Torture and the Appropriation of Genre in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

In the beginning, there was the romance, then came colonialist literature and
transformed the genre into a racial literary form in complicity with imperialism by adapting it to
the Manichean ideology which dictates a clear and uncompromising divide between the civilised,
good European world and the uncivilised, inherently evil non-European Other, thus creating a
new form designated by Abdul R. JanMohamed as the “kidnapped romance”. In an act of
appropriation, J. M. Coetzee, in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), rewrites the colonial literary
form of the "kidnapped romance", he too creates a narrative that depends heavily on the
economy of the Manichean allegory but whose objective is to strike back at imperialism and its
ideologies of othering and dehumanization. Coetzee manipulates the racial romance: he inverts
its motifs, conventions, reductive categories and simplistic representations to expose the
discursive nature of the ideologies it promotes and to reinstate these ideologies as historical
constructs rather than the natural and objective signified they pretend to be. Indeed, the
pertinence of Waiting for the Barbarians is to be found in its subversion of ideologies of
Manicheanism, othering and dehumanization which continue to inform neo-colonial forms of
expansion and dominance, especially evident in the use of torture against the Other in the era of
the war on terror.