Othering in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

This dissertation is a critical discussion of J.M Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians as an exposure of how the African People are misrepresented by the Westerners. The stereotypes constructed by West about East are the main focus of this study. Coetzee criticizes the picture of South African people who are fixed as the barbarians in their own land by the Colonel Joll and Mandel, the British officers. By imposing Western power and ideology, Colonel Joll always thinks that Africa is a land of barbarians where he wants to create peace, order and prosperity from the Western perspectives. In this way by imposing the colonial discourse and ideology the central characters like Joll and Mandel in the novel represent native people as barbarians and irrational.