Post-Colonial African Literature as Counter-Discourse: J.M. Coetzee's Foe and the Reworking of the Canon

Abstract

Post-colonial African novels have become veritable weapons used to dismantle the hegemonic boundaries and determinants that create unequal relations of power, based on binary oppositions such as Us and Them, First World and Third World, White and Black, Colonizer and Colonized, etc. Actually, the African novel occupies a central position in the criticism of colonial portrayals of the African continent and people. It has been crossing boundaries and assaulting walls imposed by History upon the horizon of the continent whose aspirations it has been striving to articulate. It is on the basis of the foregoing background that I examine how post-colonial African novelists have used their novels to facilitate the transgression of boundaries and subversion of hegemonic rigidities previously mapped out in precursor literary canonical texts about Africa and Africans. Since Defoe is representative enough in the canon of colonialist discourse, the paper focuses on one of his texts (Robinson Crusoe), and it also examines a work of a post-colonial African novelist (Coetzee) as a riposte to Defoe s. The critique of canonical works has been a strong current in postcolonial writings. Coetzee’s fiction is one of such attempts to engage in dialectical intertextualily with existing canonical works that present negative stereotypes of black peoples. It can be read as a post-colonial and feminist rewriting of Defoe’s text with the deliberate aim