From the Politics of Forgetting to the Ethics of Remembering: The Postcolonial Sublime in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians explores the possibility and limits of rationalizing and dominating the ‘other’ through an experience of dislocation. This article argues that the experience of topographic and aesthetic dislocation has the power to transform the Magistrate’s ethical standards in relation to the ‘other’. The novel unwinds a space in which to explore the postcolonial sublime, in terms of which the tension between the self and other is concealed yet, in the progress of the narrative, a politics of forgetting gives way to the ethics of remembrance. This article treats aesthetics as a discursive field and the novel as an instance of an allegorical mode. It intends to explain how manipulation of aesthetic norms can become politically interventionist and make the formulation of the postcolonial sublime an ethical obligation.