19Postcolonial Theory

Abstract

This chapter covers a select number of books from 2015 and, in one case, 2014, that expand the interdisciplinary and theoretical nature of postcolonial theory. The books reviewed cover the outputs of key figures in the field, the application of postcolonial theory in new territorial regions and work that addresses current theoretical deficits. If, as Sigmund Freud speculates in ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, the author is an unconscious, then the blank page is reformatted into a site of unconscious wish-fulfilment, which undermines all attempts to interpret text as biography encoded into art. The problems that arise in producing biography after theory are further exacerbated when confronted with a figure like the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee, commonly known by the abbreviated form of J.M. Coetzee. This condensation of John Maxwell to J.M. doubles as a form of cryptography that, when combined with Coetzee’s infamously reclusive persona, testifies to the difficulties that any prospective biographer of Coetzee faces when approaching his life through the lens of biography. David Attwell in J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing: Face to Face with Time demonstrates a sensitivity in approaching a writer as theorized as Coetzee and, in turn, judiciously sets out not to write a traditional biography of the South Africa Nobel laureate. John Kannemeyer travelled to the author’s adopted home of Adelaide, Australia, in order to complete the interviews for the only authorized biography of Coetzee which was published by Scribe in 2012. Over the course of seven hundred pages, Kannemeyer manages to get Coetzee to discuss his family’s history in South Africa, the years he spent studying in America, his daughter’s illness and his father’s death of alcoholism. Kannemeyer’s biography is comprehensive in mapping the trajectory of Coetzee’s life but steps back from offering any real literary examination of the work. Attwell, instead, turns to the archival holdings of Coetzee acquired by the Harry Ransom Center in 2013. Coetzee’s personal donation of one hundred and forty boxes of manuscripts, letters, press-clippings, photographs and notebooks are brought to light by Attwell in his book that, via the archive, functions not so much as a biography of Coetzee the writer but a textual biography of his literary output. He turns to the archive to ‘take a step back in order to look again, this time not as a literary critic would, which is to say at the finished works, but at the authorship that underlies them’ (p. 18).