'This essay considers the divide between two camps of critics responding to the use and potential abuse of a white woman narrator in J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and finds within the novel a critique of contemporaneous feminist discourses. I identify a rhetoric of rape deployed by the novel's protagonist, Susan, against the mute ex-slave, Friday, and consider its effect on Susan's ability to mediate between oppressed and dominant groups, represented by Friday and the author—(De)Foe—respectively. Ultimately, I argue that Susan's curiously masculine sense of desire complicates the charge that Coetzee is simply appropriating the voice of a woman, finding instead that he utilises Susan's attempted penetration into Friday's silence to demonstrate the faults of a second-wave feminism that exploits various categories of otherness.' (Publication abstract)
'Scholars such as Evan Mwangi argue that postcolonial animal studies is all too often considered through white environmentalist perspectives, a point exemplified by the critical focus on white perspectives provided by writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Barbara Gowdy, and Lauren Beukes. Such focus bestows the authority to care for African natures to (white) Western visions of worldmaking. Mwangi's criticism suggests the white environmental discourses that have informed prominent readings of Disgrace (1999). The uncritical discourse of animal welfare in the post-colony has ties to apartheid governance and its rhetorical legacy. Through a comparative reading of Coetzee's Disgrace, the rhetoric of euthanasia used by animal welfare organizations, and contemporary reporting on the state of the animal, I outline a historical centering of white environmentalism—in particular welfarism—in institutional South African discourses about the animal. In opposition to assertions that the animal becomes a vehicle of redemption for the main character, David Lurie, and other redemptive readings of white characters in the novel such as Bev Shaw, I suggest that Disgrace reveals the legacies of white nationalist imaginaries that continue to undergird state and institutional environmental discourses in South Africa. The purportedly humane ideologies of animal population control and welfare perpetuate white interests. Disgrace reveals the tension between institutional expressions of care and the forceful integration of postcolonial nations into global markets, which sustain colonial legacies of white worldmaking.' (Publication abstract)
