The Back of Beyond: A Spatial Study of J.M. Coetzee Novels

Abstract

At the center of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction lies the question of how one may navigate a world defined by the racial tension of a settler-colonial state. While Coetzee’s work samples multiple perspectives and pockets of society, a common theme of his novels is a character’s struggle to find spaces where they can experience individual freedom. The struggles evident within Coetzee’s work, evocative of the challenge of placing the author within a particular literary sphere, seem to reach all characters, regardless of their identity as either settler or Indigene. Through a spatial reading of three of Coetzee’s apartheid-era novels, as well as one more recent work published after the dismantling of South Africa’s apartheid, this study analyzes how a character struggles for liberation, and what steps may be necessary in order to find a place of one’s own.