The Secrets of the Empire in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
This article takes J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians as a narrative that addresses the secrets of the Empire and those of the marginalized "other" with a view to subverting the colonial discourse and revealing the unspeakable and the unsaid of empires. It addresses the Empire's capacity for violence as opposed to its much celebrated rationality and foregrounds the other's secrets as a form of resistance to being defined. It argues that the colonized "other" remains an ambiguous site that defies any final and fixed representation by the colonizer.
