Arcades of Foreignness: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe

Abstract

As we have seen, Ousmane Sembène’s novel Xala explored the continued forms of colonial modes of exploitation in the aftermath of independence, in order to criticise the national bourgeoisie’s ideological use of nationalism as a rhetorical tool serving its own class interests. Within the field of postcolonial studies, one of the problems with Xala, as I mentioned earlier, is the novel’s alleged use of a western ‘naturalist’ form, which is probably also one of the main reasons why many postcolonial critics have preferred the film version of Xala, rather than the novel version. To put it in a crude way, Xala as a novel quite simply does not seem resistant enough in an aesthetic-formal way — not distanced enough from what it supposedly criticises and interrogates politically. My reading of Xala attempted to stress a different angle from which one might avoid reading the text within this particular framework, and instead focus on what I saw as Xala’s novelistic potential as social critique. In the following, I want to explore some of the mechanisms through which postcolonial studies has attempted to renegotiate — via the dimension of the aesthetic — what I have called the problematic of imitativeness (that is, the hegemonic influence of western forms and techniques) in ways more explicitly distanced from hegemonic discourse.KeywordsLiterary TextPostcolonial TheoryTravel AdventureNarrative StrategyCanonise TextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.