Preface to Belonging and Exile

Welcome to the labyrinth for our post-colonial literature class at LaGuardia Community College, Fall 2022.

We are calling this volume: Post-Colonial Investigations: J.M. Coetzee and Others. In this course we read and discussed the works of ten different post-colonial writers.

"I wanted to live outside the history that Empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects. I never wished it for the barbarians that they should have the history of Empire laid upon them. How can I believe that this is cause for shame?"

We began in Australia with an important film about the treatment of Aborigine half-caste children in the early years of the twentieth century, Rabbit-Proof Fence. Then we traveled to Haiti to discuss the work of Edwidge Danticat and we learned a great deal about Haitian history (and its current situation) from a series of New York Times articles published in 2022. South Africa was our next destination, for a deep dive into the experience of apartheid (1947-1994). To understand the racial divide, we read a selection from Trevor Noah's Born a Crime. Then we began an in-depth study of J.M. Coetzee’s powerful novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, in which ethical dilemmas of individuals in positions of power are exposed and dissected. Coetzee tells us that the novel is about “the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of conscience” (“Into the Dark Chamber”). For our final unit, we reflected on ways a kind of “apartheid” persists in the context of gender and social class.  We focused on female short story writers including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Bessie Head, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro and Alice Walker. These selections offered intriguing examples of the ways gender codes are their own form of “colonization.” The noted Coetzee scholar, David Attwell, explains this connection: “The desired, female colonized is well known as a trope of colonial discourse, whether she represents the interior and its material riches, the landscape, or the purely psychic abundance of the unknown.”

The essays in this Wikibook are the results of student research on these authors. Welcome to our page and feel free to interact with us.

Phyllis van Slyck, Professor, Department of English, La Guardia Community College (City University of New York)

Our readings:

• "Children of the Sea" and "1937" by Edwidge Danticat from her short-story collection Krik? Krak!
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
• Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
• "Life" by Bessie Head from her short-story collection The Collector of Treasures
• "The Thing Around Your Neck" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her short-story collection The Thing Around Your Neck
• "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri from her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies
• "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro from her short story collection Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories
• "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker