. Its famous leader, Nelson Mandela, was imprisoned for many years by the apartheid government and released in 1990. Many of the movement’s leaders were exiled for promoting civil disobedience and political struggle. 1 black school children against teaching in Afrikaans, what is known as the Soweto uprising of 1976 and its aftermath of school boycotts and burnings and police retaliation, resulted in the death of hundreds of students and wounding thousands (Worden 131). The same turmoil between the police and black township youth resurfaced in 1985, and the spreading boycotts and clashes resulted in the State of Emergency that continued until 1990 and gave the police more powers for arrests and detention without trial (Worden 143). The students‘ protests, stones, and barricades were silenced by the armed forces and the police by 1987 (Worden 145). Many black leaders were exiled, imprisoned, or assassinated. The death of a detained Black Consciousness leader, Steven Biko, in 1977 under torture was a spark that revived internal resistance (Eades 20) and international condemnation of apartheid. Forced removals/relocations to ―homelands‖3 or townships and political detentions touched countless thousands throughout the apartheid years. Millions of malnourished bodies lived in extreme poverty and lack of basic services. By 1994, ―the Africans made up 75 percent of the South African population, but owned about 15 percent of land in South Africa and controlled about 2 percent of the nation‘s wealth‖ (Eades 51). Simply put, Africans suffered under the apartheid regime. For long years, protests, demonstrations, and underground activities did little to effect a real political change. Complex internal and external factors and sociopolitical dimensions contributed to the weakening of apartheid in the early 1990s and its demise in 1994 with the country‘s multiparty democratic elections. The South African apartheid history, however, is not something to be considered in itself and away from other historical contexts for bodily violations and loss of human 3 The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 required Africans to get citizenships in their new homelands, thus losing their citizenship rights in South Africa. 2 rights. Moreover, the body can be used to exercise some agency just as it often demonstrates naked vulnerability. Growing up in a small town in Jordan, I used to partake in my elders‘ daily evening pastime of watching the news. The typical sights on TV screens were those of violated Palestinian bodies crushed under a heavy Israeli war machine. The Intifada years of 1987-93, concurrent