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'The Bone People and Disgrace are two renowned literary works devoted to the exploration of postcolonial racial problems in New Zealand and South Africa respectively. In those two novels, the protagonists, while trying to understand the vicissitudes of life, tend to be under the paradigmatic influence of postcolonial allegorical narratives, which try to embody the historical trajectories of interracial violence and injustice in individual existence; however, in living out a life that is irreducibly unique, they also exhibit a subjective agency that can transcend the negative legacy of colonialism.' (Publication abstract)